US Oil Imports by Country, Explained

1. The supplier table, from the EIA annual record

Ask where America's imported oil comes from and the common answers point at the Middle East. The EIA's data points at the 49th parallel. Canada supplied 63.4 percent of US crude oil imports in 2025, close to two barrels in every three, while all OPEC members together supplied 13.5 percent. The figures below are the EIA's annual crude oil imports by country of origin, in thousand barrels per day, from the series released September 30, 2026 (checked October 2026), with each supplier's share of the 2025 total computed on this page:

The top ten sum to 93.2 percent, and the structure inside that sum is the story. Suppliers in the Americas delivered about 5.3 million of the 6.17 million barrels a day, roughly 86 percent. OPEC members supplied 832 thousand barrels a day, 13.5 percent, down from 15.9 percent in 2023, and the Persian Gulf 490 thousand, 7.9 percent. The total itself fell 6.4 percent in 2025, the first decline in this three-year window. And the flow is not small next to domestic output: in the latest week archived on this site, the week ending October 23, 2026, US crude imports ran at 6,374 thousand barrels a day beside domestic production of 13,992 thousand, so imports were about 31 percent of the two streams combined. Our trade routes page maps the sea lanes these cargoes travel, and the global oil hub places the US among producers and consumers worldwide.

A note on vintages, because it trips up many readers of this data. The weekly report's country table borrows its shares from the most recent complete annual data, so a weekly table read in mid-2025 still showed 2023 proportions: Canada at 59.9 percent, Mexico at 11.3 percent, Saudi Arabia at 5.4 percent. Those are exactly the 2023 column above. Quoting them as the current picture two years later misses the collapse in Mexican volumes and the rise of Guyana and Argentina. Always check which year a share belongs to before comparing it with anything.

2. Canada: the pipeline supplier that rewrote the table

Canada's 63.4 percent is not a market outcome that resets each year; it is infrastructure. Alberta's oil sands produce heavy crude in volumes Canada's own refineries cannot absorb, and cross-border pipelines deliver it directly to the US Midwest, the Rockies, and onward to the Gulf Coast. The Midwest refining region (PADD 2 in the district system) is effectively an extension of the Alberta market. The EIA reported on October 30, 2024 that US imports of Canadian crude reached a record 4.3 million barrels a day in July 2024, after the Trans Mountain expansion entered service in May and tripled that line's previous 300,000 barrel a day capacity, and that US West Coast crude imports hit a record 498,000 barrels a day that month, 115 percent above July 2023, as Pacific refiners took the new coastal volumes. The annual figures show the same step: 3,885 thousand barrels a day from Canada in 2023, 4,062 in 2024.

The 2025 figure, 3,910, is lower in barrels yet higher as a share, because every other major supplier fell faster. That is a useful reminder that a rising share is not the same as a rising flow: in a year when total imports dropped by 420 thousand barrels a day, Canada lost 152 thousand and still gained 1.7 percentage points. The discount at which the landlocked Canadian grade trades against WTI is the subject of our WCS-WTI differential explainer; the import table is where that discount does its work, pulling barrels south by pipe, and our Canada country profile covers the production side of the same flow.

3. Why the largest producer imports at all: the grade mismatch

The United States produces more crude oil than any other country and still imports roughly six to seven million barrels a day of it. The resolution is that crude oil is not one substance. US shale output is overwhelmingly light and sweet: low density, low sulfur, easy to refine. Much of the US refining fleet, above all the big complex plants on the Gulf Coast, was built and rebuilt over decades to run heavy, sour crude: dense, high-sulfur barrels from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and the Middle East, processed in cokers and hydrocrackers that turn cheap heavy feed into high-value light products. A complex refinery fed only light shale crude leaves expensive equipment idle and yields too much of the light end. So the two streams coexist by design: heavy crude flows in for the complex plants, surplus light crude flows out to simpler refineries abroad, and refined products flow out on top of both. Imports by country are, underneath the politics, a refinery configuration table.

Geography layers on grade. The East Coast (PADD 1) has limited pipeline connections to US fields and a refining fleet oriented to waterborne supply, so it imports crude and products across the Atlantic even in years of national surplus. The West Coast (PADD 5) is an island market, cut off by the Rockies, supplied by Alaska, California fields, and tankers from the Pacific, now including Canadian barrels through the expanded Trans Mountain line. A national total that nets to near balance is built from regional markets that are each structurally long or short, which is why the country table and the district table have to be read together.

