Originally published March 18, 2013. Updated September 19, 2026.
The United States pumped a record 13.7 million barrels of crude oil a day in 2025 and is a net exporter of energy overall, but it still isn’t self-sufficient on oil. Refiners still imported 6.2 million barrels of crude a day in 2025, mostly from Canada, even as domestic output hit that record. The country has produced more energy than it has used every year since 2019, and it exports more petroleum overall than it imports. Crude oil alone breaks that pattern. The US remains a net importer of crude.
How much energy the US produces versus how much it uses
The US has produced more energy than it has consumed every year since 2019, according to the Energy Information Administration. That doesn’t mean the country runs on nothing from outside its borders. Petroleum remains the single biggest piece of what the country burns, at 35.9 quadrillion Btu, about 38% of total US energy consumption in 2025. Natural gas is close behind, supplying 34.6 quadrillion Btu, about 36% that same year. Those two fuels alone account for nearly three-quarters of everything the country burns to move around and stay warm. The remaining quarter comes from every other fuel combined, none of it large enough on its own to move the numbers in this piece. Production topping consumption is a national total, and it doesn’t say which specific fuel crosses the border, or in which direction. That’s the gap the rest of this piece covers.
The shale boom that turned oil imports around
US crude oil production hit a record 13.7 million barrels a day in 2025, and the EIA’s own short-term forecast puts 2026 output even higher, at 13.8 million barrels a day. That surge is the shale boom, and this site has covered how it remade US oil and gas output in more detail elsewhere. Even against record production, the US didn’t stop buying crude from elsewhere. Refiners imported 6.168 million barrels of crude a day in 2025, down only slightly from 6.588 million the year before. That’s a modest dip, and the next section covers why the number won’t reach zero anytime soon.
Why the US still imports millions of barrels a day from Canada
Most of the crude the US still buys from abroad comes from one place. Canada supplied about 61.7% of US crude imports in 2024 and 63.4% in 2025, up from a market where OPEC alone supplied around 85% of US oil imports back in 1977. In barrels, that came to about 3.9 million barrels a day from Canada in 2025, out of roughly 6.2 million a day of crude imports from every country combined. Record domestic production changed which country fills that import gap, from an OPEC-heavy mix decades ago to an overwhelmingly Canadian one now.
The 2013 energy security push behind this question
In the February 2013 State of the Union, President Obama proposed an Energy Security Trust, a $2 billion-a-year fund from oil and gas lease royalties for clean-transportation research, according to Wikipedia’s account of that address. The bigger question behind that debate has an answer in the numbers above, record production and a crude-import total that has fallen without disappearing.
Petroleum exporter, crude importer at the same time
The EIA’s own accounting already showed the country as a net exporter of total petroleum, meaning crude oil and refined products added together, by 1.64 million barrels a day in 2023. That gap kept widening, as the numbers below show.
| Measure (million barrels a day) | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Total petroleum imports | 8.438 | 7.937 |
| Total petroleum exports | 10.709 | 10.785 |
| Crude oil imports | 6.588 | 6.168 |
| Crude oil exports | 4.093 | 3.961 |
Source: EIA, crude oil imports, EIA, total petroleum imports and EIA, US petroleum exports, read 2026-09-25.
Total petroleum exports kept climbing too, from 10.709 million barrels a day in 2024 to 10.785 million in 2025, even as total imports slipped. That combined trade, the top two rows of the table, left the US with a surplus of about 2.27 million barrels a day in 2024 and 2.85 million in 2025. Crude oil by itself runs the other way. The US bought more crude than it sold both years, a net import of roughly 2.5 million barrels a day in 2024 and 2.21 million in 2025. Total petroleum trade favors the US, but crude oil trade doesn’t, and confusing the two is the easiest way to get this topic wrong.
Why energy independence hasn’t lowered gas prices
Record production doesn’t buy insulation from the world market. Crude oil is the biggest single piece of what you pay at the pump, at 51.4% of the retail gasoline price in 2025. Brent crude averaged $69 a barrel in 2025, before EIA’s own September 2026 forecast put it at $91 on the back of a Middle East supply disruption, and US retail gasoline is forecast to climb from $3.10 a gallon to $3.84 over that same stretch. A jump like that shows up directly at the pump. The EIA states the mechanism plainly. Crude oil prices are driven by global supply and demand, and that holds whether the US pumps a record amount of its own oil or not. A country can be a net exporter of petroleum and still watch its own pump prices jump because of a disruption on the other side of the world. Why crude behaves like a single global commodity even with record US output gets its own explanation in why oil prices swing so much and how much OPEC still controls.
What would change this answer
That $91 forecast isn’t settled. It comes from EIA’s own September 2026 outlook, and the agency says plainly that the figure doesn’t specifically account for market events after September 3, 2026. The forecast holds only as long as the Middle East disruption behind it does. If the disruption widens, expect oil and gasoline prices to move again before the year is out. If it eases, the gap between 2025’s $69-a-barrel average and the $91 forecast for 2026 is the number that should start closing. The production and import figures covered earlier won’t move nearly that fast. Record US crude output and heavy reliance on Canadian crude both move on a much longer clock than a single quarter’s headlines. Those are the numbers worth checking against EIA’s monthly updates, separate from whatever the price swings are doing at any given moment. The split from the start of this piece holds regardless of how the forecast moves. It’s a structural fact about production and trade, not a price swing, and it moves far slower than any single forecast number does.
