Russia has overtaken Saudi Arabia in exports of petroleum products to the United States

Despite sanctions rhetoric and Washington's calls for energy independence, US refineries are buying more oil products from Russia than ever before, writes Bloomberg. To a large extent, this is the fruit of US sanctions against Venezuela.

After losing access to heavy Venezuelan oil and facing a shortage of alternative supplies due to OPEC+ production cuts, U.S. refiners turned to Russia in 2020. For many years, Russia accounted for less than 0.5% of US annual imports of oil and petroleum products, according to Bloomberg News. But in the last decade, this share has been growing and in 2020 it reached 7%.

American refineries buy mainly fuel oil, which in Russia serves as boiler fuel, and in the United States as a raw material for the production of gasoline. The largest importer of Russian petroleum products to the US was Valero (55 million barrels), followed by Exxon (50 million barrels). They accounted for nearly 50% of total Russian oil imports to the US. A boom in purchases, combined with a sharp decline in supplies from Saudi Arabia last year, propelled Russia to the position of the third largest oil supplier to the US with 538,000 b/d.

The publication finds it strange that in diplomatic circles the build-up of Russia's energy potential in the US market is almost not discussed. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the growing dependence on Russian oil is contrary to US energy diplomacy, which is strenuously opposing the Russian Nord Stream 2 project. The low-profile increase in Russian oil imports demonstrates that the mantra of energy independence is dubious, former CIA oil analyst Mark Finlay said. He recalls that last year, while campaigning in Texas, Trump boasted that the US had become "number one" and an "energy superpower" and that the country would never again have to depend on "hostile" foreign suppliers.

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The FCS data generally confirms Bloomberg’s conclusions: in the first half of 2020, Russia shipped more than 9 million tons of oil products to the United States, which was a record since 2014.