Drivers of United States oil footprints trajectory: A global assessment

Abstract

Abstract The United States is the world's largest oil user, and its changes in oil consumption affect the participating countries in the world oil market. With the process of trade liberation rapidly deepening, better understanding the oil consumption requires to investigate oil footprint. However, the existing U.S. oil consumption researches have been almost monopolized by production-based oil consumption within sovereign geographical boundary. To fill the research gap, trajectory of evolution and key driving factors of oil footprints in the United States, the global biggest oil user, are investigated and analyzed by combining multi-regional input-output model with structural decomposition analysis (MRIO-SDA). The results show that the consumption-based oil footprint has been higher than the production-based, and the gap between the two has increased by 2.68 times in 1995–2011. Meanwhile, the embodied oil import dominates the US consumption-based oil footprints, and its proportion has increased by 10.46% in 1995–2011. The US embodied oil imports are mainly from China, Russia, Canada, and South Korea and dominated by manufacturing sector. The final demand scale is the main reason for the increase of US oil footprint. And the import effect of intermediate products from other economies is a major factor in promoting the increase in embodied oil imports. But this is mainly offset by technique effect. Therefore, the best policy to reduce US oil footprints is to further improve oil efficiency in the US and its major traders.