Vehicles in the U.S. consume twice as much oil as our country produces. The number of vehicles on the road and the number of miles we drive increases every year, but U.S. oil production capacity remains about the same. In 2008, we as a nation consumed about 213,810 gallons of gasoline daily—78 million barrels of oil in just one year. (A barrel is 42 U.S. gallons.)

The National Research Council projects that by 2050 we’ll consume about 1.5 billion gallons of gasoline a year, assuming that most of the vehicles on the road are highly efficient conventional, hybrid and flexfuel vehicles. If most of the vehicles are fuel cell and battery electric vehicles, gasoline consumption decreases by almost 70% to less than 50 million gallons a year—roughly half the current domestic oil production.