With the Iran war prompting oil transport blockages in the Middle East that are pushing up oil and gasoline prices, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has become a public face of the Trump administration’s efforts to calm consumers.
In a March 12 interview on Fox News, Wright downplayed the impact on the U.S. from stalled traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil traffic flows.
“The United States — we produce more oil than we can consume. We’re a net oil exporter,” Wright said.
This comment misses some important context.
Some metrics show the U.S. as a net exporter, but for crude oil — the material that’s refined into gasoline — the U.S. is a net importer.
Also, a net exporter status wouldn’t help keep gasoline prices down for consumers in a situation like the blockage in the Strait of Hormuz.
Net exporter status “has essentially no impact on the prices Americans pay at the pump,” said Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. That’s because gasoline prices are set internationally, so U.S. consumers inevitably get hit if the price goes up elsewhere, he said.
Is the U.S. a net oil exporter?
In 2020, the U.S. became a net exporter of “crude oil and petroleum products” for the first time in decades, and it has remained that way, with some blips.
This is not the same thing as saying the U.S. is a net exporter of crude oil, which is the material that gets refined into gasoline and that motorists buy at the gas station. Crude oil can be refined into many other products, including kerosene and plastics.
Looking solely at the U.S. trade in crude oil, the balance reverses: The U.S. is a net importer of crude oil. In 2025, the U.S. imported 6.2 million barrels a day in crude oil and exported almost 4 million barrels per day of crude oil.
The reason has to do with a refinery mismatch. Crude is graded by its weight and its “sweetness,” a measure of the oil’s sulfur content. Most U.S.-produced oil is “light” and “sweet;” some U.S. refineries can process it, but many cannot.
These other refineries are built to process heavier, less sweet crude (also called heavy, sour crude) from the Middle East and other overseas suppliers. That’s a holdover from past decades, when the U.S. was primarily importing its crude.
The mismatch keeps the U.S. from simply using its own crude production to serve all its domestic needs. Changing the mix of refineries to accommodate U.S.-produced crude oil would be expensive and take years to complete.
In a statement to PolitiFact, the Energy Department said the distinction between the two statistics isn’t relevant and that Wright didn’t say the U.S. is a net exporter of crude oil only.
“Oil is consumed in the form of processed crude oil known as crude products, be it jet fuel, diesel, vehicle gasoline, kerosene, etc.,” the department said. “When people think of American oil exports, they associate fuels like gasoline into that equation. It doesn’t matter what form the oil is in — America is a net exporter.”
Does the U.S. produce enough crude oil to cover its needs?
Even if the refinery mismatch could be solved, it’s not clear that the amount of crude oil the U.S. is producing today would cover the country’s entire needs.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration does not directly measure U.S. crude oil consumption, which makes it difficult to definitively answer this question.
However, the agency’s “petroleum product supplied” measure offers a rough datapoint.
Since January 2025, the amount of petroleum product imported to the U.S. has consistently been about 7 million barrels a day higher than the amount of crude oil the U.S. produces. That gap is roughly equivalent to the amount of U.S. crude oil imports, which provides support for this calculation.
“At the very least, I would not say that we produce more oil than we consume,” said Hugh Daigle, a University of Texas-Austin petroleum and geosystems engineering professor.
Why these comparisons aren’t really on point
Even if the U.S. could fulfill its crude oil needs domestically, that would still not keep U.S. motorists from feeling pain from the blockage of oil traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, experts said.
Unlike, say, North Korea — which is largely cut off from global trade — the U.S. has chosen to participate in the global market for crude oil. This enables the U.S. to sell some of its product to other countries, but it also leaves the U.S. dependent on global price-setting for oil. In times of inexpensive oil, this is good; in times of a regional crisis it’s not.
“For decades, the bipartisan consensus among energy policymakers has been to cede production and pricing decisions to ‘the market,’” Clark Williams-Derry, energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said. “This means, in effect, that oil and gas companies decide how much Americans pay for fuel. We don’t have a policy to reserve fuel for domestic markets to keep price spikes in check.”
For American consumers worried about how much it costs to fill up the tank, he said, “the focus on our status as a ‘net exporter’ is an irrelevant distraction.”
Our ruling
Wright said, “The United States — we produce more oil than we can consume. We’re a net oil exporter.”
The U.S. is a net exporter of “crude oil and petroleum products.” In the narrower measure of crude oil by itself, the U.S. is a net importer. Crude oil on its own is the most important factor for setting gasoline prices.
The U.S. produces a lot of crude oil, but it’s not clear that the U.S. could meet its own consumption needs. And because the U.S. participates in the international trading system, prices at the pump for U.S. motorists would still be greatly influenced by international events.
The statement is partially accurate but ignores important context, so we rate the statement Half True.
This story originally appeared on PolitiFact
