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I don't know what to make of those gasoline import statistics for South Korea. They look like official US government statistics, but I think they are incorrect.

I have a lot of faith in the data from the Energy Information Administration. It is part of the Department of Energy. It's data come from very reliable sources at it is used for taxes and import levies. The EIA is widely referenced by many reporting agencies and publications.

My guess, and only a guess, is that this report published May 4th was written in April. When it states last month, the author was probably talking about March, not April. In April there was ~1,000,000 gallons deliveried. I suspect somewhere the data was converted from barrels into gallons twice. The article states "South Korean gasoline exports to the U.S. west coast soared last month", this was not a normal import level. The the average over a year or two does not come close to this level.

But I would like to see any other data you come across.

I'm getting curious about his now, so I'll have to look into it some more. A million gallons of gasoline is almost nothing these days--that wouldn't even begin to fill up a modern tanker. Nobody would even bother shipping such a small amount of gasoline. Don't those tanker ships hold about 500,000 barrels now? That number is the capacity that I recall.

I would bet that the imports from SK in April, 2004 referenced in the Bloomberg article were 1 million barrels of gasoline (same as the 43 million gallons mentioned in teh article). That is still not very much for the US, since we consume 17 million barrels per day. I'll bet imports from SK are up to at least 2 million barrels per month by now. I'll see what I can dig up on this.