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Not exactly "not physically extractable", but extractable only slowly, probably contaminated by water, in a way that is very expensive to refine.

People jump over the details in normal times, but then times get abnormal and impossible things start to happen.

i don't think extracting water from gasoline would be difficult at all, but probably plenty of other contaminants possible.

Mix a spoon of oil in a couple of glasses of water, add salt, put it a few minutes in a blender, and tell me how easy it is to retrieve the oil.

Now scale that to millions of barrels of oil every day.

1. Wait one hour.

2. Harvest.

In fact, a common further down in this thread says that's exactly how they harvest all of the oil: they pressurize it with (salt)water.

isn't that how we extract oilsands? by mixing it with hot water.

And they are very expensive to refine compared to Brent.