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What does Gasoline and the American People say about:
Amount of gasoline that Americans consume?
- The average motorist used 703 gallons in 2005--and drove 41 percent more miles than
25 years ago.
Number of cars on the road?
- The US has 1,148 registered personal vehicles for every 1,000 licensed drivers, 700 per 1000 in Great Britain, 608 in Japan, 208 per 1000 in Mexico--and just 11 per 1000 in India, and 9 per 1000
in China.
Age of drivers in America?
- There are now almost 29 million licensed drivers over the age of 65--14.5 percent of the total--compared to less than 16 million in 1980. Over the same period, the number of drivers aged 16 to 21 dropped from 18.8 to 15.8 million.
The types of vehicles Americans are driving?
- In 1975, just 16% of all vehicles in the US were light trucks (including SUVs and minivans). In 2005 this had risen to 41%. Hybrid vehicles, while gaining in popularity, make up only 1.4% of sales through November 2006.
The efficiency of the vehicles we drive?
- Fuel efficiency for the entire auto fleet in 1973 was just 13.4 miles per gallon. It was 22.2 mpg in 2005--and 16.9 for SUVs, minivans, and other light trucks.
Why Americans pay less to fill the tank?
- US motorists pay one of the lowest rates for gasoline--an average of $2.86 a gallon in the third quarter of 2006. Chinese drivers pay the least, at $2.21 per gallon, and the British pay the most, at $6.50 per gallon. The largest proportion of these price differences is gasoline tax--15% of the retail price in the U.S., 30% in Canada, 45% in Japan, 61% in France, and 64% in Britain.
- The highest gasoline price ever in the US (adjusted for inflation) was in 1918, at the time of the "gasoline famine." The lowest ever was in 1998, when oil prices collapsed. The second highest (again inflation adjusted) was 1980-1981.
Where Americans buy gas?
- The number of retail outlets has fallen 25%--to just 167,476 in 2006, and the amount of gasoline pumped per station has risen 73 percent. However, the convenience store share of total outlets has risen dramatically, to some 109,400, or 65% of the total.
Where is gasoline made?
- Although no new refineries have been built in the U.S. since the 1970s, refinery capacity has increased significantly in recent years, from 15.3 million barrels per day (mbd) in 1996 to 17.4 mbd in 2006, about the same effect as building 17 average-sized new refineries.
The prospects for ethanol?
- Reformulated gasoline requirements, congressional and state mandates, and significant tax incentives (currently a 51-cents per gallon tax credit) have driven U.S. ethanol conumption from 11,000 barrels per day (bd) in 1980 to about 350,000 bd in 2006, or about 4% of total gasoline consumption by volume.
The rise of Asia?
- Asia now consumes more oil than North America. Motorists in America would never have expected that the rising prices they faced at the pump would be the result, in part, of shortfalls of electricity production in China, blackouts and brownouts in most of its provinces, and bottlenecks in mining and transporting coal across that country.
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