Our nation’s oil addiction - is Uncle Billy Smith to blame?

Much is being written of late about the nation’s dependency on oil and the daily need to fuel our cars, trucks, railroad locomotives, ships and jetliners. Well, it all goes back to this day in 1859, when Uncle Billy Smith saw a dark film floating on the water of a shaft he was digging near Titusville, Pennsylvania. Soon, the nation’s first commercial oil well was pumping out crude oil.

Today, there are 520,000 oil wells in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau, producing more than 2-billion barrels of crude oil a year. But to meet our needs, we still need to import over 3.5-billion additional barrels annually, the majority of which comes from Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia, the U.S. Department of Energy says. That means that every day, Americans use more than 15-million barrels of petroleum products. Oil addits, indeed. One has to wonder what date will bookend this one, as scientists are already pondering just how long the dwindling supplies will last.

Thanks, Uncle Billy…I think.