Everyday Americans get dressed and go to work, school, the store, or they take their kids to school, baseball practice, the gym; and everyday as we are driving down the road, we look up and the gas price has increased, again. Even though it is a one-penny increase today those pennies will eventually turn into dimes, quarters and even dollars. What can you do, you have to have gas for your means of transportation, and so you get out your wallet and pay whatever price is on the pump. In today's society, gasoline is like blood to our economy; everyone has to have it.
Gasoline comes from a product called crude oil, also called petroleum, which is drilled directly out of the ground. Different companies buy these barrels of oil and then have to refine them, which means that there is a breaking down process that the oil actually goes through and additives have to be added to it to make it the actual gasoline that we use in our vehicles. Where does the United States get our oil? Well most of our oil imported from what is known as OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries). OPEC consists of the participation of 11 different countries: Algeria, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela. OPEC is said to be responsible for forty percent of the world's oil production and they hold about two-thirds of the world's oil reserves. In December 2003 the United States imported approximately 300 million barrels of oil. .
After seeing how much oil the United States actually imports you might be a little shocked with this next statement. The United States is the world's second largest producer of oil; the largest producing state is Texas. Most domestic oil is sent directly to refineries, but because of our dependence on foreign countries for oil, and the lesson we learned with the oil embargo of 1973 and 1974 the Federal Government set up the SPR (U.