In my opinion this is a bit misleading in the sense that gasoline imports now act like spare refining capacity.
Also the Caribbean refining capacity although technically on the import side does not really count as almost all production has historically gone to the US.

What I think is missing is that as the US has become more dependent on imports its made more sense to cherry pick the oil products we need i.e gasoline at the expense of general purpose refining which produces a variety of products.

This is why I'm far more focused on gasoline imports then US oil inventories and refining margins.

Since US refining capacity has not supplied all of US needs for some time its not the primary issue. It seems to me that going forward given that Europe prefers diesel it makes more sense for them to import oil and send the excess gasoline to us. Also the cost of oil in Euro's has not increased as much vs the dollar so on the money side they effectively get the crude cheaper and can probably produce the gasoline a bit cheaper.

Thus the real problem becomes when refineries in the US and in countries that export to the US cannot get enough oil. At that point its not really too important where the oil goes. If the US imports the oil then it won't get the gasoline imports from the countries it outbid.

Once the gap develops then OECD countries as a group will have to outbid China and India bidding agianst each other in a sense does not work.

Eventually of course they will and at that point we will see gasoline available for export begin to drop.

In a sense this is saying I expect European oil demand to probably contract faster than in the US as they use and expand their existing public transport networks and eventually reach the point before us that demand drops off.
This means the US keeps getting its oil but not its gasoline imports.

So in the world of Jevons Paradox you get the interesting result that if Europe conserves faster then the US is going to suffer.

Even if total oil production decreases if the price of imported gasoline increases and lifts refining margins in the US then the US could expand refining capacity and the same for Europe assuming oil prices don't increase as rapidly and then we could together compete with China for the remaining imports. The same if European demand drops leading to less gasoline for import higher prices and thence expanded capacity to compete agianst the rest of the world.

But no matter how you slice it either we get a lot of relatively cheap imported gasoline or local gasoline prices will have to go up to allow more expansion.

It seems that at least in the US gasoline prices are relatively low vs crude so the current dynamic is that the rest of the world is "getting our oil". And you have this nasty problem in general with oil once demand has expanded its tough to contract it. For example demand increases in China at todays prices are sticky against further price increases. So by having low gasoline prices now we are less likely to get the oil/gasoline imports we need in the future.

In a sense by not being aggressive on gasoline pricing in the US right now we have upped the ante in the not to distant future. I many ways this works like a moral hazard in economics we seem to have entered into a moral hazard situation with future US gasoline imports.