by Patrick DeHaan on Nov 13, 2009 01:27 PM

I decided that I’d crunch some numbers and attempt to put into perspective how much gasoline the U.S. consumes.

If you include everyone in the United States as of today (306 million-plus), gasoline demand is 458 gallons per person, per year, or 141 billion gallons/year as a country. Wow!

After crunching some of our numbers, I’ve calculated that the cumulative average price for a gallon of gasoline in 2009 stands at $2.299. Based on that number, the U.S. has spent $281.6 billion on gasoline as of the end of today (to be exact, $281,601,751,200). By the end of the year, that number will be closer to $327 billion dollars, assuming an average of $2.50/gallon from today through the rest of the year. That’s nearly $896 million per day!

I also did a study on sales of regular, mid-grade, and premium fuel. Regular gasoline makes up roughly 87% of sales, while mid-grade makes up around 4%, and premium accounts for 7%. 2% of gasoline sales are other grades, such as race fuel, E85, and other grades.

The amount of money that we will spend in 2009 on gasoline as a country is more than 4 times larger than the 2010 Budget for the Department of Transportation.