Oil Usage and Production
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Q. How much oil does the United States use in a Day?
A. 21 million barrels
Q. How much oil does the United States use in a year?
A. 7.5 billion barrels
Q. How much oil does the world use in a Day?
A. 84 million barrels
Q. How much oil does the world use in a year?
A. 31 billion barrels
Q. How much oil does the Untied States produce in a day?
A. 7 million barrels
Q. How much oil do we import a day?
A. 14 million barrels
Q. How much does this oil cost us yearly?
A. Approximately $300 billion dollars
Q. How much oil does the world have left?
A. The proven reserves of the world's oil producing nations equal 900 billion barrels.
Q. At current usage rates how long will the world's oil last?
A. Approximately 30 years.
Q. How much oil does the United States have in reserve?
A. The United States has 21 billion barrels of proven reserves. This is enough oil to last 8 years at our current usage.
Q. What are "proven reserves"?
A. Proven reserves are defined by the oil industry as; "the estimated quantities of oil which geological and engineering data demonstrate with reasonable certainty to be recoverable in future years from known reservoirs under current economic and operating conditions."
Q. Do we know if the proven reserves numbers are a correct?
A. Yes and No. Public companies such as Exxon/Mobile must, by securities law, follow very strict guidelines when reporting their oil reserves. Their stock goes up the more reserves they have, so the tendency is to be optimistic with their estimates. Nationalized Oil companies, such as Saudi Arabia's Aramco, are not obligated to follow any guidelines and tend to be very optimistic with their proven reserves estimates because their production quotas within OPEC are set by their proven reserve numbers. The larger the reserve number the more they may produce.
Q. Can the United States increase its daily production of oil?
A. Not likely. The United States has drilled hundreds of thousands of wells in the last thirty years and still has been unable to reverse its decline in production that began in 1972. Our major fields, which were mostly found before 1950, are in the late stages of their development leaving little hope of seeing their daily output increased. As an example, Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in North America, has seen its production fall from 2 million barrels a day in 1978 to 450,000 this year.