10 Things You Didn't Know About Oil

Now that it's costing $4 a gallon or more to fill up our gas tanks, it's hard not to pay attention to news about the oil markets. Beyond that fact that crude oil prices have repeatedly reached all-time highs this year, though, there's a lot more to petroleum than you might be aware of:

1. Petroleum isn't refined into just gasoline for your car. It's also a critical ingredient for a host of other products, including ink, car tires, antiseptics, soft contact lenses, pantyhose, fertilizers, candles, house paint, vitamin capsules, shaving cream, shoe polish, antihistamines, food preservatives, petroleum jelly, nail polish, deodorants, carpets, dishwashing liquids, heart values and insect repellant. In fact, 18 percent of the petroleum we use ends up not in gas tanks but in plastics, rubber and other products.

2. With oil prices spiraling upward, it makes sense that all those other petroleum-based products are also getting more costly. The Wall Street Journal recently identified 50 things that have been hit by high oil prices, including steeper fees for pizza delivery, more police departments adopting foot patrols, fewer volunteers for Meals on Wheels and higher garbage collection charges.

3. Of the 12.5 million barrels of petroleum a day the U.S. imported in May 2008, only 20 percent came from Persian Gulf countries, according to the American Petroleum Institute. Statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show that we import more oil every year from non-OPEC nations than from OPEC countries. Canada and Mexico, for example, both send us more oil every year than does Saudi Arabia.

4. Which other countries send oil to the U.S. each year? You might be surprised to discover they include Aruba (110,000 barrels a day in 2007), Denmark (6,000 barrels a day), Norway (141,000 barrels a day) and the U.K. (278,000 barrels a day).