How much oil is in the ground? That question has been asked for 150 years at local, national, and global scales. A precise answer is unknowable because most oil exists thousands of meters below the surface of the Earth, and it can be identified and measured only after drilling extremely expensive wells. But that hasn’t stopped legions of scientists and
With 4% of the world’s population, the United States consumes 40% of the world’s oil, due largely to its consumption of travel and shipping by its 267 million cars and trucks that are inefficient relative to other countries. The United States has substantial oil resources, accounting for about 17% of all oil ever produced in the world. Nevertheless, domestic supply
How much oil is in the ground? That question has been asked for 150 years at local, national, and global scales. A precise answer is unknowable because most oil exists thousands of meters below the surface of the Earth, and it can be identified and measured only after drilling extremely expensive wells. But that hasn’t stopped legions of scientists and
With 4% of the world’s population, the United States consumes 40% of the world’s oil, due largely to its consumption of travel and shipping by its 267 million cars and trucks that are inefficient relative to other countries. The United States has substantial oil resources, accounting for about 17% of all oil ever produced in the world. Nevertheless, domestic supply
License: Unless otherwise noted, all visualizations, data, and stories produced by Visualizing Energy are open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). This means that you have permission to copy, transform, and redistribute the material in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.