Sorry, Donald Trump, but the US does need oil from the Middle East

President Donald Trump was wrong last week when he said that the US did not need Middle East oil. For one thing, US refiners still need to process it to make the products their customers want. What’s more, US car drivers and truckers need it to keep flowing or they will face higher prices at their local petrol pump.

Trump made his assertion during an address from the White House after Iran launched a barrage of missiles at two airbases in Iraq used by the US military and amid fears of an escalation in attacks on key oil infrastructure in the region, including potentially the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz — a narrow neck of water that connects the Persian Gulf to the open seas.

It’s certainly true that very little of the crude produced in the Persian Gulf region now finds its way to refineries in the US. Less than 5% of the 16.5-million barrels a day of crude and condensate — a light form of oil pumped from gas fields — that flowed through Hormuz in 2019 went to US refineries, according to tanker tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.

By contrast, four Asian countries — China, India, Japan and South Korea — bought two-thirds of all the crude and condensate from the region. If you add in the rest of Asia, that figure rises to more than 80%. Little wonder then that Trump is calling on those countries to take a bigger role in protecting oil flows through the strait.

But the shipments to the US cannot be dismissed so easily. Individually, the country is the fifth-biggest buyer of Middle Eastern crude. Of course its imports from the region have tumbled as domestic oil production soared with the shale booms, as shown in the chart below. But the countries of the Persian Gulf still account for one in every eight barrels of crude imported into the US

As my Bloomberg News colleague Sheela Tobben wrote here, before the shale boom began, US Gulf coast refiners invested millions of dollars revamping their plants to process relatively cheap heavy crude from the Middle East and Latin America into the low-sulphur products demanded by local consumers. Since 2012, they have rejigged their facilities again to process higher proportions of the type of light, sweet oil (containing little or no sulphur) that is extracted from shale formations.

Much was made of the US’s oil independence when the country posted the first full month as a net exporter of crude and petroleum products since government records began in 1949. That became apparent at the end of November, when monthly data for September was published. The feat was repeated in October (the most recent month for which we have monthly figures).

But one shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this new status as a net exporter is driven by shipments of refined products. The US continues to import more crude than it ships out. It is solidly linked into the global oil market and will remain so.

And with tension now flaring with Iran, the fact that there are fewer sources from which to import the heavy, sour crude (containing high concentrations of sulphur) on which Gulf coast refineries depend is coming into relief. The US imposed sanctions on Venezuelan oil exports in January 2019 and Mexico and Colombia are facing declining output as a result of a lack of new investment. For now, while Canada remains the biggest supplier to the US, the Middle East delivers most of the rest.

That brings me to the second reason that the US remains dependent on oil flows from the Persian Gulf — and why it will remain so even if it buys none of the region’s exports. Prices.

No matter where oil from the Middle East is sold, the volume coming out of the region still has a profound effect on crude prices as well as those of petrol and diesel. Nowhere is that more true than in the US, where low taxes on fuels mean their prices are much more responsive to movements in global crude.

The national average price of regular unleaded petrol jumped 10 US cents a gallon — the biggest two-day increase in more than two years — after attacks in September on Saudi oil installations, even though the world’s biggest oil exporter was quick to reassure customers that there would be no disruption to supplies.

Saudi Arabia lived up to its promise, but it still took three months for petrol prices to return to their pre-attack level. That shows just how important the flow of crude from the Persian Gulf still is to Americans — and their president.

For now, the killing of Iran’s Gen Qassem Soleimani and Iran’s responses so far have had a smaller, but still noticeable effect on US petrol prices — even without any explicit Iranian threat to regional oil flows.

If the mere prospect of a disruption to Persian Gulf oil flows can inflate US gas prices, imagine what a real disruption, much less an outright halt, would do. No president would want that risk during an election year and in that sense, the incumbent of the White House is no different from his predecessors.

• Lee is an oil strategist for Bloomberg. Previously he worked as a senior analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies.

Bloomberg