The thing that jumps out here is that if a gallon of gasoline is capable of storing 37 kilowatt hours of electrical energy equivalent, and our battery pack gives us a usable energy of 16.8 kilowatts, our little electric car is running on essentially a half a gallon of gasoline for its entire range of 75 miles. To put that another way, the internal combustion engine automobile would have to get 165 miles out of a single gallon of gasoline in order to be the equivalent efficiency of this little electric car. This superior efficiency is the source of all the other benefits of reduced heat, reduced noise, reduced cost, and reduced emissions that you derive from an electric car.
It's simply because the electric drive plant is a technically more elegant and eight times more efficient way to move an automobile and the people inside it. Let's talk a little bit about cost, but let's talk about them not in a personal sense but in a national sense. In order to drive 8 billion miles a day, which is what our 203 million drivers are now doing, we have to burn about 373 million gallons of gasoline in a day.
That's down from 397 million before the four dollar gasoline hit. So we're burning about 375 million gallons right now, and that's pretty close to three quarters of a billion dollars per day and about 225 billion dollars per year. If you believe, as I do, that gasoline will soon reach four dollars a gallon again and perhaps quite beyond that.
At four dollars a gallon, that's a half a trillion dollars per year that we, an aggregate as a nation, spend on gasoline to get to work and back and go to the store and a soccer game. What I'm going to say next is going to surprise many of you and anger more than a few who have drank the kool-aid of environmentalism and the sky is falling with regards to the production of crude oil. Crude oil is a little bit like the lithium things.
The price of it determines how many people are looking for it and producing it, and that determines how much we produce. The actual facts are that at the very end of 2008, our average daily oil consumption, even at inflated prices, had risen to 85,525,000 barrels a day. Our production has kept pace very nicely at 85,459,000 barrels a day with about a 56-day supply on hand, and that's really not going to change.
There is no peak in oil production. We don't have a problem replacing it. We have a problem replacing it at $10 a barrel, but if you're willing to pay more, they're willing to produce more, and I don't see any end of that sight, certainly within this lifetime and most likely for several to come.
There's plenty of oil. The problem is that all the low-hanging fruit has been found and all the easily extracted oil has been extracted, and from here on out with an increasing demand for oil globally, the price is going to continue going up. They could make oil synthetically without ever finding any oil, but the price of it would, by today's standards, are prohibitively high.
The supply is essentially inexhaustible. Also, the ceiling on the price is essentially inexhaustible. You could pay $5 a gallon for gasoline.
You could pay $10 per gallon for gasoline. You pay $100 a gallon for gasoline. If you want it bad enough, they will supply it.
So we're currently spending in the United States a quarter of a trillion dollars on gasoline a year. If we return to $4 a gallon gasoline, we're spending a half a trillion, but there's no guaranteed cap on that. We could very easily find ourselves even five or six years from now spending a trillion dollars a year on gasoline.
So if you hear somebody talk about the costs of converting to electric drive automobiles, we have a little piggy bank to play with there. We're already spending more on transportation than anyone in the civilized world. If you want to drive the cost of oil down, the solution is pretty easy too.
If all the households in the United States would replace one half of the miles that they drive with an electric car, the price of gasoline for the escalade they use to tow the boat to the lake or go to another city on a trip would fall to a dollar a gallon. You not only don't have to give up your escalator or your muscle car, you don't have to give up anything. Let's talk a little bit about emissions.
I know that's a concern to a lot of people and fairly poorly understood by most has been my observation. Gasoline is a combination of hydrogen and carbon. If you combine it with oxygen, both burn rather readily.
The hydrogen forms with oxygen to produce water and in the process releases a good bit of energy, and this is basically what drives your car. Unfortunately, gasoline also contains carbon. About four and a half pounds of carbon in a gallon of gasoline, a little over 2.1 kilograms.
Combining oxygen with carbon gets us a variety of things based on how well we do the burning process. The largest component is carbon dioxide, and that's the natural outcome of combining oxygen with carbon. If you do that a little less efficiently, you get carbon monoxide.
That's a poisonous gas that combines readily with red blood cells. More has a greater affinity for red blood cells than oxygen itself, and in sufficient concentration it can be fatal. In any concentration it's not very good for you.
If you don't burn the carbon at all, some of it escapes oxidation. It essentially exits the vehicle as what we call particulates, more commonly soot or smoke, and this is what gives exhaust the lovely fragrance or bouquet that we associate with it. It's also the largest component of the clouds or smog that we see in our cities.
To burn a gallon of gasoline actually takes an immense amount of atmosphere. It's not just that we're putting out a lot of exhaust, we're actually consuming a lot of clean air and a lot more than most people realize. Our atmosphere is about three quarters nitrogen, and in the extreme temperatures and pressures of the combustion chamber, nitrogen and oxygen will combine and produce an array of various oxidized nitrogens that we lump together and call nitrous oxides.
Nitrous oxides then combine with the water vapor from the hydrogen combustion to produce a water vapor that's very low in pH, essentially acid, and this you may have heard referred to as acid rain. It certainly wilts the plants, but it's also a pretty strong, strongly carcinogenic substance that causes cancer. To reduce the amount of particulates and carbon monoxide in exhaust, it was thought by our wise leaders that we should oxygenate our fuels to reduce the levels of those pollutants.
Unfortunately, they selected a substance called MTBE to do that and required it as a fuel additive in gasoline. As it turns out, it's the most carcinogenic element in gasoline, and it accumulates in the groundwater and is impossible to get rid of, so it was a huge mistake. The entire ethanol production concept in the United States has not been developed as an alternative fuel.
It's been developed as a replacement for MTBE. They very quietly outlawed MTBE and have encouraged the production of ethanol, not so much as an alternate fuel, but as a oxygenator for the gasoline that they've got, and they're hoping that you do not know, do not find out, and do not notice what an egregious mistake they made by requiring the MTBE. And so that's the ethanol story.
It was never seriously contemplated as an alternative fuel for motor vehicles. It's an oxygenator to replace their MTBE mistake.