Lets Talk Petroleum

Today I want to have a little chat about Petroleum. Petroleum or, crude oil as it is also known as, is the stuff we use to make all kinds of stuff with. Like anything from make up to shoe polish to care battery casings and yes, of course, we also make that oh so important Gasoline with petroleum. So it’s obvious that we need petroleum, and lots of it. Now to obtain this we have to drill way down into the ground to where the nasty old remains of dead prehistoric animals have oozified (yes I just made that a word, so don’t even start with me) and turned into precious black goo. Now any well educated elementary school child can tell you- this means petroleum is a fossil fuel, which also means it is nonrenewable, therefore meaning we have only a limited amount and this all breaks down to the fact no one really wants to think about- We will run out of petroleum one day. What do we do then? Well let me just tell you what we’ll do then. We will have to just get over it and find a new way to make pretty much everything we deem a necessity in life if we want to continue to live.
Now as to what we are going to find to substitute for petroleum is a very vast and confusing topic and will require a blog post all of its own, so I’ll talk about that another day
Alright so the way that petroleum is sold is in large 42 gallon barrels. From one of these barrels we can get an average of 44 gallons of gasoline, which ok sounds like a good amount of gasoline, but if you really think about it it’s not that much. The average car holds about 15 gallons of gas (on average that is, some SUVs have 20-30 gallon tanks so). Now considering this that amount of gas keep my car going for 2 weeks if I drove strictly where I had to go and nowhere else. That would really be stretching it because I mean come on, I do have a life here, places to go, people to see. Hey maybe I’ll just get lost and drive around Seymour for an hour and half and waste over a quarter of a tank of gas. See what I mean.
So now that I’ve shown you how much gas a normal person goes through just driving around to keep living, I’m going to tell you how much a nation uses a day.

# 1 United States:
20,680,000 bbl/day 2007
# 3 China:
7,578,000 bbl/day 2007
# 4 Japan:
5,007,000 bbl/day 2007
# 5 Russia:
2,858,000 bbl/day 2007
Now this is just the top 5 consumers of Petroleum each day. As you can see the US is right there at the top (as always). We use over double of what China, who as you can see is in 2nd place here, uses every day. Twenty million, Six hundred and eighty thousand barrels of Petroleum A DAY. DING DING DING this should be sounding an alarm in some bodies head. That is a heck of a lot of oil for us to be using here. I’m sorry but is it now evident that we are exceptionally wasteful people here in America.
We have becomes so ridiculously dependent on a substance that we will soon run out of one day. What are we going to do then, because I know we sure aren’t going to go back to living like cavemen. Compared to other countries our petroleum usage is ridiculous and we need to slow it down here real soon. Dang cut back on your driving here people: car pool, walk, run, ride a bike, something, anything.