The world of today is not defined by the banking crisis, credit crunch or questionable morals of some of our politicians. Equally it’s not defined by terrorism and conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel. It’s not even defined by the good things that we often overlook such as our unprecedented life expectancy, quality of living or social safety nets. Instead, today’s world and all it provides us can be defined by a single number.

Here in the UK like most of Europe that number is 6. In North America and Australia it’s 3, in China and India 30, and in the less touristy parts of Africa it’s something over a thousand.


Six days is all it takes for the average British family to consume a barrel of petroleum.

Petroleum is crude oil and natural gas. Oil can handily be counted in barrels. Natural gas was formed in the same way as crude oil and comes from the same wells that are drilled and produced in exactly the same way. Being a gas, you can’t count it in barrels, but you can count it as an equivalent number of oil barrels. Hence in the UK the average family burns its way through an equivalent barrel of crude oil and natural gas every 6 days.

A barrel of petroleum in less than a week? That’s pretty amazing. It’s easy to visualise a barrel and understand that it’s quite a large amount, and the average family certainly don’t spend all day and every day driving around in a V8 Range Rover to get through it.