Why drilling more oil in the US can’t bring down gas prices | CNN

The current war in the Middle East has sent the price of oil spiking — and with it, US gas prices. Crude prices leapt over $100 per barrel on Monday. In the US, the average gas price was $3.48, up 50 cents since the US entered war with Iran. The current energy crisis underscores an important fact: US gas prices are inseparable from the global oil market. And even though the US is the biggest exporter of oil globally, it can’t make up for the standstill of oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, plus Middle East oil stalwarts Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates starting to reduce their production. While the shale revolution — with new fracking methods extracting more oil from Texas, New Mexico and North Dakota — has pushed the US to become the biggest oil producer in the world, this country has learned the hard way that not all oil is the same. And the US consumes a different kind of oil than we produce. Oil falls on a spectrum from light to heavy, depending on how much sulfur it contains. The stuff the US extracts from the ground via fracking is an expensive, light crude oil. It made up most of what the US exported around the world in 2025: 3.9 million barrel