One of the first actions a Bernie Sanders administration might take would be to reimpose a ban on U.S. crude oil exports. Still, it’s not clear whether doing so would significantly reduce global carbon emissions.
“To prevent U.S. producers from exporting oil would not solve the global emissions problem,” said Antoine Halff, a senior research scholar with the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “It would make the economics of U.S. production much more difficult, but it would not reduce the global need for oil. It would just export emissions to other countries.”
Sanders is competing with the more centrist Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, proposing an aggressive agenda to end the use of fossil fuels to combat climate change that goes further than anything his opponent would do.
Sanders’s platform includes a call to impose a nationwide ban on fracking for oil and natural gas, a policy that could imperil his chances in swing states such as Pennsylvania, where the drilling technique is prevalent.
But it also includes other less-talked-about, harder-to-project policies such as banning the import and export of all fossil fuels, including reinstituting a ban on U.S. crude oil exports lifted in 2015 as part of a budget agreement between the Obama administration and then-Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan. Former President Barack Obama previously threatened to veto lifting of the ban as standalone legislation.
Experts say the potential emissions-cutting benefit of preventing U.S. crude oil exports is among the least effective policies proposed by Democratic candidates, as compared to those targeting reductions in fossil fuel demand, such as a carbon tax or a zero-carbon electricity mandate.
Paasha Mahdavi, an energy and environmental politics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said that cutting off oil exports would reduce U.S. emissions in the short term. Doing so would lower prices for thousands of independent oil producers that would be forced to curtail production.
But it would not decrease emissions over time, he said, because international oil companies would move to produce oil in other countries with less cumbersome regulations to serve continued global demand.
“Among the suite of tools being proposed by candidates, this would be the least effective,” Mahdavi said. “Candidates thinking about reducing U.S. emissions should be thinking about global emissions.”
Stopping exports could also have geopolitical implications, the main concern cited by former 2020 candidate Michael Bloomberg. His campaign recently said he would not reimpose the ban because becoming a top exporter has reduced U.S. dependence on the Middle East and Russian oil and gas.
Increasing U.S. production and exports has also enabled world energy markets to withstand major output disruptions, such as the September attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil installations, which did not produce a sustained spike in prices.
“The world is awash in oil,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser and lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy. “Cutting off our exports will only help our enemies. It’s a typical symbolic, do-gooder attempt that actually does harm.”
Liberal environmental groups that fought against lifting the crude oil export ban in 2015 have been lobbying Democratic hopefuls to reinstate it, viewing it as a signal to energy investors that the fossil fuel era is ending. (The Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council, which are less liberal, declined to comment on if they would endorse such a policy.)
A coalition of left-leaning environmental groups crafted an action plan that lists “immediately reinstituting the crude oil export ban” as one of 10 things a president could do without Congress.
Greenpeace and Oil Change International released a policy briefing in January saying that reimposing the crude oil export ban could slash global emissions by 73 million to 165 million metric tons per year. That would be equal to the emissions reductions from shuttering 19 to 42 coal plants. The groups say the crude oil ban could be reinstated while declaring a national climate emergency. (The 2015 budget deal that lifted the ban allows the president to impose “export licensing requirements or other restrictions” on crude oil exports for renewable one-year periods if a national emergency is declared.)
“We need to use all our tools to rein in our fossil fuel production in the U.S. to achieve our climate goals,” said David Turnbull, strategic communications director at Oil Change U.S., the lobbying arm of Oil Change International. “Reinstating the crude oil export ban seems like a no-brainer step.”
Turnbull acknowledges some portion of the lost U.S. production from banning exports would be filled by increased production elsewhere, but he says the replacement is not “one to one,” and his group projects a net carbon benefit to the policy.
“The economics are such that U.S. producers would have less incentive to do the massive extraction they are doing right now,” he said, noting that American refiners are built to process heavy, sour crude grades produced overseas, meaning U.S. producers that specialize in light, sweet oil — with no export market — would be forced to accept a lower price from domestic refiners.
Turnbull blames the lifting of the crude oil export ban as a primary reason the United States became the largest producer of oil and gas combined in the world.
The ban was initially imposed during the 1970s oil embargo when the U.S. produced much less crude oil than it consumed. Now, there’s too much oil, thanks mainly to the American shale boom that has the U.S. on the cusp of being a net energy exporter later this year.
Obama reversed the ban as part of the budget plan that exchanged extensions of tax incentives for wind and solar energy.
U.S. crude exports have since climbed from an average of nearly 465,000 barrels per day in 2015 to 2.98 million barrels per day in 2019, according to the Energy Information Administration.
“With hindsight, we know how big a mistake that was,” Turnbull said.
The oil and gas industry views the prospect of reimposing the ban differently and is taking the threat seriously. The U.S. producing a record amount of oil and gas has not resulted in higher domestic gas prices, as some opponents feared when the export ban was lifted, but instead kept oil and gas prices low in a global market.
“We are very concerned about a ban on oil exports,” said Frank Macchiarola, vice president of policy, economics, and regulatory affairs at the American Petroleum Institute. “Policymakers introducing these policies are trying to lay down a marker and set a precedent to create an air of inevitability and reasonableness. We want to cut that off to show people these are radical policies that will have detrimental effects on the American people.”
Kevin Book, managing director for research at ClearView Energy, argued the politics of reimposing the export ban are risky for Democrats, with the potential for raising energy costs given that replacements for oil products, such as electric vehicles for transportation, are still not prevalent.
“It’s pretty easy to see that policies of raising energy prices and destroying jobs doesn’t look good for anyone in a close election,” Book said.
