Which countries are the thirstiest?

I just wanted to do a short blog post about world oil and energy demand, development and economics mainly looking at the main consumers and the consumption of oil break down into regions just using statistics. A new global oil production record was set in 2011 at 83.6 million barrels per day (the most recent date before the source I got this statistic from was written). This figure includes production of crude oil and natural gas. Furthermore this article also stated that global oil production grew by 163% between 1965 and 2011. (Energy Trends Insider, 2014) Seeing as the article is slightly out of date, it is clear that even more oil was produced in the later years as the oil peak (maximum production of oil) is still not reached and production of oil increases every year. However I shall explore below who are the thirsty countries and regions that consume all these resources.

Firstly Figure 1 shows those countries that consume the most oil. The darker the country is shaded, the more oil it consumes. It is obvious that the Northern America, Europe and Australia are the main consumers of world oil.

Figure 1.

Source. A map of world oil consumption in barrels a day per capita, 2007.

The next two figures- Figure 2 and 3 just confirm the above findings and present them as graphs where yet again we can see that USA consumes by far more oil per capita per barrel than any other country or continent or region including China. 

Figure 2.

Source. Petroleum: top consuming nations, 1960-2008.

Figure 3.

Source. Daily oil consumption by region from 1980 to 2006.

Furthermore Figure 4 is a screen shot from Wikipedia which shows a table of 20 countries that consume the most oil. Wikipedia based these statistics on the CIA World Factbook. From here it is clear that these countries include USA, China, India, Russia, Brazil (The BRIC) as well as Japan, UK and so on. So we can conclude that the countries that consume the most oil include USA; some highly developed countries such as UK, Australia and Japan; BRIC countries- those developing at greatest speed right now and oil producing countries such as Saudi Arabia, Russia.

Figure 4.

Source. Countries that consume the most world oil.

It is perhaps unsurprising finding about the countries that consume the most oil. USA is the leader as USA to the present day is still the number one economy of the world and leading world economics hence as well as producing oil, they consume it in all sorts of ways including manufacturing. Similar argument goes for highly other highly developed countries that consume a lot of oil such as some of the EU, Australia, Japan which require a lot of oil as a lot of modern technologies and style of life in these countries is all about oil and people have become dependent on it to get their energy from it. Countries such as the BRIC and other that are on the boom of economic development are using up the oil as we expected to help their development and finally oil producing countries become very rich all of a sudden when oil is discovered and hence start developing at an incredible unnatural pace such as Saudi Arabia hence require a lot of energy for this to occur.

Thus we can conclude that none of the findings of this article are surprising regarding the oil demand and we could have easily predicted these finding however it is useful to know the exact data and statistics.