Last Thursday's post Global Coal Consumption and Production: Fun with Charts made one conclusion unmistakably obvious: China uses several times more coal than any other country.
Today I used more data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration to make a chart representing global petroleum consumption and production, and the conclusion is different, but just as obvious. The U.S. uses a lot of oil -- also several times more than any other country.
Just to sniff-test the numbers a bit: the data says the U.S consumes about 20 million barrels of oil a day. At $80 per barrel, this comes to $1.6 billion per day, or over $500 billion per year. Is this right? Guesstimating a little more, we know that in the U.S., the primary use of oil is to make gasoline, which is mainly burned in cars. Out of a population of 300 million Americans, if 100 million spend an average of $10 on gas each day, this comes to $1 billion every day, without even counting other uses of petroleum. From another perspective, Exxon Mobil reported $384 billion in revenue in 2010. Based on this, the figures in the chart look "reasonable". And we do use an awful lot of oil.
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