Tire Pressure Maintenance -- It'll Help but It's Not The Fix

Everybody has heard about Senator Obama's suggestion for reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. So the question is: Just how much fuel can the average motorist save?
I wrote this piece primarily because I wanted to see if a complete energy layman of Conservative principles could determine the following. First, was Senator Obama's tire pressure suggestion factual or a lot of hooey? Second, is Senator McCain justified in lampooning his suggestion? What I found was that both Senators are correct. McCain is correct that we must advance all forms of energy production available to us. Senator Obama who also supports quite a few of the same energy policies expressed by Senator McCain (except the drilling part, of course) is absolutely correct that at the national level, proper automobile maintenance can help reduce our need for foreign oil. If you want to read my lengthy proof then proceed.

Senator Obama asserts: Improper tire pressure can cause a vehicle to lose as much as 3% of its fuel usage efficiency. If the American electorate maintains proper tire inflation we could save more fuel than can be produced though offshore drilling. Is this true or false? My research concludes that this is somewhat true, but that his position is based on some overly broad assumptions.
www.carcare.org suggests that improperly inflated tires can reduce gas mileage by as much as 3%. They do not cite the source of any studies or provide any hard evidence. But hey, it's www.carcare.org, right? Let's roll with it. I currently drive a 2001 Dodge 3500 1 Ton dual-wheel pickup. When it's running well, which is all the time, and I don't drive like Dale Earnhardt, Jr., it gets 18 MPG on the highway and about 14.5 MPG in the city, for a mixed bag of about 15.6 MPG. These are actual statistics I have compiled over the years of driving this vehicle. I drive about 20,000 miles per year. So, at optimum tire pressure (amongst a whole lot of other things) I should use about 1,282 gallons of diesel in one year.

Now, let's say that I let the tire pressure go but maintain everything else. Assume that I suffer the maximum suggested performance hit of 3%, or in other words I only get 97% of my optimum efficiency. That would be 15.1 MPG (actually 15.132 but I'm rounding everything down to the nearest 1/10th). So, dividing 15.1 into 20,000 means I would use 1,324 gallons. This is 42 gallons per year. At the time I wrote this, diesel in my neighborhood was selling for $4.70 a gallon. This means I would spend $197.40 more for diesel annually. But keep in mind that I would have paid $6,025.40 for the other 1,282 gallons so in the great scheme of things this isn't a whole lot of money, nor is it a whole lot of gas. In fact, it's only 3 PERCENT. More importantly, if diesel went up by only 25 cents during the calendar year, that would wipe out any financial gain that I would get from running optimum tire pressure all the time.

Everything to this point has been a discussion about how it affects ME, the individual. Let's apply the same thing to the nation. First of all, we need to know what the average MPG is for the entire United States. According to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics (www.bts.gov), the average MPG for all passenger vehicles currently registered in the U.S. for 2006 was 22.4 MPG. Total miles driven in the same year for passenger vehicles only was 2,670,145,000,000 miles. That's right! 2.67 TRILLION miles! Now keep in mind that this is a very SIMPLE example. At 22.4 MPG, that means that American passenger vehicles consumed about 119,202,901,785 (119.2 billion) gallons of gasoline and diesel. Now, drop the MPG to only 97%, which is 21.7 MPG. This would result in 123,048,156,682 (123 billion) gallons needed, or four billion gallons more than we used with 22.4 MPG.

Now, who the devil is going to argue that it wouldn't be prudent for Americans to maintain proper tire pressure in order to save FOUR BILLION gallons of fuel? Nobody. However, what is the total impact to the United States? Here's where it gets really interesting.
In order to understand what four billion gallons of gasoline means to the CRUDE OIL market, we first have to know how much gasoline is IN a barrel of crude oil. And there's simply NO standard answer to this question. Crude oil comes in many varieties. Some Texas and Arabian crude oil deposits are very "light/sweet" and can produce up to 30% "straight run" gasoline (very little refining effort here). Others, like Venezuelan crude may produce only 5% "straight run" gas. However, in both cases, the remaining crude can be refined be various processes, which I won't go into here, to further refine the heavier crude into gasoline as well. So, if you ask 15 petrochemical engineers, you'll get 15 different answers. Based on my not very exhaustive research, anywhere from 19 to 28 gallons of oil can be obtained from one 42 gallon barrel of crude. And remember, the remainder can be used for many other uses, such as heating oil, fuel oil for large ships, etc. So I have a range of 19 to 28 gallons from a single barrel. Let's just split the difference. Subtract 19 from 28 leave 9 divide by 2 = 4.5 add to 19 gives us 23.5 gallons of gasoline per barrel. EXCELLENT! If we divide the 3.846 billion gallons by 23.5, we get 163,627,867 barrels of crude wasted by our 3% penalty because of our lousy tire pressure maintenance. That's 163.6 million barrels.

