What’s Making Americans Less Hungry for Gasoline?
Oil use: plateaued or trending down.
The price of gasoline keeps rising for Americans, but it’s not because of rising demand from consumers.
Since the first Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, the U.S. has struggled to quench a growing appetite for oil and gasoline. Now, that trend is changing.
“When you look at the U.S. oil market, you see that there’s actually no growth,” says Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
He says gasoline demand peaked in 2007 and has fallen each year since, even though the economy has begun to recover.
“The U.S. has already reached what we can call ‘peak demand.’ Because of increased efficiency, because of biofuels, we’re not going to see growth in our oil consumption,” Yergin says.
That view is shared by the government’s official source of energy data, the Energy Information Administration. Its long-term projection is that gasoline consumption will steadily decline by around 7 percent over the next 25 years.