Oil Production and Consumption

As a new "featured column" on the blog, I've asked Jason Roy, a statistician who lives in downtown Lewisburg, to provide us with a simple graph or chart each week that illustrates or sheds light on some important issue. This week, Jason has sent us the following item regarding oil consumption and the notion of "drill, baby, drill":

A key issue on the minds of a lot of voters is oil production and consumption. Gas prices have had an impact on many families and businesses. A difference between Obama and McCain is their views on offshore drilling. During his convention speech John McCain said "We will drill new wells off-shore, and we'll drill them now. We'll drill them now." Offshore drilling would come with some environmental risks. So, a reasonable question is whether the benefits outweigh these risks.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted that "the U.S. government's own Energy Information Administration says that removing restrictions on offshore drilling wouldn't lead to any additional domestic oil production until 2017, and that even at its peak the extra production would have an 'insignificant' impact on oil prices." That same report predicted that new offshore drilling could eventually produce as much as 200,000 barrels per day. While that sounds like a lot, it is extremely small relative to current foreign and domestic oil production, as seen in the graph below:

This is a key part of the argument against offshore drilling: it's not just that it will take 10 years or so to produce results. (Most people have heard that part by now.) It's that it would produce such a tiny, tiny amount of oil compared to total U.S. consumption.