Where in the World Does Our Oil Come From?

UNDATED -- As oil prices continue to rise, so does the price we have to pay when we fill up at the local gas station.

Patrick DeHaan is the Head of Petroleum Analysis at GasBuddy. He says tensions between Russia and Ukraine impact us because the global oil market is one big pool, and if a top oil-producing nation like Russia stops exporting oil the world supply will be depleted quickly.

He says after oil consumption plummeted at the beginning of the pandemic, demand has come flying back with 100 million barrels consumed every day.

He says, here in Minnesota, most of our oil actually comes from North American markets.

In Minnesota, most of it is the United States. Or, a lot of it comes from Canada. It's our #1 source of imported crude oil, our partner to the north sends us millions of barrels per day. Besides Canada, we get a lot of oil from Mexico.

DeHaan says the United States is the world's number one oil producer at about 11.6 million barrels per day. But, that is down from the 13 million barrels per day we were producing before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here at home by far, our biggest oil-producing states are Texas and Alaska. DeHaan says the North Dakota oil fields aren't what they used to be.

When oil prices were high in 2011 through 2014 the Bakken was just surging. The problem was the Saudi's back in late 2014 along with OPEC decided to open up the spigot of crude oil to try and derail the U.S. energy sector, and as a result, oil prices plummeted, which caused a lot of contraction in the Bakken.

DeHaan says oil production is slowly ramping up again in North Dakota, as well as companies investing in new fields in places like Oklahoma and Utah.