> That begs the question why aren't we building refineries that can process our own oil

Putting aside the legal and "public appetite" aspects that someone else already mentioned, it all comes back to privitisation in the end.

Given that the extraction was privitised, clearly market theory dictates that you cannot then interfere with where the extracted oil goes.

So if a private company is deciding on refining then it will follow the path of most profit, i.e. build/expand vs use existing capacity elsewhere. Given that most oil companies are large multinationals they will likely also prioritise using their own facilities vs paying a third-party refinery.

And clearly at the time, carbon footprint was not on the agenda of the private companies, either directly or enforced via legislation.

The writing is on the wall that people, especially young people, don't want to be using fossil fuels anymore.

Refineries are expensive (like $10B for country scale) and take years to build.

Which begs the question, how much renewable energy can you get for $10B? And perhaps even faster?

But it's not that clear, because reality has these fractal trade offs and the future is typically pretty opaque. So then will/motivation because an issue too.

Most likely the legal and public relations costs of building it are predicted to be more than shipping it somewhere else and back.