

![]() | By Richard Gibson: What Things Are Made Of The story of America's dependency on mineral commodities (including oil) in everyday life. Buy the book. Print (312 pages): $17.95; electronic (PDF) $9.99. Additional e-versions details to come. visit the blog | Find out how to invest in energy stocks at EnergyAndCapital.com.
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| Where do you stand as a US gasoline consumer? For 2008 (Jan-Sept) the USA consumed an average of 8,980,000 barrels of gasoline every day. (Note that we are ignoring diesel, jet fuel, home heating oil, asphalt, plastics, and all the other uses of oil.) With a population of 306,000,000, this works out to 0.029 barrels per day for every human in the US, on average. 0.029 x 42 gallons per barrel = 1.22 gallons of gasoline, every day, for every person. That's 446 gallons of gasoline per year for each person. I bought exactly 222.6 gallons of gasoline for 2008. How about you? Are you above or below the average per person of 446 gallons per year? |

US OIL DEMAND, 2004: Over 20 million barrels
per day, up from January 2002, when demand was about 18.5 million barrels
per day, = 777 million gallons. If lined up in 1-gallon cans, they
would encircle the earth at the equator almost 6 times (about 147,000 miles of
cans) — every day. Here's another image: EVERY DAY, the US consumes
enough oil to cover a football field with a column of oil 2500 feet tall. That's
121 million cubic feet. 55-60% of US consumption is imported at a cost of
$50 billion+ per year, amounting to the largest single element of our trade
deficit. In summer 2004, thanks to higher prices, increased demand, and lower
production, record trade deficits of more than $50 billion per month were recorded,
with approximately 30% of that attributable to imported energy costs. In
September 2004, the US reported its lowest monthly oil production in 55 years,
at an average of 4.85 million barrels per day.
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Want to know more? Gibson Consulting recommends: Read The Prize, by Daniel Yergin. |


©1997-2009 Gibson Consulting
Background image of drilling well in Utah in 1981 © 2000 by Dick Gibson