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| An oil facility near Warri, Nigeria |
The U.S. used to be the world’s biggest consumer of African oil,
importing about a quarter of the continent’s total exports. Now it’s barely
taking any at all. Since 2010 the U.S. has cut the amount of oil it imports
from African countries by 90 percent, from an
average of roughly 2 million barrels per day to about 170,000.
The shale oil
boom has boosted U.S. production from 5 million barrels a
day in 2008 to more than 8 million. The Energy Information Administration
predicts that by 2019 that number will rise to
9.6 million barrels
per day. For what it’s worth, Saudi Arabia pumps about 9.5 million barrels
of oil per day.
Almost all of that new U.S. oil is
light, sweet crude—the same kind American refiners used to import from West
Africa. Now, instead of shipping it across the Atlantic, U.S. refiners are
piping and railing it across the country. That’s pushed African oil to Asia
(China now gets a third of
its oil from Africa) and helped keep the world oil markets stable and
well supplied amid large amounts of chaos and outages.
Energy Information AdministrationU.S. imports of African crude have fallen 90 percent
This is essentially the story of
four major African oil producers that hardly sell to the U.S. anymore: Nigeria,
Angola, Algeria, and Libya. Nigeria has seen its exports to the U.S. tumble the
most, from more than a milion barrels a day in 2011 to about 38,000 as of
February.
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