Global overview of crude oil use: From source to sink through inter-regional trade

This paper conducts a systems input-output analysis to form an overview of crude oil use in the globalized world economy in 2015. The use of crude oil is tracked from the sources of exploitation to the sinks of final use through the channels of inter-regional trade. This paper finds that the top five oil users, the United States, Mainland China, Japan, South Korea and Canada, are together responsible for half of global oil use. The global volume of oil embodied in trade is twenty percent larger than that in oil exploitation, and the role of the trade of non-oil goods in the global oil balance is comparable to that of the direct oil trade. The United States is the biggest net importer of oil use, in contrast to Mainland China, which is the biggest net importer of direct oil. In order to characterize a region's energy security, new indices for its dependence on external sources of oil are devised. The inter-regional transfer of the environmental burden associated with oil use, leading to the dilemma of “regional decrease at the expense of global increase”, is shown to be inherent to existing energy strategies.