Google Earth Community: World Oil Consumption

Hi,

Here's an example of what's currently incorrect, and how to fix it:

Barrels/Day Land Area (SqKm) "Height" (km) *flawed* prism volume
Germany 2393000(bbl) 357,021(km^2) 72(km) 26,040,626(km^3)
France 1919000(bbl) 643,427(km^2) 58(km) 37,634,766(km^3)

Do you see how France *actually* uses only about 4 barrels to every 5 used by Germany? And despite this, if Germany is shown with 5 units of *volume*, France shows up as having 7 units of volume?

This effectively *doubles* the amount of apparent French oil consumption; it's really, really really inaccurate.

The distortion on other nations is much more extreme. European populations have risen to *much* higher densities than that of the USA, which has conserved a great deal of pristine open space (France packs people in at approximately 7.5 times the density). So this causes your chart to show American oil consumption as being many many *TIMES* higher than it actually is.

Perhaps you might consider working out your equations such that a given amount of prism-volume consistently relates to a given amount of whatever-you're-trying-to-measure (whether that's barrels/day, or barrels per person per day, or 1/10th of a barrel per person per day, or whatever you want). That would make your chart *less* skewed and more accurate.

The key is not to let the surface area of the country play into the equation (because otherwise you'll be confusing geographic area with oil consumption).

So, if you were to do per-capita, I'd obtain the per capita oil consumption and then divide by the surface area of the country. That will give you an overall volume that shows the "size" of each *citizen's* oil consumption.

This may be disappointing because it probably won't match up with a lot of the propaganda that's floating around (that Americans consume almost infinite amounts of oil while Europeans consume nearly none). But that's the nature of fact: it doesn't always agree with what you're *told* to believe.

You also ought to account for oil production. I say this because a great deal of the controversy surrounding oil has to do with *importing* oil (typically people talk about the Middle East).

For example: EU and the USA.

The EU draws a great deal of it's oil from the Middle East. The USA produces some of it's own oil (about 8% of the world oil supply in 2007) and tends to diversify it's oil purchases across more of the world.

This leads to the fact that:

Group Annual Imports of Middle East Oil (barrels/year)

European Union 1,080,013,209
United States 810,237,571

The Europeans generally don't like to draw attention to this fact, but in reality Europe imports a significantly larger amount of oil from the Middle East than does the United States. Also, that oil accounts for a larger % of their total consumption.

So when people talk about "oil wars" in the Middle East, realize this: Europeans will *in actual fact* take and use more of that oil than will the Americans.