U.S. supplants Russia as Europe’s biggest crude oil supplier in major blow to Moscow

The U.S. has overtaken Russia as the top crude oil supplier to Europe, according to new data released Tuesday, capping a remarkable 12-month period that saw Moscow’s plan to use energy as a weapon fall flat amid strong Western opposition to the war in Ukraine.

New European Union figures show that in December 2022, the U.S. provided 34.5 million barrels of oil to Europe, which accounted for about 18% of the continent’s total crude imports. Russia provided 7.6 million barrels, or 4% of imports, that same month.

Those numbers represent a rapid turnaround for Europe, where officials as recently as last summer warned that citizens could face energy shortages and blackouts if Moscow slashed oil-and-gas exports as a way to punish Europe for its opposition to the war. Such fears were well-founded in the early months of the conflict as European dependence on Russian fuel appeared to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s greatest weapon in an economic war with the West.

From the last quarter of 2021 to January 2022, imports of Russian crude oil ranged from 39.7 million to 49.7 million barrels, EU data show, or about 24% and 31% of all imports, respectively. 

Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022.

From late 2021 through January 2022, the U.S. accounted for between 10% and 13% of imports, according to the EU. But just several months after the war began, those numbers began to change.

By May, Russian crude oil exports to Europe dropped to 24 million barrels, or 12% of European imports. The percentage declined each month thereafter before reaching December’s historic low.

EU officials left little doubt about the reason behind the massive shift.

“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had a significant impact on the import of crude oil into the EU,” the EU’s Eurostat agency wrote Tuesday in an analysis of the most recent energy data.

“The decline in imports from Russia was compensated by a rise in imports from other sources,” the agency said.

Indeed, U.S. oil exports to Europe rose just as rapidly as Russia’s fell. The share of European crude oil coming from the U.S. went up 6 percentage points from late 2021 to December 2022.

Other nations also helped fill the gap. Norway, already one of the continent’s biggest suppliers of oil, has claimed an ever bigger piece of the pie, providing 32.9 million barrels last December. That’s up 7 percentage points from a year earlier.

Oil imports from the U.K. and Libya also increased during that same time period.