ENB Pub Note: This article was originally run on the California Globe, and we recommend following their productions.
Californians consumed 484 million barrels of oil in 2025, with in-state production only providing 111 million barrels
By Edward Ring, April 15, 2026 4:00 pm
With war in the Middle East disrupting shipments of crude oil, we have another reason to question policies that are driving our in-state oil industry into terminal decline. To briefly recap, Californians consumed 484 million barrels of oil in 2025, with in-state production only providing 111 million barrels. The rest was imported. It doesn’t have to be that way. In 1986, California produced 402 million barrels from in-state wells.
Gasoline consumption in California is slowly decreasing. With the nation leading average gasoline MPG and next generation EVs promising to expand their current five percent share of California’s roughly 30 million light vehicles, we have the potential to produce 100 percent of our petroleum based fuel and other products right here. There’s plenty left. Just in the Los Angeles Basin, which has the highest density of oil per square mile in the world, a 2013 USGS study estimated that as much as 5.6 billion barrels of additional oil were recoverable with existing technology. And then there are the massive remaining reserves in Kern, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, as well as offshore.
It may take several decades before Californians no longer depend on petroleum fuel, but if we source it here instead of importing, it will generate hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars. Moreover, the biggest oil-related source of methane and volatile organic compounds polluting the atmosphere, by far, is leakage from natural seeps continually opened up via seismic activity. The only way to reduce, if not eliminate, this leakage of methane and VOCs is not by capping or recapping wells and eliminating production, but instead to safely increase drilling in order to deplete the underground reservoirs.
So before our state legislature and the activist agencies they have empowered complete the job of driving crude oil production and even oil refining completely out of California, let’s have a look at a variable they purport to value above all else: CO2 emissions. We know that the volume of CO2 emissions in the state is unaffected by where the petroleum comes from, so from that point of view we may as well get it from our own in-state reserves. But how much CO2 emissions come from transporting crude oil to California from every corner of the world?
In 2025 California imported 373 million barrels of oil, with 83 million barrels coming from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Another 163 million barrels came from Latin America, with most of the rest coming from Canada and Alaska. From each of these sources for imports, the port of departure and sea miles to California is known. Based on the fact that seven barrels of crude oil weighs one ton, it is a relatively simple matter to calculate the ton miles for each of these shipping lanes. From there, maritime transport emissions based on an industry average 5 grams of CO2 per ton-nautical mile, we can estimate with some confidence that in 2025, shipping crude oil into California from out-of-state sources carried with it CO2 emissions equal to 1.9 million metric tons.
That’s not quite the end of the story, however, because these empty tankers must return to their far flung ports of origin for refills. Estimates vary, but at best an empty tanker will consume about 30 percent less fuel than one that’s filled to capacity with crude oil. That means the round trip emissions of the tanker fleet supplying California with crude oil in 2025 may be estimated to total 3.3 million metric tons of CO2.
To put this into perspective, the California Air Resources Board reported total statewide CO2 emissions in 2023 (most recent data) to total 360 million metric tons (MMT). This includes emissions from “CO2 equivalent” sources such as methane. This total has declined by 21 percent since 2000, when CARB estimated the total at 458 MMT.
The fact that CO2 emissions from ships importing crude oil and, now, refined gasoline into California accounts for barely one percent of the state’s total CO2 emissions may not seem like very much, but it supports a larger point: from an environmentalist perspective, there is only upside to extracting and refining crude oil here in California.
It isn’t just that approximately 3.3 MMT of CO2 per year would be kept out of the atmosphere if we restored our in-state oil production to its full potential. We would also eliminate thousands of tons of genuinely unhealthful air pollutants discharged by fleets of oil tankers idling offshore. The twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the single largest source of air pollution in all of Southern California. And as noted, we would lower methane emissions from natural seeps by depleting underground reservoirs. And, of course, because our oil industry is subject to the most stringent environmental regulations in the world, we would not be exporting the environmental impact of drilling and refining oil to nations with virtually nonexistent environmental safeguards.
Until we don’t need it anymore, in order to improve overall air quality in California and the world, we should be producing and refining as much oil as we possibly can right here.
Check out the Energy News Beat Substack: https://theenergynewsbeat.substack.com/