Follow crude oil through the United States: oil comes out of the ground, arrives from other countries, leaves for other countries, or goes into refineries. Refineries are factories that turn crude oil into fuels and other products.
Oil enters, moves through storage and refineries, and then leaves as exports or finished products.
Oil comes from US wells and other countries.
Some oil is saved for later or taken out of storage.
Factories turn crude oil into useful products.
Products are used at home or sent abroad.
Production is oil taken from the ground. Imports come into the country; exports leave it. Refinery inputs are the crude oil sent into refineries for processing. The large summary cards show annual averages; the chart uses monthly data.
Refinery utilization is a percentage. It cannot share the original-volume axis with barrels per day, or be added to those volumes.
An example value of 500 in “thousand barrels/day” means 500,000 barrels per day, on average for that month. A refinery utilization rate of 90% means refineries are using about 90% of their reported operating capacity, not that 90% of US oil is being used.
Monthly values are matched by date.
Preparing stored observations…
These summary numbers describe the dates shown in the chart. They tell you what happened in the past; they do not predict what happens next.
The table makes exact values easier to check. A CSV download is a simple table file that opens in most spreadsheet programs.
Read why the United States imports oil for the story behind these numbers. The crude quality guide explains the light and heavy grades involved, and the oil trade value calculator turns a barrels-per-day flow into dollars.
Production, imports, exports and refinery inputs are measured in thousand barrels per day. Utilization is a percentage of refinery capacity. None of these lines is a price in dollars.
A 10% “CAGR” here means the volume grew about 10% a year, not that anyone earned a 10% return. Volatility shows how much monthly volumes swing, for example around maintenance season.
“Latest” is the last value in the displayed range, not necessarily today’s. For CAGR, volatility, drawdown and correlation, see the full guide to reading the workbench results.
Oil can go into storage or come out of storage. The full national balance also includes adjustments and other categories not shown here. Do not treat production plus imports minus exports as an exact measure of fuel use. Growth and volatility figures on this page describe oil volumes or refinery activity, not investment returns.
A CSV file is a table you can open in a spreadsheet. The download links give you the stored source observations, while the on-page table shows the latest values after your chosen changes, such as indexing or currency conversion. They may therefore show different numbers. Keep the dates, units and source names with any figures you reuse.
About the examples: Round numbers in these explanations are for learning. They are not current market quotes or predictions. “Not enough data” means a statistic cannot be calculated from the available observations.
These links lead to the organisations or methods behind the numbers. New figures appear here after they are published and added to this site. A missing value means data is unavailable, not that the price or supply is zero.
