“Why are we importing a record 232 million barrels of oil from Russia last year? And that was only through November. In fact, we set a monthly record of 26 million barrels last May,” he asked.
Upon entering the White House, Joe Biden promised to wean the United States off of fossil fuels, stopping all new drilling leases on federal land and canceling the Keystone XL pipeline between the United States and Russia.
This hasn’t stopped the United States from importing millions of barrels of oil from Russia, Canada, Mexico, and other countries every month.
In the second half of 2021, according to the United States Energy Information Administration, the United States imported a monthly average of 266 million barrels of crude oil. There were 8,2 percent of imports from Russia during that time frame.
That’s less than the 9% that came from the Persian Gulf and substantially less than the 49.5% that came from Canada.
The amount of oil imported from Russia represents a relatively small percentage of the total amount imported by the United States, but in absolute numbers (22 million barrels a month) it is not insignificant.
Over the last several years, this number has also steadily risen: Russian crude oil imports in the spring of 2021 were at their highest level in a decade.
In 2020, the United States used an average of 18.19 million barrels of crude oil per day and 6.66 billion barrels over the course of the year. The United States imports almost one million barrels of oil from Russia daily.
A supply disruption will result from the Ukraine-Russia conflict, but also increasing prices will result from the uncertainty of the conflict. Oil prices rose by over 2% when National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced that Russia could invade Ukraine “at any moment.”
Since the invasion, the price of a barrel of crude oil has fluctuated wildly.
This level of oil price was last seen in 2014, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Additionally, Russia is one of the largest suppliers of natural gas – a fuel that is necessary to refine crude oil into other fuels – and one of the largest suppliers of crude oil in the world.
And we’ve been the ones whipping out the wallets.
