Kevin Cramer: We've "Hit A Wall" In Oil Production And Need "Another Place To Sell The Product"

North Dakota congressman Kevin Cramer told Breitbart in an interview that America has “hit a wall” in domestic oil production, and that we need to lift the ban on crude oil exports so that American companies have “another place to sell the product.”

Anytime you have a lot of a product – and we have a lot of oil…now that we’ve hit the wall, if we don’t have another place to sell the product, obviously production is going to stop or come down and when that happens, of course, price is going to spike again – that’s just the natural order of things, but if we can be competing in the global market place going up against Saudi Arabia – going up against Iran, that just keeps more and more production happening, creates more jobs.

To illustrate what Cramer is talking about, consider that U.S. oil production has continued to soar even amid falling prices:

I’ve written about this phenomena – “competition breeds competence” –  which has taken most observers by surprise. The shale oil producers are innovating and improving so fast that, even amid a price rout, they can continue to produce oil profitably.

That’s good! But there’s already a supply gut to the point where this is a thing that’s true: “crude oil inventories rose last week, even though it’s driving season when inventories are supposed to fall rapidly.”

Which brings us back to Cramer’s point. We need another place to sell this oil.

What’s nice is that we have an easy solution at hand. We can raise the crude oil export ban, which makes American oil producers a captive audience to American refiners, and give an already thriving energy industry another shot in the arm.

More jobs. More commerce. More prosperity.

The thing is, there are anti-oil activists who, for purely ideological reasons, see the “wall” the oil export ban creates as a feature of the policy.