Wednesday, August 6, 2008

How much oil can we save - Update

It's late and I'm ready for beddy bye, but here is some info.

Hussein claims that inflating tires and getting tune ups will increase fuel efficiency 4%. He further claims that will save the same amount of oil as we can get out of the continental shelf.

Let's look.

One barrel of oil is 20 gallons of gasoline. There are 207,000,000 cars, light trucks, minivans and SUV's. The average miles driven per year is 12,000 and the average MPG is 24, or 500 gallons a year.

A 4% savings would be 20 gallons a year. Or 1 barrel per vehicle per year. So with those 207,000,000 vehicles, you can save 200 million barrels per year.

Of course that is not realistic numbers. At 2% savings the number is 100 million barrels.

At 2% savings and 100,000,000 vehicles (50%) the number is 50,000,000 million barrels. That's about 4 - 6 hours of our 320 million gallons used per day.

The current estimate of recoverable oil on the outer continental shelf is 90 billion barrels. Since recovery rates improve with technology that number is probably closer to 110 billion. This does not include ANWR or any other source.

That is 1.8 trillion gallons of gasoline.

Fill'er up?

Gallons used. Gallons per barrel.
Number vehicles
MPG
Miles traveled per year.
Barrels in outer shelf

No comments:

Post a Comment