American Oil Prosperity
Everybody’s talking about America’s oil addiction. At a rate of over 87 million gallons per day, America uses over one quarter of the oil consumed worldwide. This is comparable to the amount of oil consumed by China, India, Russia, Japan, and Germany combined.
For the worlds most influential regions, I have computed an oil prosperity index which aims to show the differences in a country’s efficiency of oil use with the wealth of its people. The value is GDP per capita divided by daily barrel consumption, normalized to the United States at 1.0. The five countries/regions listed account for about half the world’s population, and three-quarters of its GDP.
The table below outlines basic population, GDP and oil consumption data for the five areas of interest:
| Country | Population | GDP (Millions USD) | GDP per capita | Barrels per day |
| US | 0,304,695,000 | 013,843,825 | 45,435 | 020,730,000 |
| EU | 0,491,018,677 | 016,830,100 | 34,275 | 014,550,000 |
| China | 1,325,152,000 | 003,250,827 | 02,453 | 006,534,000 |
| India | 1,135,863,900 | 001,098,945 | 00,967 | 002,450,000 |
| Japan | 0,127,690,000 | 004,383,762 | 34,331 | 005,578,000 |
The good stuff is below. Statistics are calculated based on the above table. “Daily Users” is the average number of citizens it takes a country to consume one barrel of oil in one day. GDP per daily barrel is a somewhat contrived statistic, which shows, if nothing else, that GDP and oil consumption are very inter-related. All values are of the same order, within a factor of 2. GDP per capita per barrel aims to show the extent to which oil consumption is creating wealth for the citizens of a country (as mentioned above.) Finally, the last column simply restates this value normalized to the United States at 1.0.
| Country | Daily Users | GDP per daily barrel | GDP per capita per daily barrel | Normalized Index |
| US | 014.7 | 0,667,816 | 0.002190 | 1.000 |
| EU | 033.9 | 1,156,708 | 0.002360 | 1.077 |
| China | 202.8 | 0,497,524 | 0.000375 | 0.171 |
| India | 463.6 | 0,448,548 | 0.000394 | 0.180 |
| Japan | 022.9 | 0,785,902 | 0.006154 | 2.810 |
Oil usage data was obtained from “Oil > Consumption (most recent) by Country”; Nationmaster.com. Population and GDP values were taken from Wikipedia.
Hats off to the Japanese.
Tags: america, China, consumption, eu, Europe, european union, gdp, India, japan, oil, per capita, Population, productivity, united states
August 7th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
More blogz plz. Thx
August 10th, 2008 at 1:44 am
Cheers for the blog comments, yo!
Interesting info. What’s with the random capitalization on the tags? How embarrassing.
Sincereliest,
Kelly Anne
August 11th, 2008 at 5:46 am
Hm, yea… that is awful. Either I’m a blasphemous fool, or the software changed them.