With escalating tensions in the Middle East and continual bombing of Russian oil facilities by Ukraine, it's a confusing time in the oil business, so nobody needs a tropical interruption of oil processing.

But with concerns that a tropical storm or worse could threaten the Gulf coast of Texas and Louisiana, Dallas-based King Operating's Jay Young says there are some things we should keep in mind to understand what's happening to us at the gas pump.

One of the main points he makes is the US is working hard to keep refined oil and its derivatives like kerosene flowing, but the US is not mainly an oil exporter, we're mainly an oil importer, strictly speaking.

Young says the Biden administration could have helped the oil industry when it was needed, but instead directed investment toward wind and solar.

The price of oil continues to rise these days as tensions increase in the Middle East, and while Russia has been counting on selling oil to world even as it wages war on Ukraine, the Ukrainians have been bombarding Russian oil depots and refineries at a mad pace, wiping out an estimated one-quarter to one-half of Russia's oil systems.

In the United States, we're just catching up from some fallow years though.

"Biden could, with the stroke of a pen, have increased the capacities of refineries all over the country, but he didn't want to," Young point out.

So there have been refineries working at 40-percent capacity -- but now with oil at a new premium because of war in the Middle East and in Ukraine, some refineries are working at a near-max 97% capacity.

The United States and its oil companies are doing what they can to supply oil and refined oil products to the world, but it's getting tougher to do so.

The processed oil we churn out -- including kerosene, diesel fuel and propane and hundreds of products -- is a large part of our exports.

In fact, the United States is not a net exporter of oil -- it's a net exporter of oil products, such as jet fuel -- it's nations like Saudi Arabia that don't need so much of their own oil that do much of the exporting.

"The United States is different," Young says, "we only produce 13 million barrels of oil per day, but we use 20 million barrels of oil per day."

It's that 7 million barrel difference that causes the US to have to import oil, even as it ships out oil products.

"And that's the reason why they're welcoming the Venezuelan oil as much as they are," Young says, because the darker, heavier form of crude oil is what US refineries need, and that comes from Canada, too.

San Antonio's First News