Keeping track of the way oil is distributed around the world can be complicated, but it's still true that the US has plenty of oil.

That can't be said of China, South Korea, Japan, and India, among other nations, and they were the ones most threatened by the "closing" of the Strait of Hormuz last week, helping send the price of oil way up temporarily over the weekend.

Jay Young, the CEO of King Operating company, based in the Dallas suburb of Addison, says the oil markets are going through some changes, though, and they'll have an effect on every nation -- but the effects may not show up for a while.

"We're seeing this oil that's going through these different places like the Strait of Hormuz," part of which stretches along the coast of Iran, "and other places, and if they need oil, like Japan and India, and if there's oil that's needed there and they're not getting it, they're going to come back and say they need oil -- but if they can't get it at the price they want they won't have any choice but to pay more for it, pay the worldwide market price," Young says.

Oil and gas are pretty much one world market, so it's hard to release oil on a local basis, most of it goes onto world markets where petroleum products get the best price and profit.

That's why when the United States and other nations release oil from their Strategic Petroleum Reserves the countries make money but the oil probably goes to the most oil-hungry places, like China,for better or worse.

The real problem is what some people call the "end of cheap oil," that is, the growing problem that until now it's always been relatively cheap to drill for oil.

In the wildcat days of the 19th and 20th centuries if you had a few hundred dollars you could explore for oil, but those days are mostly done -- now it costs millions of dollars to pump fracking wells, and those wells have been pumping long enough that the amount of oil they're putting out is diminishing.

"We take oil for granted, but when we have disruptions like we've had in the Strait, the price is going to go up as long as we have them," he adds.

"And frankly, we don't have the oil we had before," referring to ten or twenty years ago.

It now can take weeks or months for wells to go back in service after being shut in because prices and profits are low, and it can be several months before a new well can go online, and the days when we could count on nations like Saudi Arabia to pump extra oil to keep gasoline prices cheap are now ending because those nations are using up most of their extra oil.

"We're going to have to start getting used to higher prices" for oil and gasoline, Young says, because there's a finite quantity of it, which could cause a rush for resources like oil and gas around the world.

Some analysts say that's what's happening more and more -- competition, trade wars and now hot wars because of the diminishing of resources, and oil is among the most precious of all of them because each barrel is the most plentiful source of efficient energy known today.

Michael Berry