General Discussion

Are paying very high rates (leaving US consumers with higher prices for gas), the US has remained a net CRUDE importer throughout this fracking boom. We've generally been exporting about 4.5M barrels a day, and importing about 5.5M barrels a day until like 2 weeks ago.

An addendum to your post there is that the main reason for the imports is that the oil being produced by VZ, Canada, and Mexico is much closer in nature (sour, heavy) to the oil that most of the US (including Alaska) was producing prior to the fracking boom, and a great many of our refineries were never retooled to process the (sweet, light WTI) oil produced by the frackers. So we still import MORE (heavy, sour) than we export (light, sweet) when it comes to crude.

Again until like 2 weeks ago, when the WTI producers sold a shit-ton of it to the rest of the world, to the point that exports finally exceeded imports. US oil inventories, in net, fell drastically as a result, and that is part of why US prices have shot up so much the past couple of weeks.