The Frightfully Expensive Kit
You see, not all oil is created equal. Venezuelan crude is notoriously heavy and sour. It is a thick, sulphurous muck that requires incredibly specialised, frightfully expensive equipment to process. You cannot just tip it into any modern, light-sweet shale refinery and expect a good result.
This gives a select group of American refiners an enormous, structural advantage. Companies like Valero Energy spent decades building plants specifically for this kind of sludge. They possess a technical moat that newer competitors simply lack.
Then, you have the middlemen.
Getting this crude from a murky Venezuelan port to the US Gulf Coast, and subsequently pumping the refined petrol across the country, requires an ocean of steel pipes and storage tanks. It is remarkably unglamorous work. Yet, firms like Enterprise Products Partners quietly collect their predictable fees regardless of market panic. If the volume of imported crude swells, their transport revenues could very well follow suit.
Of course, this is oil, and oil is never entirely safe.