BLOOMBERG - May 22, 2014
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.
READ MORE....