4. The weekly table versus the annual structure

The EIA prints the country split weekly, and the weekly columns swing hard enough to mislead anyone who reads them as structure. In the weekly table for the week ending June 27, 2025, the four week average for Canada was 3,613 thousand barrels a day, close to its structural level. Mexico's four week average was 415 thousand, below its 2024 annual average of 464 and close to the 383 the full year 2025 would end up averaging. Nigeria printed 419 thousand barrels a day in that single week, against a four week average of 226 thousand: one or two tanker arrivals landing inside the week boundary. These are cargo-timing artifacts, and the EIA labels the weekly table preliminary for that reason. The monthly Petroleum Supply Monthly restates the flows, and the annual Petroleum Supply Annual fixes the shares the weekly table borrows. Read the weekly table for direction, the annual table for fact, and never annualize a single week of a small supplier.

5. The moving rows: Mexico down, Guyana and Argentina up

The annual columns show more change in three years than the old picture of US supply allows for. Mexico, the second supplier, went from 733 thousand barrels a day in 2023 to 464 in 2024 and 383 in 2025, nearly halving in two years. Venezuela swung from 132 to 228 and back to 140 as US licensing conditions changed, arriving in tanker-sized cargoes that leave many individual weekly prints empty. Meanwhile two newer producers climbed the table. Guyana, a producer whose offshore output is still ramping up, supplied 98 thousand barrels a day in 2023, 176 in 2024, and 208 in 2025, enough to rank fourth, ahead of Brazil, Colombia, and Iraq. Argentina nearly doubled, from 68 to 130, entering the top ten for the first time in this window.

The weekly report's country list is re-based each year on the prior year's volumes, so these shifts reach the weekly table with a lag: a supplier can matter in the monthly data a full year before it earns a named weekly row. Russia shows the reverse path. The EIA's annual series records 199 thousand barrels a day of Russian crude in 2021, 20 thousand in 2022, and none in 2023 through 2025. The stable fact across all the churn is the one at the top of the table: Canada, the supplier connected by pipe.

6. Where the 2025 decline came from: a worked decomposition

Total crude imports fell from 6,588 to 6,168 thousand barrels a day in 2025, a drop of 420. Splitting that change by supplier shows that it was broad rather than one country's story:

Three readings follow. First, the largest single contributor was Canada, the supplier whose share rose, which is the clearest possible demonstration that shares and volumes answer different questions. Second, three long-standing Latin American suppliers to the Gulf Coast, Venezuela, Mexico, and Ecuador, together account for about 193 thousand barrels a day of the drop, close to half of it. Third, the growth suppliers, Guyana and Argentina, added 94 thousand barrels a day between them, offsetting less than a quarter of the decline elsewhere, and a new supplier's crude is not automatically a substitute for a departing one, because refineries are configured for particular grades, as section 3 explains. The table records the change; it does not explain it. For causes, the EIA's monthly supply data on refinery runs, stocks, and production are where to look, together with the WTI-Brent spread that decides whether foreign crude is worth landing, covered in our WTI-Brent spread explainer.

One more ratio puts the import table in proportion. The EIA's October 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook (Table 4a, checked October 2026) puts crude oil input to US refineries at 16.37 million barrels a day in 2025 and US crude production at 13.66 million. Gross crude imports of 6.17 million barrels a day therefore equal about 38 percent of what US refineries ran, and Canadian crude alone, 3.91 million, equals about 24 percent. Those percentages are not the share of foreign molecules in any given refinery, because the United States also exported 4.0 million barrels a day of crude in 2025, down 3 percent, according to the EIA's March 10, 2026 Today in Energy, so domestic and imported barrels are partly swapped rather than simply added. What the ratio does show is scale: roughly one barrel in four processed in a US refinery in 2025 had a Canadian counterpart in the import data. A pipeline outage between Alberta and the Midwest is therefore a US refinery problem within days, which is why the Alberta takeaway capacity analysis belongs in any reading of the import table, and why a disruption at a minor seaborne supplier usually does not carry the same weight: the Gulf Coast can replace one cargo with another, while a pipeline barrel has no quick substitute.

7. 2026 so far: the Persian Gulf row empties, the Venezuelan row fills

The annual table ends in 2025, and 2026 has already rearranged it. The EIA's monthly series by country of origin, released September 30, 2026 and running to July 2026, shows two rows moving in opposite directions at the same time. Imports from the Persian Gulf countries rose to 775 thousand barrels a day in February, their highest month in the 2025 to 2026 data, then fell to 186 in May and 113 in June. The EIA's June 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook reported that shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz had been extremely limited since military action began on February 28. Imports from Venezuela went the other way: 137 thousand barrels a day in December 2025, 231 in February, 471 in May, 630 in June and 701 in July, more than five times the December level and 11.3 percent of all US crude imports that month.

