"at least to the extent that almost any SI post is likely to (and to a greater extent than your post did)"
I've crunched the numbers before. I was laying out the information you would need to make a more accurate estimate. But, what the heck. Let's do it your way.
"1 to 3% of the oil used to make gasoline"
What is this number? According to the DOE, each 1 PSI of underinflation knocks off 0.4% of your gas mileage.
edmunds.com
Now, Edmund's did a survey of their employees and found the underinflation was a an average of 2.24 PSI, or about 1% lower gas mileage across the entire fleet.
edmunds.com
Now this sample is small and biased towards keeping to the OEMs recommended inflation specs. Bottom line, you are probably underestimating the problem by more than an order of magnitude. Assuming your other calculations are correct, that'd put the oil saved at 300k barrels per day. Or more than some estimates of OCS production. Note that this problem does not get solved by TPMs because they apparently are generally set to trigger at 75% of proper inflation.
"The only part that was pure guesswork, was the factor that you didn't consider at all"
Umm, Tim, this would only be a factor if Obama was putting that forward as an actual program. He wasn't. He was asked what individuals could do and he pointed a couple of things out. For what it is worth, the list was far from exhaustive. So your exercise as to how many could actually be recruited is not pertinent to the argument. I know McCain et al likes to pretend that Obama was setting forth a policy, but he wasn't.
Thanks again, Tim! Your luck should change soon, huh? |
