Oil Consumption in the United States

As many of you know, if you have been reading my article series on energy independence and renewable energy sources, I have been doing a lot of research on the subject of green energy.

In my process of doing research I found some fascinating information. According to a recent article that I read Americans consume nearly 25% of the entire world’s oil production. Ok so that one is not a show stopper, you can turn on any news station to find that out. However, did you know that over 30% of that oil is used to produce plastic? Yes plastics!

If you combine the use of oil for transportation (cars, boats, planes, etc) and the use of oil for plastics you are looking at over 80% of what oil is used for in this country. Another fascinating piece of information that I found out is that only 3% of the oil supplied is actually used to generate electricity in this country. The bulk of electric is generated by burning coal, of which the United States is one of the leading producers of.

So why not just build vehicles that run off of coal? Simply put it is impractical. I would love for it to be a reality that domestically mined coal could be used in our everyday vehicles but if you Google steam locomotives you will see why coal in its current form is not a good idea.

Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens currently has a plan that says build a wind farm from the Texas pan handle up through North Dakota. Ecological maps show that wind gusts along this corridor are some of the best in the world and because of this reason are ideal to produce all of the electricity that this country needs from wind, the ultimate renewable energy source.

Now you might be asking why go through all of that effort if only 3% of oil is used to create electricity? For one it would eliminate the need for that 3% which is obvious, the second reason is it eliminates the need to burn coal to create our electricity, which too may be obvious as well. But what may not be common knowledge is that you can actually turn coal into methanol which is a liquid combustible fuel that can be used in flex fuel vehicles.

Now I know environmentalists will go nuts with global warming and all of those topics, but the fact is right now we do not produce enough vegetation to sustain a complete ethanol supply for all of our transportation needs, therefore we need to bridge a gap until we get there and coal could be our answer.

Going back to T. Boone Pickens his bridge is using natural gas, which is also abundant in the U.S., burns cleaner than coal as well as gasoline and can be used to run our vehicles. The issue I have with this solution is that there are very few cars that run off of natural gas. Also it would become costly and complicated to convert existing vehicles to utilize this resource. Methanol on the other is a combustible liquid fuel just like gasoline, therefore requiring less to convert existing vehicles over and the auto industry only has to make minor changes in order to run vehicles on a gasoline/methanol/ethanol mixture, these vehicles, which already exist, are called flex fuel vehicles.

Flex fuel vehicles are just what the name implies a vehicle that can run on any or a combination of all of the previously mentioned liquid fuel sources. These types of vehicles are not new and they date back to the early 1980s where Ford engineers retro fitted special sensors on Pintos so that the vehicle could run off any combination mix of gasoline and methanol.

Unfortunately because oil prices were low during the 1980s and the early to mid 1990s to immediate need to mass produce flex fuel vehicles were not is as much demand. Also due to low oil prices the auto industry produced vehicles that people were craving, gas guzzling SUVs that could haul the boat, a trailer and half the neighbor hood kids all at the same time.

During the late 1990s and early the 2000 decade, oil prices jumped extremely high once again fueling a debate (no pun intended) as to the need for flex fuel vehicles. If the auto industry had just followed through since the 1980s producing flex fuel vehicles, I have no doubt that we would all be driving them today and our need for foreign oil would be near zero.