Within 5 to 10 years, America will be energy independent?

Currently, the United States consumes 19.6 million barrels per day, of oil, which is more than 25% of the world's total. I never heard that that number excludes domestic military, but maybe? But it may exclude overseas military? In any case, obviously USA has too much consumption.

 

Is the import fraction the right figure to use? I suspect the marginal import fraction is much higher than the fraction of total imports.

BTW I used a lifetime of 250k miles, just barely more than I kept its predecessor.

The same applies to car sales. Even on an 100% imported car, a considerable fraction of the sale price is still spent domestically on marketing, dealer expenses and profits, transportation, and taxes.

The so-called 'hybrid premium' was put into perspective when I realized that the previous car's lifetime fuel bill exceeded its purchase price.

 

I thought that was worth repeating, so I did.

 

that must include military usage. i dont think i have ever seen a consumption total that high. i usually total consumption around 14-16 million bpd.

 

Oh yea . . . 5 or 10 years:



I'm hoping for 10 thank you very much


.

 

All we need is a bigger unit of measurement.

Millions of barrels sounds like so much.

But megabarrels? We only use 14-16 of those every day!

Problem solved!

 

15 million b/d is oil, the 19 million b/d includes other oil derived and oil like products. If you look at the first measure the US imports 9.2 mb/d the other is 11.8 mb/d. You can play with the measure here

U.S. Total Crude Oil and Products Imports

Both measures include domestic military consumption. Neither includes consumption of the military or Americans in foreign countries.

Also if you look at the information
U.S. Crude Oil Imports

Just under half of the 9.2 mb/d come from opec representing billions of dollars. These countries have used oil blackmail before to hurt the us economy and instability has caused wild fluctuation in prices. I would not agree with the idea that most or friendly is a good measure of oil importation being all fine and good.

I think the megabarrel sounds bigger.

 

Nor would I, but my earlier posts were trying to counter the false claim that all oil money funds terrorism.

The high rate of consumption is a far bigger problem than where it comes from.

 

Most of united states oil consumption comes from NA production. Very little of the money directly supports terrorism, but some does, and any is too much. So your statement is factually correct, but to me other facts matter more.


Worse 4.6 mb/d last year seemed to come from opec, and even though this number is shrinking it is not declining rapidly and is a large percentage. Any oil bought from opec does support all opec countries whether the oil is purchased from that country or not. For example the refusal to buy from Iran does nothing to decrease iranian consumption as it is pegged by opec and there are other buyers. The ability of opec to drastically reduce exports as they did in the 70s and early 80s, along with the potential of instability there to reduce oil supplies as they just have in Libya, harms the united states economic security. Because the US under the carter doctrine has military to protect the oil, this reliance harms national security.

With the scarcity of easy oil and the environmental costs of unconventional oil, many here would agree raw consumption is the biggest problem with america's "addiction to oil". I would not say the other problems are small though, and recognition of these can help bring consensus to reduce oil use.

 

How long will my car last? - Business - Consumer news - ConsumerMan - msnbc.com

I would assume if anything 200,000 miles useful life of a prius is going to over not underestimate the average new prius. There are car accidents and any number of things that will affect this. Given that the majority of prii are gen 2 or later, there simply is not enough information to tell how long they last.

The prius price includes very little marketing and only a small dealer mark up. Now importing prii only hurts balance of trade in the year they were imported.

The net effect of importing prii is very small on balance of trade, economic, and national security compared to oil.

 

Regardless of the priority placed on the various consequences of oil use, they'd all have less impact if we made a concerted effort to reduce our consumption. At this point, energy independence looks like a pipe dream. Either oil pipe or crack pipe, I'm not sure which.

 

Hm, good point. Perhaps we just need to double the size of a barrel?

I agree, but wonder if this is possible, given some seemingly intrinsic fundamentals of this modern world.

It seems to me that the current definition of progress is exploitation of natural resources. It's what the industrial age is all about. And although tech has been added to the mix, it's still part of the mass produced/economy of scale/faster is better world that began 150 or more years ago.

I feel like we're getting to a point where we've seen that vision through to its logical conclusion.

But what supersedes it, I honestly have no idea. Especially when China, for example, is now implementing their version of the industrialist vision.

I also think a more agrarian and more localized way of living might force us to once again have to deal with each other on a personal level, perhaps reducing the amount of polarization we're experiencing today as we're divided and subdivided again by the things which accentuate our differences, instead of our similarities.

Yeh, right. [sigh]

Is this entire system symbolic of some basic human characteristic? Perhaps this—what we've created—is just who we are as sentient beings. I wonder about this sometimes, but hope it's not so.

 

Yes; selfishness and greed.

At some point in the hopefully-not-too-distant future, we'll have to learn that our actions affect the viability of the human race. Life in one form or another will hopefully survive no matter what, but at this point of the sixth extinction, it's far too early to tell if humans will be a successful species. Which is sadly ironic, because we are the one species capable of defending life as we know it from planetary-level threats like meteors.

Our economic system is seriously flawed. It prioritises individual wealth at the expense of the common good. We liquidate natural capital and call it income. We completely ignore very real and very large costs by dismissing them as 'externalities'. Governments have been corrupted by narrow-minded business interests, and are far more concerned with short term paper profits than long term success. The very organisational structures that should be ensuring our viability are instead undermining it at an increasingly rapid pace.

So, it's not a pretty picture at the moment. We may yet develop vision and intelligence, but that's not what's being taught or rewarded.

 

Energy independence seems very difficult in the short term, but is essential in the long term. Which seems to be a point we at least partially agree on. Substituting electricity and/or alcohol for oil and lower consumption seem like the necessary solution, but many don't want to do this. In my little part of the world, we would rather pay for wind turbines to fill up our cars than settle for less performance or unsustainable oil.

How about ULCC (ultra large crude carrier) lets just not spell it out and use initials. These super tankers can carry 2,000,000 barrels of oil. The US imports less than 5 ULCCs of oil a day. That doesn't seem so bad

I am sure that many had it worse off in the agrarian past, especially with these high populations. If you get a chance try to visit china and see how they live on the farm versus the city. I do not have full solutions, but like to optimistically look forward instead of idealize a past that many of our families never had. Sunday I ran a race that raised money to get 10,000 families in Africa clean drinking water for life. We have it very good in this country, its just not as good as it could be.

 

You know, kind of like my megabarrel idea, I feel like we need a unit of measurement that takes our consumption down to the thousands of something per day. That way it sounds significant but not artificially low.

Very true. But I fear what we're doing currently may be taking us further away from where we all want to be.

I do not know, every time I have to put gasoline into a vehicle it strikes me what an amazing liquid it is. It has a high energy density and burns almost completely.

I know this is kind of a weird idea, but maybe we need to see how much of it we're using. Remember pictures of those old time gas pumps, where the liquid is first pumped into a clear chamber then drained into the car's gas tank? There's something about the system now, where we never actually see gasoline unless we spill it.

Today, the only thing gasoline is, is numbers on a pump and an amount we owe. Maybe if we actually saw it, we'd realize how much we use?

Probably not.