along with a portion of the drilling effort that came for an oil change to the Gulf of Mexico (though, presumably, there was no oil changed at all).
When you consider what ExxonMobil and Shell had already done, and what had once been a federal-state dispute, the U.S. is no exception. Although much of Exxon Mobil's oil was sold off to China for a record $4.6 billion in 2010 but a further $1.3 billion went to Iran and then to Russia, Shell's drilling effort ultimately got caught in a Russian pipeline.
In 2010, the US government made a $60 billion deal to drill for offshore reserves under natural gas reserves that were also offshore by accident. The oil companies that agreed on this deal were then given the ability to drill on "state-owned" reserves because they were only allowed to bring out oil to sell.
The decision by the government to let the companies drill over state-owned reserves was hailed by the public. The president of the American Petroleum Institute (API), John Podesta, said, "There is a great irony to it: The way this new deal is presented, this is a federal-state dispute over the production of offshore gas. If I'm president, I want to keep the United States from buying and extracting the gas. That's not going to happen."
The US government would do an awful lot