You can’t go anywhere in this modern world without being affected by the oil industry. We depend on the oil industry to maintain or comfortable way of living. The oil business is all about finding, extracting, transporting, marketing and refining petroleum products. The main petroleum based product is gasoline. We use gasoline everyday in our vehicles. We count on gasoline to get us to our important destinations, because most of these destinations would be time-consuming and exhausting to reach on foot alone. Petroleum is pretty much vital in many of today’s industries. 40% of America’s energy consumption is oil and 30 billion barrels of oil are used every single year. In 2005, the United States of America consumed 21,930,000 barrels of oil in a single day. The production, distribution, refinement and retailing of petroleum make the petroleum industry the largest profit making industry in the world. In America we pay a gasoline tax for the gasoline we buy. This gasoline tax is collected by the Federal Highway Trust fund and is used to pay for road maintenance and other transportation projects or needs here in our country. Therefore, gasoline tax can be described as a “user’s fee”. You drive on the roads, which increases wear and tear on the roads, so you pay the tax on your gasoline in order to maintain the roads. There has been a tax on gasoline since 1919. The initial tax rate was only 1 cent on the gallon, but today, more then 50 years later, we pay around 18-19 cents of federal tax on every gallon of gasoline we purchase. State gasoline tax is a different thing altogether. The average state tax for gasoline is about 28-29 cents on the gallon. So all together we pay about 48 cents of tax per gallon of gasoline purchased here in the United States of America. The average cost for a gallon of gasoline today in my home state of Texas is $3.21.