The OPEC+ production cuts, lower overall oil demand, and declining demand for foreign-sourced lighter crudes resulted in 2020 in the lowest annual American crude oil imports from OPEC in data going back to 1973, the Energy Information Administration’s ‘This Week in Petroleum’ note showed . Last year, U.S. crude oil imports from OPEC producers averaged just 816,000 barrels per day (bpd), the EIA has estimated. The OPEC+ production cuts and the deliberate efforts from Saudi Arabia to reduce shipments to the most transparent market, the United States, played a role in last year’s record-low American oil imports from OPEC. The other key reason was that the surging U.S. oil production in recent years—which made America the world’s top oil producer—was mostly of light and medium grades, so demand for such grades from OPEC or elsewhere in the world has significantly dropped since 2005. While oil imports from OPEC hit […]