Oil is essential to our everyday life.
In 2019 we used up 100m barrels just like this every day,
mostly to fuel the cars, planes, and ships that move us
and our goods around the world.
Then there's a fair bit that goes
into power generation, heating buildings,
and other industrial uses.
So, what about the rest of it?
This is where our oil dependency becomes even less visible.
Because honestly, it goes into all kinds of stuff.
If you refine the oil, you get products
that go into making petrochemicals
such as ethylene and propylene.
Petchems are in everything, from plastic bags, toothbrushes,
and food packaging, to detergents, paint, cosmetics,
and mattress foams.
More than 16 per cent of oil demand
will be for non-combustive uses like these alone,
and a big share of that is put into single-use plastics.
This is definitely an area we can cut back on.
In here, there's about two weeks of plastic consumption,
if our video team is anything to go by.
Most societies are starting to take recycling seriously,
at least in the west, and vendors everywhere
are promising to use less plastic.
But this isn't the whole story.
Petrochemicals are used in clothes.
High-street retailers make and sell huge amounts of synthetic
materials, and a whole other branch called aromatics are
essential for drugs - like aspirin or ibuprofen.
Oil is in our medicines.
Now making these products isn't quite the same
as burning fossil fuels as we do in cars,
but they do cause pollution hazards of their own.
And to manage plastic waste, it's
often incinerated, releasing carbon dioxide emissions
at that point, too.
This is why we need to be honest with ourselves
about how embedded oil is into our everyday life.
Experts say we'll have to curb our addiction to oil
if we're going to avoid the worst impacts of climate
change.
But kicking our habit is going to take more than just
changing the cars we drive.
So the sooner we start, the better.