You can quote numbers all day about how much oil the US uses and for which purposes, but few things drive the point home like the graph below. This shows US oil consumption for just transportation (broken out by mode), with a line plot of domestic production, revealing a humongous gap and explaining why so many peak oil adherents are so freaked out.
The description from the graph’s page:
In 1989 the transportation sector petroleum consumption surpassed U.S. petroleum production for the first time, creating a gap that must be met with imports of petroleum. By the year 2030, transportation petroleum consumption is expected to grow to nearly 17 million barrels per day; at that time, the gap between U.S. production and transportation consumption will be 3.7 million barrels per day.
The graph’s caption:
Note: The U.S. Production has two lines after 2005. The solid line is conventional sources of petroleum. The dashed line adds in other inputs — ethanol, liquids from coal, and liquids from biomass. The sharp increase in values between 2006 and 2007 are caused by the data change from historical to projected values.
The graph’s page has a table of the data, but it doesn’t break out those “other inputs”, which seem to be particularly loaded with assumptions. (“Liquids from coal”???) The sources cited for the data are “Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 27, and EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2009, December 2008″.
