Larry Summers, former secretary of the treasury and top economic advisor to President Barack Obama, has strongly advocated to lift the crude oil export ban. And he has a compelling, if not necessarily fact-based, argument.

“Permitting the exports of oil will actually reduce the price of gasoline,” Summers told an audience at the Brookings Institute on September 9th.

This argument for lifting the crude oil export ban is also pushed by the American Petroleum Institute, prominent Republicans and the Government Accountability Office.

When analyzing the push to lift the crude oil export ban, it's informative to look to the ongoing efforts to sell the massive expansion in U.S. natural gas exports.

The oil and gas industry and its supporters have also pushed the idea that exporting natural gas would be good for the average American. However, in the case of natural gas exports, the outcome was actually quite the opposite as predicted by the Energy Information Administration in a report titled “Effect of Increased Natural Gas Exports on Domestic Energy Markets.”

Their analysis reads: “Increased natural gas exports lead to higher domestic natural gas prices.”