The U.S. population is now 311.6 million or roughly 4.5% of the world's population (6.9 billion). Oil producing nations produce 85.4 million barrels of crude oil per day. The world presently consumes 85.8 million barrels per day. There is a shortage of 400,000 barrels of oil per day. Not a good situation. Somethings got to give.
If every nation in the world was consuming oil at the same rate, then the U.S. should be consuming 3,856,614 barrels per day (calculated by multipying the total world's oil consumption of 85.8 million barrels by 4.5%). However, in actuality the U.S. actually consumes 19.5 million barrels of oil per day, or roughly 23% of total world oil consumption. 71% of the oil consumed by Americans is used for transportation--just for getting around or transporting things in our cars, trucks, buses, trains, ships and planes.
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The U.S. produces only 10% of the world's oil, yet we consume 23% of the world's oil, so it is necessary for us to import the other 13%, or roughly 11,154,000 barrels per day, from outside the country At the end of 2010, the price per barrel of crude oil was about $90. The U.S. paid $400 billion for its imported oil. Now you wonder why there is such a huge trade imbalance between the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Passenger cars use more than 40 percent of the oil consumed in America today. That's roughly 7.8 million barrels of oil per day or 2.881 billion barrels of oil per year. Drivers spent $186 billion on gas fuel in 2010. Without vehicle fuel economy improvements, Americans will spend an estimated $260 billion in 2020 on gasoline.
Raising fuel economy standards to 40 mpg would save car owners $3,000 to $5,000 at the gas pump over the life of their cars, more than offsetting increased vehicle costs. Even interim steps toward the 40-mpg and 55-mpg targets would have huge benefits. For example, a 3-mpg increase in fuel economy would save 1 million barrels of oil per day, save consumers as much as $25 billion per year in fuel costs, and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 140 million tons per year.
The U.S. is home to the largest passenger vehicle market of any country in the world. Overall, there were an estimated 254.4 million registered passenger vehicles in the United States according to a 2007 Department of Transportation (DOT) study. This does not include freight transportation vehicles like trucks or planes and ships.
If we replaced just 10% or 25.4 million of our passenger vehicles with hybrids and electric vehicles or converted those vehicles so they could run on natural gas (a fuel we have in abundance, and sufficient enough to last os 100-200 years), reduced highway speed limits to 55 mph, improved gas mileage per gallon only 3-mpg, and drivers took public transportation or mass transit, we could reduce imported oil by approximately $40-45 billion per year (assuming a price of $90 per barrel of oil).
Courtesy of Good Transparency, U.S,. Department of Transportation and Wikipedia
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