The United States consumes over 20 million barrels (840 million gallons) of petroleum products each day, almost half of it in the form of gasoline used in over 200 million motor vehicles with combined travel over 7 billion miles per day.
Gasoline is made from crude oil, which was formed from the remains of tiny aquatic plants and animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. These remains were covered with layers of sediment, which over millions of years of extreme pressure and high temperatures became the mix of liquid hydrocarbons (an organic chemical compound of hydrogen and carbon) that we know as crude oil.
Because crude oil is made up of a mixture of hydrocarbons, refineries break down these hydrocarbons into different products. These “refined products” include gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, jet fuel, liquefied petroleum gases, residual fuel oil, and many other products .