Oil drilling extracts crude oil from beneath the earth’s surface, and that oil gets refined into fuels, plastics, chemicals, textiles, medicines, and thousands of other products that shape daily life. The world produces roughly 103 million barrels of oil every day, and while most people associate drilling with gasoline, transportation fuel is only one piece of a much larger picture.
Transportation Fuel
The single largest use of drilled oil is powering vehicles. In the United States, transportation accounts for about 66.6% of all petroleum consumption. That includes gasoline for cars, diesel for trucks and freight trains, jet fuel for aircraft, and bunker fuel for cargo ships. Nearly every mode of moving people and goods still depends heavily on refined petroleum products.
This dominance explains why oil prices ripple so quickly through the economy. When crude costs rise, the price of shipping food, commuting to work, and flying all climb in tandem.
Industrial Manufacturing
Industry consumes about 27.5% of U.S. petroleum. Factories burn petroleum-based fuels to generate heat for smelting metals, producing cement, and running heavy machinery. Petroleum-derived lubricants keep industrial equipment running smoothly in the form of gear oils, hydraulic fluids, compressor oils, turbine oils, and greases. These lubricants reduce friction and prevent wear in everything from power plant turbines to the robotic arms on an assembly line.
Even electric vehicles, often framed as oil’s replacement, require specialized petroleum-based lubricants for their motors and battery systems.
Plastics and Everyday Products
Petrochemicals derived from crude oil make the manufacturing of over 6,000 everyday products possible. When oil is refined, some of the output is a set of building-block chemicals (ethylene, propylene, benzene, and others) that serve as raw ingredients for plastics, resins, and synthetic materials.
The resulting product list is staggering. It includes obvious items like plastic bags, water pipes, and food packaging, but also things you might not expect: contact lenses, vitamin capsules, crayons, guitar strings, credit cards, insect repellent, lipstick, toothpaste, and solar panels. Wind turbine blades, spacesuits, artificial turf, and hearing aids all rely on petroleum-derived materials. If an object is lightweight, flexible, or waterproof, there’s a good chance oil played a role in making it.
Clothing and Textiles
Petroleum is the leading source material for synthetic fabrics. Polyester, nylon, acrylic, and spandex are all made from crude oil. The process involves applying heat and pressure to petroleum-based compounds to form a plastic solution, which is then drawn into fibers and woven into fabric.
Polyester alone accounts for more than half of all fiber production worldwide. Acrylic mimics the look and feel of wool but is made entirely from plastic threads derived from fossil fuels. Nylon, used in everything from stockings to parachutes, is composed of long chains of carbon-based molecules extracted from crude oil. If you’re wearing athletic wear, a fleece jacket, or stretch denim right now, you’re wearing petroleum.
Medicine and Healthcare
About 3% of global petroleum production goes toward pharmaceutical manufacturing, but that small share is critical: nearly 99% of pharmaceutical feedstocks and chemical reagents come from petrochemicals. The pain relievers, antidepressants, cholesterol medications, diabetes drugs, and antihistamines prescribed in most doctor visits trace their chemical origins back to crude oil.
Plastics are equally central to modern healthcare. The antiseptic model of hospital care depends on single-use, sterile plastic items: gloves, IV tubing, syringes, surgical gowns, implants, and drug delivery devices. Researchers are developing biodegradable and plant-based alternatives, but petroleum-based plastics remain the backbone of medical supply chains for now.
Roads, Roofing, and Construction
When crude oil is refined, one of the heaviest byproducts is bitumen, a thick, sticky substance used to bind gravel into asphalt. Road construction accounts for roughly 70% of annual global bitumen production. Most of the remaining 30% goes into roofing materials and waterproofing products like sealants and coatings.
Virtually every paved road, highway, and airport runway in the world has a layer of petroleum-derived asphalt. Petroleum also shows up in construction adhesives, insulation materials, vinyl flooring, plywood glue, caulking, and paint.
Heating and Electricity
A smaller but still meaningful share of oil goes toward keeping buildings warm and generating power. Residential heating oil accounts for about 2.8% of U.S. petroleum use, with commercial buildings adding another 2.5%. In colder regions, oil-fired furnaces and boilers remain common in older homes that haven’t switched to natural gas or electric heat pumps.
Electric power generation uses the smallest slice, just 0.6% of petroleum consumption in the U.S. Oil-fired power plants have largely been replaced by natural gas, coal, nuclear, and renewables, but they still operate in some island nations and remote areas where other fuel sources are hard to deliver.
Who Produces the Most Oil
Global oil supply hit about 103.4 million barrels per day in November 2024. The top producers span several continents. Russia led OPEC+ output at 9.25 million barrels per day, followed closely by Saudi Arabia at 9.04 million. Iraq, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates each contributed between 3 and 4.2 million barrels daily.
Outside that group, the United States, Brazil, Guyana, Canada, and Argentina are driving the fastest supply growth. Total global production is projected to climb to around 104.8 million barrels per day in 2025, reflecting steady demand across all the sectors that depend on crude oil as both an energy source and a raw material.