According to Environment America, a federation of US organizations, the country could reduce its oil dependence by 79 billion gallons per year—more than all of their imports from OPEC nations.
For those who are not familiar with gallons and other non-metric – I almost wrote exotic – measures, this represents 299 047 530 936 liters of oil, or 1.88 billion oil barrels. These would save the United States 5 million barrels of oil per day !
These are huge savings, perhaps not as much as the US could and should do but by any means, this would represent an excellent beginning. Would this be enough in the face of peak oil ?
Here are some details from the press release :
By taking strong action to cut down on energy waste and shift to cleaner sources of energy, America could reduce its consumption of oil for energy by 1.9 billion barrels of oil per year by 2030 – 31 percent of today’s oil use – while achieving President Obama’s goal of reducing oil imports by one-third by 2025 and putting the nation on track to ending its dependence on oil.
To date the country consumes over 18.7 million barrels per day. The European Union, while being much more populated – with 500 million people versus 300 million in the United States – consume much less, with 13.7 million barrels per day. (source: the CIA world factbook, via Wikipedia)
Basic arithmetic can tell us that American people consume 2.27 times more oil per capita than their European counterparts. This is a staggering figure that really give sense to the expression ” addicted to oil “…
I believe that calculating their mileage with miles per gallons isn’t a great way to assess their vehicles’ efficiency. Luckily, the country is slowly moving toward gallons per hundred miles as Grist noted last week.