As reported by the New York Times, a shipment of 400,000 barrels of oil from the Port of Galveston, Texas, July 30 might have seemed unremarkable to anyone watching it leave the harbor, but “the export shipment symbolizes a new era in U.S. energy and U.S. energy relations with the rest of the world,” Daniel Yergin, energy historian and co-founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, told the New York Times.
According to the article, the shipment “was another critical turning point in what has been a half-decade change for the American oil industry.”
The shipment of oil to South Korea by Singaporean tanker BW Zambesi was the first unrestricted export of U.S. oil to a country outside North America in nearly 40 years. And it was made possible thanks to its relatively low-profile launch, which avoided a lot of the thorny politics associated with the United States’ ban on such exports since the mid-1970s.
There is debate as to what these exports might do to oil prices. Some think they will increase prices in the United States, while others believing global prices, including within the United States, will decline because of the added supply, but everyone agrees the issue comes with very difficult political decisions.
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Drew Campbell is senior editor of Institutional Investing in Infrastructure.
