Singapore Uses 93.6 Barrels of Oil Per Person

Singapore tops the per capita oil consumption table at 93.6 barrels a person a year, ahead of Curaçao at 84.4. The United States is eleventh at 22.1.

The ranking is not measuring lifestyle. Singapore sold 56.77 million tonnes of marine bunker fuel in 2025, a record, which works out at a few hundred million barrels. That fuel goes into ships that then sail away, but all of it is counted against the roughly six million people who live there. Curaçao in second place and Malta in fifth are the same story, both refuelling ports. Luxembourg is ninth at 26.5 barrels, higher than the United States, because cheap diesel pulls transiting trucks in to fill up.

The Gulf states are different. Their oil really is burned at home. Qatar uses 40.2 barrels a person, Kuwait 39.2, and the UAE and Saudi Arabia 36.7 each, which means a Saudi uses 66% more oil than an American. Domestic fuel is cheap, power generation and desalination run on oil and gas, and heavy industry is spread across small populations.

So the table measures location and tax policy more than prosperity. To judge where oil demand will grow, population and industrial structure matter, not who sits at the top of a per capita list.

The accounting basis matters too. These figures include international shipping fuel, refinery fuel and biofuels, and a different basis would reorder the table.

Source: Eni World Energy Review 2026 and the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (Image: @jackprandelli)