Gasoline Perspective

For starters, let's clarify that 95% of American gasoline is used in "Light Duty" vehicles, meaning passenger or light cargo automobiles. Large commercial trucks, boats, trains, everything for which cost and practicality is taken into account, uses diesel for it's greater efficiency and superior engine durability.

According to eia.gov, the United States used 134.5 billion gallons of gasoline in the year 2013 (This is down by 6% from 142.35 billion in 2007, so pat yourselves on the back)

Compared with the US census of about 310 million people that year, that's 433 gallons for every adult, child, and senior citizen. Have you used your allotted quota? How many other people's gasoline have you taken?

Back to our use as a whole, 134.5 billion gallons a year means 368.5 million gallons a day, 15.35 million gallons an hour, 255,900 gallons a minute, 4,265 gallons a second. Let's visualize 4,265 gallons as a cube:

At this point you may, in fact, begin to realize that the United States uses quite a bit of petroleum, and this doesn't even include what we "need" (aka food, energy, heat, which comes from diesel, coal, and natural gas), this is ONLY in our cars that we use to live further from our work or family, or just for personal enjoyment.

Now for the stupid part:

What if it was all consumed in one, enormous, engine?

Let's start with a typical car engine, and scale it up until it uses all of the gasoline in the US. 

Because I'm familiar with it, I'm going to use the 1.5-liter inline-4 engine from my own car, a 1988 Japanese-built Dodge Colt.

Typically, my car cruising down the highway at 60 MPH will be consuming a gallon of fuel every half hour or so, for a respectable 30 miles to the gallon. My four pistons each measure 75.5mm in diameter, and travel 82mm vertically every time the engine fires.

Remember the cube above? My car's personal gasoline per second cube measures about 1/2 inch to a side, or .00007416 cubic feet, 1/7,682,346th of the 569.72 cubic feet of the above cube.

This means that, presuming fuel consumption is directly relative to engine displacement, in order for my car's engine to consume all of the gasoline in the U.S., the pistons would have to measure roughly 48.5 feet across, and travel 54.7 feet vertically every cycle.

It's safe to assume this immense engine would run slower than the 50 rotations per second my car does, so let's take a stab in the dark and say that, flat-out, it runs at one rotation per second, or 60 RPM.

With this in mind, in order to fire one cylinder one time, it would require 2133 gallons of gasoline, or about five peoples' yearly consumption.

Your average gallon of gasoline produces roughly 158.75 cubic feet of CO2, which represents a relatively significant increase in volume. With this in mind, we're burning 4,265 gallons per second, which would come out to 677,068 cubic feet of exhaust, per second.

Divided by, say, a 20 foot exhaust pipe, the exhaust would blast out at a leisurely 2,155 feet per second, or 1.94 times the speed of sound. Remember, this is 24/7, 365, with no end in sight.

So, "What can weeEEeee do we're just peopllleee" you're all undoubtedly asking (Or maybe you just honestly don't care). 

You can stop driving for fun, you can stop taking a car to the store just to get two things, or getting your mail at the end of your driveway in your SUV, you can put honest effort into living closer to where you work, or even work from home, through the internet that takes almost no energy.

You can tolerate going ONLY a mile a minute (60mph) instead of 80 on the freeway, you can tolerate having a car that can't do 0-60 in 9 seconds (which is, I'll note, a Toyota Camry. Even our economy cars are incredibly over powered).

Perhaps the most important change you can make is just to realize the imbalance petroleum has put on our society, and that we all assume we have a RIGHT to be able to travel hundreds of miles a day if we so choose. Ask if you deserve instead of if you can afford, ask yourself where the energy would come from without petroleum.

Thanks for reading, tell your friends.