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JuanDeFuca
Big Wall climber
Stoney Point
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Topic Author's Original Post - Aug 12, 2006 - 07:19am PT
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I wonder how many Olympic size pools it would fill?
Juan
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TradIsGood
Trad climber
Gunks end of country
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Aug 12, 2006 - 04:13pm PT
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http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/quickfacts/quickoil.html
The US uses just a little over a gallon of gasoline per person per day. So say 300 million gals. It is bandied about that we use a quarter of the oil production, so let's just go out on a limb and say that everybody that consumes petroleum gets about the same amount of gasoline out. So you get about 1.2 billion gallons per day. World population is about 6.6 billion.
So world average per capita consumption per day is a little under one quart per day (0.2 gallons/ person / day).
Does that seem like a lot?
What would happen if India and China caught up to us? Many of the global warming scenarios assume that they will in the next score or so years. Will we need to go back to using water in our swimming pools?
Juan, you can do the swimming pool arithmetic if you like. I have never seen a swimming pool with gasoline in it. It would be hard to swim in gasoline since it has about 75% of the density of water.
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pFranzen
Boulder climber
Portland, OR
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Aug 12, 2006 - 04:23pm PT
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10 seconds on Google is a much easier way to find this out...
http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/quickfacts/quickoil.html
83,970,000 barrels of crude are consumed each day (July '05 statistic), but obviously a lot of that goes into other products besides gasoline.
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JuanDeFuca
Big Wall climber
Stoney Point
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 12, 2006 - 08:27pm PT
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http://auto.howstuffworks.com/question417.htm
There are a couple of different ways to discover the answer to this question, but here is one way to estimate it. If you look at a page like this one, it shows that the United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil each day. If you look at the statistics on a page like this one, you find that a barrel of oil (which contains 42 gallons or 159 liters) will yield something like 19 or 20 gallons (75 liters) of gasoline, depending on the refinery. Therefore, in the United States, something like 400 million gallons (1.51 billion liters) of gasoline gets consumed every day. That truly is an amazing amount of liquid, but when you consider that there are about 100 million households in the United States, it is only 4 gallons per household per day. Each family doesn't consume that much, but a huge number of families are doing it.
In a year, therefore, the U.S. consumes about 146 billion gallons (about 550 billion liters) of gasoline!
There are two ways we typically see oil and gasoline moving around: tanker trucks and oil tanker ships. A tanker truck can typically hold about 9,000 gallons (34,000 liters) of gasoline. It would take 40,000 tanker trucks to carry the gasoline the U.S. consumes in one day. A large tanker ship like the Exxon Valdez carries about 1.26 million barrels of oil, so it takes about 14.25 of these ships to carry all of the oil that the U.S. consumes in one day.
Where does all of that gasoline go? When it burns, it turns into lots of carbon dioxide gas. Gasoline is mostly carbon by weight, so a gallon of gas might release 5 to 6 pounds (2.5 kg) of carbon into the atmosphere. The U.S. is releasing roughly 2 billion pounds of carbon into the atmosphere each day.
One thing that's been in the news lately is the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It currently stores about 570 million barrels of oil in underground salt caverns along the Gulf of Mexico. Given that the U.S. imports about half of its oil, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve holds about a 60 day supply of oil if all imports were suddenly cut off.
Here are several useful links:
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d-know
Trad climber
electric lady land
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Aug 12, 2006 - 08:34pm PT
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what % of our petroleum consumption goes into the war machine, or does that not count?
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