In a July 6 interview with Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, President Obama repeated his false claim that the U.S. “import[s] more oil today than ever before.” When Obama first said this in February during an address to a joint-session of Congress, we wrote that the president had gotten his facts wrong. We said then that oil imports peaked in 2005 and have “substantially” declined since.
That’s still the case. This chart from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, updated from our February post, shows that weekly imports of crude oil and petroleum products have continued to decline. According to the chart, oil imports peaked in November 2005, with 15,217,000 imported barrels per day. The most recent data, from the week of June 26, 2009, shows 11,883,000 imported barrels per day.