We continue to look at what impact US tight oil has on global oil markets, in this post the reduction of US petroleum product imports. This analysis shows that only around one quarter of a drop of 1.7 mb/d since 2005/06 can be explained by the tight oil boom. Fig 1: US product imports The graph shows that US product imports peaked already in 2005/06, long before the tight oil boom started. The drop between that peak and 2010 was around 1 mb/d. Remember that the US went into recession end 2007. A further drop of 700 kb/d happened during the tight oil boom. (1) US product imports from Venezuela The biggest drop came from Venezuela and Virgin Islands. Fig 2: US product imports from Venezuela Product imports from Venezuela are in long-term decline since 1997. In 1999 el Comandante Chavez came to power, re-instating quotas and trying to […]