US sharply increases oil imports from Russia

The US significantly increased its imports of oil and petroleum products from Russia in 2020, Report informs referring to Bloomberg.

After years of accounting for less than 0.5 percent of annual US imports of oil and refined products, Russia steadily increased its share over the last decade, reaching an all-time high of 7 percent last year, according to Bloomberg News calculations.

US imports from Russia averaged 538,000 barrels a day in 2020 - more than the 522,000-barrel-a-day average from Saudi Arabia.

What US refiners have been buying from Russia isn’t mostly crude, but a semi refined fuel oil known as Mazut 100 that has a gooey consistency. In Russia it’s largely burned to generate heat. But in the US, it fed the cokers to produce gasoline.