They need to sell to us every bit as much as we need to buy form them. The idea that OPEC is going to cut us off (successfully) is, in my opinion, apocryphal fear mongering. Oil on the global market is fungible. If OPEC stops exporting to us, they have to sell that oil elsewhere- they are not going to cut their own collective throats to spite us! That means those new customers have to not buy from wherever they are buying from (Former Soviet States, the North Sea Parties, etc) and buy from OPEC (probably at a reduced price), which means we can in turn buy that surplus oil from the Former Soviet States, North Sea, South America- etc. It would be a Very Painful Thing, causing corrections and Recessions in the west. Prices would spike greatly because transportation costs would skyrocket as we would be shipping oil 'up hill'- but it wouldn't be the end of the world as we know it.

Chances are, if OPEC tried to order another Embargo, Some countries in OPEC would leave OPEC and sell to us in order to reap a fantastic profit. OPEC is not some monolith- they were practically a non-entity in the 80s and 90s.

The realistic Bad Thing the richer OPEC countries could do to us is dump their dollars and value oil in euros, which would pretty much do-away with the Dollar as the reference currency. But they have been threatening to do this since early 2007, not that the idiots here have noticed that!

Yeti