In the final week of 2020, the U.S. imported no crude from Saudi Arabia for the first time in 35 years. But it's not quite the historic moment it might seem at first sight.
As recently as 2017, the desert kingdom was regularly sending more than 1 million barrels a day of its crude across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to the U.S. Within the space of four years that market has all but disappeared, as the shale industry boomed for a second time and then demand collapsed with the pandemic.
The drop to zero doesn't spell the end of Saudi shipments to the U.S. Already that figure won’t be repeated in Wednesday’s weekly report from the Energy Information Administration that covers the first full week of January. U.S. customs data show 1.9 million barrels of Saudi crude entered the country during that period.
The pattern of dwindling flows to the world’s biggest oil market is one that’s been felt by producers around the globe.
The first to feel the chill (aside from Iran, which hasn’t exported crude to the U.S. since President Jimmy Carter imposed sanctions in 1979) were those in West Africa, particularly Nigeria. Their oil shipments across the Atlantic were hit by the 2008 financial crisis and then crumbled in the teeth of the first shale gale beginning in 2011. They revived briefly as that boom ran out of steam in 2015, but the recovery was short-lived.
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