Petroleum Consumption Vs Production (I)

This is the first post of a serie dedicated to the Worldwide Petroleum Consumption and Production.

The consumption and production data by countries is easy to find in Wikipedia. I elaborated the following Table 1 “Consumption and Production by countries”. I selected the first 30 countries by production and consumption of refined petroleum products and biofuel.

The date of the consumption data is 2013, and the date of production data is 2010. That is the reason why the oil consumption is bigger than the oil production. As this is not an academic article, and only an exercise, I solve this contradiction assuming that the percentages have not suffered a significant change between the years 2010 and 2013, so I can compare the data in terms of percentage.

Table 1 “Consumption and Production by countries”

At first sight, we see that USA, China, and Saudi Arabia, are in the top five, both consumption and production.

Surprisingly for me, the United States (4.45% of the world population) consumes the same amount of oil than the following seven most consumer countries: China, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Canada and Russia together (42,34% of world population).

Each American consumes as much oil than 18 chinese or 28 indians. China and India are hughe countries, with large rural populations, so we cannot compare U.S. with them.

If we compare U.S.A. with the top five most industrialized and poblated countries of the European Union (Germany,United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain), each american consumes between 2.2 and 2.5 times what a western european does.

Only Canada, Saudi Arabia and Singapore consume petrol more than U.S. (two great producers with low population and big extention, and one State-City)

Graphic 1. World Consumption by countries

Graphic 2. World Production by countries