After the 1973 crisis a law was brought in so that U.S. crude oil had to be sold on the domestic market, i.e. not available for export.

Then it changed and here we are today.

From https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/09/30/why-the-u-s-...

Crude oil producers lobbied for an end to the export ban, and in late 2015 they got their wish when President Obama signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016. This $1.15 trillion spending bill contained a provision that stated: “To promote the efficient exploration, production, storage, supply, marketing, pricing, and regulation of energy resources, including fossil fuels, no official of the Federal Government shall impose or enforce any restriction on the export of crude oil.”

So this is what is happening. There is a lot of economic warfare going on in energy markets. The OPEC gig is designed to make sure that extracting oil is profitable, if there was no OPEC then it might as well be pre-Standard Oil days when there was a race to the bottom, with everyone churning out as much as they can and prices going to zero.

Another change is that the U.S. vassal Iraq is back online, with the oil being looted from beneath the sands there to line the pockets of the big corporations that backed that particular war.

Given this supply situation - the U.S. and Iraq now selling on the open market - something has to give. Hence, in this game of musical chairs it is practically necessary to keep other suppliers out of the game. Hence sanctions and other economic measures to keep players such as Venezuela, Iran and Russia in their place.

Now this is bad for the U.S. dollar as sanctions, tariffs and protectionist nonsense mean that countries like India are happy to by oil from Iran. They see the childish USA as a here today, gone tomorrow empire and Iran as a proper civilisation with many millennia of legit history and culture. Same with China and the trade deals they have with Russia. This is all going on differently to before. In the pre-9/11 days the world was happy to buy a freshly printed dollar from Uncle Sam in order to buy oil. Now that bit is being bypassed, not out of choice but what do you do if there are sanctions stopping you from buying that useless greenback?

For many decades the U.S. was able to print as much money as possible with those excess dollars going overseas, to not enter the domestic economy. This meant that there was no inflationary pressure on the dollar. With the Trump trade wars going on various countries are now reducing their dollar holdings and going for a mix of other currencies, e.g. the Euro and the Rouble. So soon the U.S. young people are going to be the bag holders and the whole scam of the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency is going to come crashing down.

Hence the current desperation by the U.S. to foist their hydrocarbon products onto lame countries such as Poland and the Ukraine, usually wrapped up with some arms sales deal for good measure. Meanwhile more and more groundwater in the U.S. gets polluted with the miraculous fracking. This fracking business is built on quite sub-prime financing, tantamount to a Ponzi scheme and, once the LNG has been liquified and sent half way around the world it is not as competitive as 'gas from Russia'. World politics also goes from mutual trade and cooperation to protectionism and fascist politics.

At least this is better than the 'Peak Oil' with massive die-off that doom-mongers were predicting 15 or so years ago but it does not make for happy times. Oil is not a 'scarce resource' even if it will run out eventually, the problem - as 'solved' by Standard Oil - is too many people drilling for it, so it has always been an artificial scarcity. Also that small detail of the law being changed to enable U.S. producers to export is not widely known, certainly not on this thread thus far has any comment been made.