California’s Oil Refinement, Imports, and Use

California’s Oil Refinement, Imports, and Use

I am going to use a mix of numbers from recent years, which of course change from year to year with a fungible product like oil.  Costs don’t matter much since those thrifty days are gone.  We give yearly figures to start.

2021 oil supply to California refineries in millions of barrels (mb):

California      151.3 mb.   28.9%

Alaska.            78.1 mb.    14.9%

Foreign.        294.3 mb.   56.2%

The total production in 2021 is 523.7 million barrels, or, dividing by 365, we get 1.43 million barrels per day on average.  This is about 8% of US daily oil use, although California has 12% of the US population.

In the good old peak California production year of 1986, California produced 402 million barrels, or 59.9%, Alaska produced 35.2%, and Foreign was only 5.5%.

As an aside, Lawrence Livermore National Lab points out that of the about 100 quads of energy that the US sources a year, 24.3 quads goes into transportation, but only 5.09 quads or 21% of that goes into useful work, while 19.2 quads is rejected, like into road and air friction, and heat expelled.

Here is a graph on how California and Alaska oil sources have shrunk over the years, since 1985.

The 2020 Foreign oil imports highlight Ecuador, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, each over 20%,  in the table below of Countries, millions of barrels, and percent of imports.

The key point here is that whenever somebody says that the US is energy independent, you say … uh, but what about California?