Where America Gets Its Oil: The Top 10 Foreign Suppliers Of Crude To The U.S.

The past decade has seen a major shift in the U.S. crude oil market. As a result of the surge in domestic production that was largely enabled by hydraulic fracturing — a practice Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders vows to ban and his rivalHillary Clinton promises to severely restrict — U.S. crude imports fell from 10.1 million barrels per day in 2005 to 7.4 million bpd in 2015. Over that span, the share of U.S. oil consumption satisfied by imports fell from 48.7% to 37.9%.

This surge in U.S. production and subsequent decline in imports resulted in more oil available for trade on the global markets, and that ultimately put downward pressure on the price of crude. OPEC exacerbated that pressure with its decision in late 2014 to defend market share, and these two pressures combined to drive oil prices down below $30 per barrel.

As a net oil importer, the decline in oil prices has hurt the U.S. oil industry, but it has also reduced the U.S. trade deficit. Consumers have benefited from lower energy prices. But the drop in prices has especially hurt the economies of countries that derive substantial revenues from oil exports.

Over the past 20 years, Canada has become by far our biggest foreign supplier of oil. In fact, the U.S. presently consumes almost 70% of Canada’s oil output. According to the Energy Information Administration, in 2015 the U.S. imported 3.2 million bpd from Canada, which accounted for 43.1% of U.S. crude oil imports. This volume represented a near-doubling in volume from 10 years earlier, but with oil prices still about $60 a barrel lower than they were two years ago, Canada is receiving about $70 billion a year less for oil from the U.S. than they were.

Twenty years ago Saudi Arabia was the top supplier of oil to the U.S. market, but they lost that top spot to Canada just over a decade ago. Still, they are the second-largest source of U.S. crude oil imports, supplying 1.1 million bpd in 2015. This represented 14.3% of U.S. crude imports, but a volume drop of 27.3% from 2005.

Because of growing global demand, Saudi Arabia (like Canada) has substantially ramped up its oil production since 2005. Saudi Arabia’s decline in exports to the U.S. wasn’t because it doesn’t have sufficient oil to export. However, declining production is increasingly an issue for Venezuela and Mexico, our No. 3 and No. 4 suppliers of crude.

Both Colombia and Brazil saw oil exports to the U.S. more than double over the past decade, but for most of the Top 10 the U.S. is importing substantially less oil than we were a decade ago.

Forbes