To summarize everything we've done to this point; We've determined the average MPG of the US passenger car fleet (22.4) in 2006, the total number of miles driven (2.67 trillion) in the same year by the same class of vehicle, and the total extra barrels of crude we would have been consumed caused by a three percent drop in average MPG because of poor tire pressure maintenance (163.6 million barrels). This does assume that EVERY single passenger car in the US fleet is not properly maintained, which is most certainly NOT the case. This is a worst-case scenario.

Now all we have to determine is if increasing US offshore drilling would produce more barrels of crude than is lost from poor tire pressure maintenance.
To quote from the June 18th, 2008 LA TIMES, which ran an article about this very subject entitled "Bush Calls for Offshore Drilling, Citing Gasoline Prices":
'The Energy Information Administration said that opening access to undersea oil fields "in the Pacific, Atlantic and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030." Drilling in domestic waters off all the coasts except Alaska's would increase annual production from 2.2 million barrels a day to 2.4 million barrels a day, the agency estimates.'

Excellent! So we estimate that while it would take nearly twenty years to get these fields 100% online, at that point in time we would increase domestic crude oil production by two-hundred thousand barrels A DAY. Multiply that times 365 days per year (except leap years of course) and we get 73 million barrels of new crude production annually. Keep in mind that only a portion of this gasoline will actually go to passenger car usage. Much of it will go to commercial and public transportation (rail, city public transit, government usage, etc). I did not find that statistic.
OVERLY SIMPLISTIC CONCLUSION: In twenty years we could be producing an additional 73 million barrels of oil annually. Assuming that every single barrel was destined for passenger car usage and that every single car on the road was wasting at least 3% fuel economy due to incorrectly inflated tires not only would the 73 million barrels be completely consumed, but we would still have 90 million barrels that we would need to get from somewhere in order to handle the shortfall. So, Senator Obama's suggestion has some merit. There are modest savings to be had at the household or passenger car owner level. At the national level, Senator Obama's suggestion could reduce American fuel usage by over one hundred million barrels of crude per year. But there's a tremendous caveat here: A large fraction of the American people properly maintain their vehicles, including monitoring tire pressure. So the consumption of 163 million barrels of crude caused by poor tire inflation is VERY speculative. I simply could not find any metrical data to establish even a rough guess number, so the scenario I have presented to you is a worst-case scenario.

Based on my research, I think that we can conclude the following.
1. The US needs to expand all sources of energy production. This includes fossil fuels, nuclear, natural gas, shale-oil, tar sands, clean coal, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, hydro-electric, fuel-cell and others that I'm probably not listing here. Incidentally, John McCain supports this idea.
2. The US needs to expand the grid to efficiently transport energy from the point of collection/production to the point of consumption. T. Boone Pickens wants the taxpayer to pick up the tab for this one. I for one say that we should get government out of the way and let the entrepreneurs, who have never failed us yet in a crisis, to solve this. But make sure that they do so in a manner that does not unduly harm our interests. Make them responsible to cleanup when they are done.
3. American auto manufacturers must step up to the plate with vehicles that can use fuels other than gasoline/diesel. They've made progress but we aren't there yet.
4. Those American who are not properly maintaining their vehicles should be considered for punishment, as they are directly adversely affecting our nation's strategic security and increasing our dependency on foreign fossil fuel sources. I really like this idea, but I doubt the Progressives do.
5. The American people need to accept that we can no longer count on being the only consumer of energy in the world. Growing industrial economies in South America, Asia and India will have tremendous impact on the worlds resources. We must accept that this is not an American problem, but a Global problem of which America is only a part. Republicans have to accept the fact that we do live in a global community. Democrats have to accept the fact that government kowtowing to the extreme environmentalist lobby is probably the single largest reason why we don't produce domestically more of the energy that we use.

A couple of final things I just have to get off my chest. The chorus of cries that the oil companies need to invest in alternative fuel and energy sources. Is it my imagination or are they called "oil companies" for some reason other than they are specialists in the finding, pumping and refining of naturally occurring crude oil? And the other hue and cry is that drilling NOW will not lower cost of fuel in the short term. Yup, they're sure right on that one. We wouldn't start seeing benefits for at least seven to ten years, with fruition taking nearly two decades. AND YET every day that we delay exploration, drilling for oil or exploiting shale-oil or other fossil fuel deposits is one more day that we will not be able to lower the cost of fuel. To stand by and do nothing is worse than insane. It is national suicide. And there's NOT ONE STUDY that indicates that any other energy technology can produce the same quantity of usable energy at the same cheap cost as fossil fuels or is mature enough to provide energy to the United States, much less the world, in quantities to satisfy our need (not desire) for energy.