About the blog: What Things Are Made Of

AMERICA'S GLOBAL DEPENDENCY FOR NEARLY EVERYTHING


The United States relies on imports for dozens of commodities in everyday use. Often enough, that reliance is 100%. In this book I aim to provide awareness of the hidden geology and mineralogy behind common things, and to develop an appreciation for the global resource distribution that underpins our society. While concerns about oil import reliance are in the news every day, our needs for other minerals are comparable and are typically unknown even to technologically aware Americans.


Obviously this blog hasn't been updated in years. If you are interested in follow-up posts on this (and other) topics, please visit my Substack page.


Monday, January 25, 2010

Perspective

A 462,000-gallon oil spill such as the one near Port Arthur, Texas, in January 2010 is not a good thing. But it gives a good opportunity for some perspective.

462,000 gallons amounts to not quite one minute’s worth of oil consumption for the United States. As of October 2009, we used up (forever) 546,204 gallons every minute of every day (EIA data), and that's with US consumption down by 2 million barrels a day or so from 2007, thanks to the recession.

In terms of world oil consumption, this spill represents just over 11 seconds in the planet’s oil-guzzling day.
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2 comments:

oceansmiles said...

Thanks for this info- your blog is a wealth of information!

February 23, 2010 at 7:53 PM
Richard Gibson said...

Thanks!

February 23, 2010 at 7:54 PM

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