Source: EIA, US crude oil imports by country of origin, monthly (release September 30, 2026, next release October 30, 2026), checked October 28, 2026. n/a: the July 2026 Persian Gulf total and the July Saudi and Iraqi values are not yet published in the series; the Persian Gulf grouping runs a month behind the other rows.

The EIA explained the Venezuelan side before the Hormuz closure began. Its February 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook reported that an oil blockade and the interception of sanctioned tankers had halted a large portion of Venezuela's exports in December, that exports recovered in January after licenses were granted to the trading companies Vitol and Trafigura, and that the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control then expanded the general license to let more companies transport and sell Venezuelan crude. The same outlook said the ultimate destination of much of that oil was likely refineries on the US Gulf Coast. The import data bear that out: of the 701 thousand barrels a day from Venezuela in July 2026, 655 thousand, about 93 percent, were processed in Gulf Coast (PADD 3) refineries, according to the EIA's imports by PADD of processing. The EIA's October 2026 outlook puts Venezuelan crude production at 0.93 million barrels a day in the first quarter of 2026, 1.11 million in the second and 1.18 million in the third, so the higher exports came with higher output rather than from storage alone. The longer record, Venezuelan output by year since 1980 against what the United States bought, and the OFAC licenses dated alongside it, is in our history of Venezuela oil production.

Put the two rows side by side and the timing is what stands out. From February to June the Persian Gulf countries lost 662 thousand barrels a day of US deliveries while Venezuela gained 399, so Venezuelan barrels replaced a large part, though not all, of the crude that could no longer leave the Gulf. That fits the refinery logic of section 3: a plant configured to run a particular imported grade looks for a similar foreign barrel, because surplus light shale crude does not fill the same slot. Averages hide the swing. Over January to June, the Persian Gulf countries averaged 480 thousand barrels a day in 2026 against 472 in the same months of 2025, nearly unchanged, because the first quarter ran high before the collapse. Total imports for January to July averaged 6,276 thousand barrels a day, 98 more than a year earlier, and Canada averaged 4,045, up 126. The detail on the strait itself, the shut-ins by producer and the price shock is in the Strait of Hormuz guide, whose Table 6 carries the Persian Gulf series back to 2015.

8. Where the barrels land: imports by district of entry

A country table says where crude was produced. The EIA also records where it entered the United States, by refining district, and that second view explains why the country table looks the way it does. In 2025 the Midwest (PADD 2) took in 2,903 thousand barrels a day, 47.1 percent of all US crude imports, and in the EIA's imports by PADD of processing, every barrel of foreign crude run in Midwest refineries in each month of 2025 was Canadian. The Gulf Coast (PADD 3), home to 9,903 of the country's 18,044 thousand barrels a day of operable distillation capacity in the EIA's weekly data for October 16, 2026, took 1,153 thousand, 18.7 percent, about the same as the West Coast (PADD 5) at 1,145.

Source: EIA, crude oil imports by area of entry, annual and monthly, thousand barrels per day (release September 30, 2026), checked October 28, 2026. The two January to July rows are day-weighted averages of the monthly values, computed on this page, as is the share column. Districts may not sum exactly to the US total because of rounding in the published series.

The ten-year change is the most striking line. Gulf Coast entries fell from 2,966 thousand barrels a day in 2015 to 1,153 in 2025, a drop of 61 percent, while Midwest entries rose 25 percent, from 2,317 to 2,903. The Gulf Coast decline ran alongside the growth of Texas and New Mexico output, a domestic supply on those refiners' doorstep, while Canadian pipeline barrels kept growing into the Midwest. That is why the country table is so dominated by Canada: the district that imports the most is the one wired directly to Alberta. The oil production by state guide shows the domestic side of the same shift.

2026 moved the districts too. Comparing January to July of each year, Gulf Coast entries rose from an average of 1,188 to 1,340 thousand barrels a day as the Venezuelan cargoes arrived, while West Coast entries fell from 1,178 to 1,033. The West Coast drop lines up with the Persian Gulf collapse: West Coast refineries processed 245 thousand barrels a day of Persian Gulf crude in March 2026, and 17 thousand in June, according to the EIA's imports by PADD of processing, with Iraqi crude accounting for all of the June figure. In July, with Persian Gulf barrels scarce, the same district processed 516 thousand barrels a day of Canadian crude, its highest Canadian month in the 2025 to 2026 series, a sign of how much the Trans Mountain route described in section 2 now matters to Pacific refiners. The districts themselves are mapped in the PADD guide.

