A short lesson on where our oil comes from to meet our domestic needs. You will be surprised by these numbers!! Take a look...

This chart shows total crude oil imports to the US from the Top 20 source countries in the year 2010. From these 20 courtries, we imported a total of  3,259,534,000 Billion barrels of oil to help meet our domestic energy needs (the unit of measure for oil is in barrels. One barrel equals 42 US gallons of oil),  From Canada and Mexico alone we get 22% and 13%, respectively, for a total of 35% of imports from the Top 20.

 

There is a common misperception that we get "all our oil" from the Middle East.  If you look at the countries in the Top 20 that are Middle Eastern countries (Persian Gulf area) you will find only Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait.

Combined, these three countries supplied the US with 617,831,000 million barrels of oil, or 19% of the total from the Top 20.

Of this amount imported from the region, Saudi Arabia represents 64% of the total.  Saudi Arabia's imports to the US represent only 12% of the total from the Top 20. 

Since total oil imports are approx 50% (a little less in actuality) of our overall domestic oil use, you can cut all those percentages in half to get a rough estimate of how dependent we are on these foreign sources of oil.

Note: the TOTAL amount of crude oil (JUST crude oil) imported to the US from ALL sources in 2010 was 3,362,856.  The Top 20 countries above provided 97% the total amount imported.  While my calculations are not exact, you can see they will be in pretty close proximity.