Venezuela overtakes Saudi Arabia in the crude the United States buys

The United States imported 599,000 barrels a day of Venezuelan crude in the week ended September 4. From Saudi Arabia it bought 347,000. From Mexico, 297,000. Venezuela has now spent twenty straight weeks as the U.S. market's second-largest supplier, behind Canada alone.

The figure comes from no press release and no Venezuelan official number. It comes from the preliminary weekly series the U.S. energy agency publishes every Wednesday, country by country, and which needs nobody's permission to run. It is the most uncomfortable measurement there is on this subject, because it does not distinguish between what gets announced and what gets unloaded.

When it started and how much moved

The run begins in the week ended April 24. The previous one, ended April 17, was the last time Saudi Arabia came out ahead: 515,000 barrels a day against 499,000. The order has not flipped in a single week since.

The change in scale is of a different order than the change in rank. Across the thirty-six weeks of 2026 so far, the Venezuelan average is 429,000 barrels a day. Over the same stretch of 2025 it was 142,000. That is 203% more, and it adds up to roughly 108 million barrels year to date.

The extremes are worth a look too, because the series is preliminary and swings hard: inside that same average there are weeks of 49,000 barrels a day and weeks of 743,000. A cargo landing on Thursday instead of Monday moves the weekly number without anything having changed in the field. That is why the run says more than any single print.

On the Saudi side there is a figure the weekly comparison shows and the annual average buries. In seven weeks of 2026 Saudi Arabia shipped no crude at all to the United States, and five of those seven were consecutive, in July. The displacement is not only Venezuelan.

What the rank is measured against

Venezuela produces around 1.2 million barrels a day on OPEC's September measurement. At 599,000 in a good week, the U.S. market is taking close to half of everything the country lifts. That concentration is the underlying economic story, and it has the two faces it always has: a nearby buyer that pays fast and on less freight, and a single buyer.

That is the difference between winning a rank and winning bargaining power. Second place is already won, and it was won against a competitor with ample capacity to take it back. What has not been won is slack on the far side of the pipe, and without slack every additional barrel competes against one already coming in.

What to watch, week by week

The series publishes on Wednesdays at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, shifting to Thursday when Monday was a federal holiday. Three things read off it without needing interpretation.

Whether the run holds. Twenty weeks is a pattern; a one-week break may be a cargo that slipped its date, and two in a row is no longer that. Whether the moving average rises or sits where it is: the export target needs the floor of the weak weeks to come up, not the ceiling of the good ones to go higher. And whether District 3 utilization eases, because that is the only thing that would make room for the extra barrel without fighting for it on price.

The Venezuelan barrel has already found its buyer. What decides next year's revenue is not whether it finds one, but at what discount it places when the only open door is full.