Getting Gasoline

If you've ever gone to gas up the car with your folks, it seems like getting gas is pretty simple. In that sense it is. But in a bigger scope, it isn't. We use a lot of oil every year. Our cars burn about 65 billion gallons of gas in a year. If you add up all the gas, diesel, jet fuel and everything else, it translates into about 22 million barrels of oil each day. A barrel holds 42 gallons of oil. Here's the problem: The United States only pumps about 9 million barrels a day out of its own wells. The other 13 million barrels come from somewhere else. It might come from places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, the North Sea, Venezuela or Russia. It usually arrives in the United States in giant supertanker ships. Each supertanker might carry 2 million barrels of oil.

Image courtesy © BP p.l.c. Oil platform

Importing all this oil creates a couple of different problems for us. For example, right now China is starting to use lots more oil. There are more than a billion people in China, and most don't have cars. The economy is getting better, so lots more people in China would like to own cars, just like people in the United States. The problem is, there is only so much oil that the world pumps out of the ground every day. The United States wants it. China wants it. Europe wants it. And so on. So the price of oil goes up. This is one reason why the price of oil is rising so fast.

Another problem can be seen in the Gulf of Mexico. The United States pumps lots of oil out of the gulf, and most of its refineries are in the gulf region. When a hurricane comes through, it can damage the oil rigs and refineries, which really cuts down on the amount of oil the United States can produce for itself. That can make gas prices go up too.

Image courtesy © BP p.l.c. Oil rig

And then there are political problems. Because oil is so important to the United States and the world, oil can be used as a weapon, or a bargaining chip. For example, terrorists know how important oil is to the world, and know they could cause lots of problems by cutting off the flow of oil. If terrorists were to blow up a major pumping facility in Saudi Arabia, it would create a very big problem for the world. If Iran were to decide to make a political statement and stop pumping oil for some reason, it would affect oil prices all over the world.

There is one other problem: global warming. Burning gasoline releases lots of carbon into the environment, and that seems to be making the Earth warmer. The warmth is going to cause all sorts of problems. That leaves us all pondering one obvious question, "Is there any way that we could replace gasoline with something else?"