Canada

so is it slurry with oil products, or oil with crap in it?

It's slurry with oil products in it, separating it into different products is what refining is. For those unfamiliar you can think of it as liquid ore and the gasoline is 18k Gold you get from rocks you dig out of a mountain. The distinction is that we're not putting any work into what we're pumping out of the ground and shipping it across the ocean. It'd be like if you owned a mine and shipped truckloads of dirt somewhere else for the gold to be pulled out. It's exceedingly inefficient and wasteful.

refinement of the slurry as “modern processes”

It is modern, however if there seemed to be a positive spin to that, that's my fault in not properly couching that term. Modern processes for me has become a negative term. I'm inherently suspicious of anything sold or marketed as modern as it tends to be a shittier version of what we already have. But that's a topic for another time. The modern processing we could do locally would not make the gasoline, plastic, diesel, or other manufacturer distillates cleaner. It would atleast lessen the further pollution from shipping. In that it would be an "improvement". Under no circumstances is domestic oil a net positive for anyone. I think the only ethical act is to sabotage oil infrastructure in America and make it too expensive to drill. But that also is a different topic for a different discussion.

Thank you for being so patient with my pedantry.

I partially think that an impending surge in renewables is a factor in their unwillingness to add the capability here. I guess we’ll see if there is any truth to that now that we are Trumpland and renewables will probably be set back at least a decade.

On this we absolutely agree.