9. Mistakes this data invites

• Equating imports with OPEC dependence. OPEC members supplied 13.5 percent of US crude imports in 2025. Canada alone supplied more than four times that. Commentary that treats US supply as hostage to OPEC decisions is working from a 1970s map.
• Confusing crude imports with total petroleum trade. This page is crude oil only. The United States also imports and exports large volumes of refined products, natural gas liquids, and biofuels, and on that total petroleum basis the EIA counted the United States as a net exporter in 2020, for the first time since at least 1949, and again in 2022 and 2023.
• Reading one weekly print as a trend. A small supplier's weekly figure is a count of tankers that happened to dock. The four week average exists to absorb exactly that lumpiness.
• Assuming imports mean domestic production failed. The flows are driven by crude quality and refinery configuration. The US imports heavy barrels it chooses to run and exports light barrels it chooses to sell, in the same week, because each cargo suits the refinery that buys it.
• Treating the top ten as the whole story. About 6.8 percent of 2025 crude imports, 420 thousand barrels a day, came from outside the top ten, a tail of occasional and emerging suppliers that the annual re-basing keeps redrawing.
• Quoting a share without its year. The 59.9 percent Canadian share still repeated in many explainers is a 2023 figure; for 2025 it is 63.4 percent, and Mexico's fell from 11.3 to 6.2 percent over the same span. Shares in this table move several points in two years.

10. Frequently asked questions

Data and sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), US crude oil imports by country of origin, annual, released September 30, 2026 and checked October 22, 2026 (thousand barrels per day; totals 6,489 in 2023, 6,588 in 2024, 6,168 in 2025; OPEC 1,032, 1,015, 832; Persian Gulf 609, 533, 490; country values as tabled in sections 1, 5, and 6; Russia 199 in 2021, 20 in 2022, none reported 2023 to 2025). Shares, the top ten sum, the Americas total, and the 2024 to 2025 decomposition are this page's arithmetic from that series. EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report, crude oil imports by country of origin table, as published in mid-2025 editions and read October 21, 2026 (shares matching the 2023 annual data: Canada 59.9 percent, Mexico 11.3, Saudi Arabia 5.4; four week averages for the week ending June 27, 2025: Canada 3,613, Mexico 415, Saudi Arabia 263, Brazil 283, Nigeria 226, Iraq 173, Colombia 172, Ecuador 113, Libya 102, Venezuela 99 thousand barrels per day; single week Nigeria 419 thousand). EIA, Today in Energy, October 30, 2024, checked October 22, 2026 (record 4.3 million barrels per day from Canada in July 2024; the Trans Mountain expansion tripled the line's previous 300,000 barrel per day capacity; US West Coast crude imports of 498,000 barrels per day in July 2024, up 115 percent from July 2023). EIA, Oil imports and exports explainer and FAQ on petroleum imports and exports, checked October 22, 2026 (the United States a net total petroleum exporter in 2020 for the first time since at least 1949, and net exports of about 1.19 million barrels per day in 2022 and 1.64 million in 2023). EIA, Short-Term Energy Outlook, October 2026, Table 4a, checked October 22, 2026 (2025 crude oil input to refineries 16.37 million barrels per day; US crude production 13.66 million). EIA, Today in Energy, March 10, 2026, checked October 22, 2026 (2025 crude exports 4.0 million barrels per day, down 3 percent). EIA, US crude oil imports by country of origin, monthly, crude oil imports by area of entry and imports by PADD of processing (Gulf Coast, Midwest and West Coast pages), all released September 30, 2026 and checked October 28, 2026 (monthly values to July 2026 as tabled in sections 7 and 8). EIA, weekly refinery inputs and utilization (Gulf Coast and US operable crude distillation capacity, 9,903 and 18,044 thousand barrels per calendar day, week ending October 16, 2026), checked October 28, 2026. EIA, Short-Term Energy Outlook, June 2026 (Hormuz shipping traffic), checked October 28, 2026. EIA, Short-Term Energy Outlook, February 2026 (Venezuela blockade, Vitol and Trafigura licenses, expanded OFAC general license, likely Gulf Coast destination) and October 2026, Table 3d (Venezuelan crude production by quarter), checked October 28, 2026. Latest week import and production figures are computed at build time from the PetroEyes archive of EIA weekly data (file updated October 19, 2026). All other figures are as published by the sources named, for the periods stated.