Europe inports 96% of its oil and Russia by far the largest supplier. If you include Kazakhstan, 39% of imported came from or through Russia in 2018.
Reports are that western traders are refusing to buy Russian oil because of sanctions and the threat of sanctions. No one wants to get stuck with tanks or ships full of Russian oil that they can’t offload based on the whim of politicians.
Russia is seeing a huge immediate hit in oil revenue, but Europe will quickly exhaust its stores. The US and European governments are releasing oil from US reserves, but the amount is mainly symbolic. The release corresponds to about a week of imports from Russia.
Unless there is a sudden change of course, Europe is likely to see massive price spikes as they run dry of oil. Diverting tankers to Europe mean that oil prices will see big spikes in oil prices in North America as well.
What will the response be to $10/gallon gasoline in the US?
The sanctions are intended to punish Russia in the hope of achieving regime change. Will they achieve that goal, but in the governments in North America and Europe?
The US reserve has about 600 million barrels. We could drain it completely in a about month if we used it to make up for European oil inputs from Russia.
I am old enough to remember the OPEC oil embargos against the US in the 1970s. We almost went to war to secure the oil supplies. Now NATO governments are inflicting a similar embargo on their own citizens.
My cynical observation is that the quickest way for Putin to end the sanctions is for him to declare an oil embargo against NATO. The response would flip to calls to invade Russia to secure the vital oil flow.
There are no “taps” to open on the Keystone XL pipeline because what was halted in January 2021 was only 8% complete, and no construction had been done on it since 2015. It would not have been operational for years, and would not increase oil supply. It is only a short cut to the existing Keystone Pipeline, which is still operational. Furthermore, as everyone knows, this is Canadian tar sands oil, which is difficult and expensive to process into usable products, and the eventual products would not necessarily be available to the United States market; we would have to compete just like every other country.
China produces 4,905,070.87 barrels per day of oil (as of 2016) ranking 4th in the world.
China produces every year an amount equivalent to 7.1% of its total proven reserves (as of 2016).
China holds 25,132,122,000 barrels of proven oil reserves as of 2016, ranking 14th in the world and accounting for about 1.5% of the world’s total oil reserves of 1,650,585,140,000 barrels.
