The entire world runs on energy. Mostly petroleum energy. According to the Our World in Data website, the three largest sources of global energy are oil, coal and natural gas. Last year, 76.4 percent of global energy came from those three sources. A whopping 51.8 percent came from oil and gas alone.
Yes, coal may be in decline. Yes, wind and solar are rising. But when we cook our dinner tonight or turn on our TV set later, most of the electricity will come from petroleum energy.
The Future Is Different,
But the Present Is Here
Safer, smaller scale nuclear power is on the horizon. So is long-awaited fusion power. But this year, and for years to come, we’re going to be depending on British thermal units produced by combusting petroleum products measured in millions of barrels and trillions of cubic feet.
I wish it were otherwise. But it isn’t. Here, even revolutionary change is measured in decades.
This reality makes oil and natural gas keystones of value, if not the primary currency of human civilization.
So, with that notion in mind, how much is America worth – lock, stock and barrel?
The Value of America
I’ve been wrestling with this question since the first OPEC embargo in 1973. Soon after the embargo, analysts were calculating how long it would take for Saudi Arabia to buy every company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It wasn’t that far-fetched a notion.
But we need a bigger measure. How many barrels of oil, in billions, would it take to buy the net worth of every household in America?
The calculation is simple. The Federal Reserve keeps track of our collective finances. It provides a quarterly figure for our collective net worth. The most recent, for the end of March, was just shy of $170 trillion. That’s up 4.5 times since the heady days of the Internet bubble in 1998. It’s up nearly 19 times since the miseries of 1980.
Then we divide our household net worth by the price of oil, in barrels. I used the Bloomberg price posting for Brent crude. The result is how many barrels of oil it would take to buy everything we Americans have.
Our Number Over Time
As you can see from the table below, the number varies quite a bit.
The Barrel Value of America |
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| This table takes the net worth of American households and nonprofit organizations as measured by the Federal Reserve and divides by the price of oil to find how many barrels of oil it would take to buy the country.
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| Year | Household Net Worth (in $ billions) | Price of Oil/per Barrel | Barrels to Buy America (in billions) |
| 1970 | $ 3,418.5 | $ 3.18 | 1,075.0 |
| 1975 | 5,141.5 | 7.67 | 670.3 |
| 1980 | 9,468.6 | 21.59 | 438.6 (L) |
| 1985 | 14,206.6 | 24.09 | 589.7 |
| 1990 | 20,249.9 | 20.03 | 1,112.0 |
| 1995 | 27,732.4 | 14.62 | 1,896.9 |
| 1998 | 37,369.7 | 11.18 | 3,342.6 (H) |
| 2004 | 48,092.8 | 42.00 | 1,145.1 |
| 2007 | 57,718.0 | 120.00 | 481.0 |
| 2025 | 169,781.6 | 66.78 | 2,542.4 |
| Sources: Federal Reserve, Bloomberg | |||
Pre-OPEC America (1970) could be bought with 1,075 billion barrels of oil. A decade later, with stocks depressed, high inflation and high interest rates crushing our businesses, banks and thrifts, and putting home ownership out of reach, you could buy America for the bargain basement price of 438.6 billion barrels of oil.
Our number has been up and down since then. During the 1998 Internet transformation of our economy, which was fueled by hype and hope, you have needed 3,342.6 billion barrels of oil to buy America. But the number plummeted to a near low, 481 billion barrels, at the beginning of the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
Today, with a lower oil price and a richly valued stock market (not to mention the housing market), the price has soared toward the old high.
What Should America Be Worth?
Which raises a question. What should America be worth?
No one knows the answer. My personal bias is that I’ll bet on our collective efforts (including all worrywart burdens) because we change, adapt, innovate and invent. We humans tend to prevail. It’s good to remember that we’re not using whale oil for lighting anymore.
But it’s also good to remember that we humans get drunk on success. We become more daring. Then we become outright foolish. We’ve done this many times. With fewer Americans able to buy and pay for houses and cars, not to mention health care and food, it’s quite likely that our stocks and our homes are overvalued and overpriced.
At least for now.
Related columns:
Scott Burns, “The Value of America, in Barrels,” 5/11/2008: https://scottburns.com/the-value-of-america-in-barrels/
Sources and References:
Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado, “Energy Mix: Explore global data on where our energy comes from, and how this is changing,” 1/2024: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “Balance Sheet of Households and Nonprofit Organizations, 1952-2025 (Q1): https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/z1/balance_sheet/table/
Bloomberg, Crude Oil & Natural Gas: https://www.bloomberg.com/energy
This information is distributed for education purposes, and it is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement of any particular security, product, or service.
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(c) Scott Burns, 2025