If you think about it 25m gallons per day is not the right number for the USA, it's like 0.1 gallons per person order of magnitude, 10x that seems more reasonable, you also have to count all the public transportation, trucks etc.
If you hie over to FRED and look at retail sales from gasoline stations (which also includes candy bars, lottery tickets, etc. and is in dollars, not gallons), you will also see there was no recent massive drop -
Most of them just closed, others we sold, 2,220 in total. I remember around the election or before all mobile stations in my area going away. They either closed or became independent or remodeled into QuickTrips and other brands. Most of them closing due to gas prices at the time and the economy.
Possibly the dynamics of this contributed to a changed supply market since they were so big?
That data set isn't entirely helpful for addressing questions about U.S. retail gasoline consumption. "Petroleum products", as defined by the EIA, include "heating oils; gasoline, diesel and jet fuels; lubricants; asphalt; ethane, propane, and butane; and many other products used for their energy or chemical content" [1].
Most sales are wholesale - http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&...
Going to take a wild guess and say that a refinery sold some gas stations or somehow a bunch of sales got reclassified from retail to wholesale.
See definitions http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/TblDefs/pet_cons_refmg_tbldef2.a...
If you think about it 25m gallons per day is not the right number for the USA, it's like 0.1 gallons per person order of magnitude, 10x that seems more reasonable, you also have to count all the public transportation, trucks etc.
If you hie over to FRED and look at retail sales from gasoline stations (which also includes candy bars, lottery tickets, etc. and is in dollars, not gallons), you will also see there was no recent massive drop -
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CES4244700001
edit: Ack! that's employment at gas stations. Here is retail sales at gas stations -
http://www.economagic.com/em-cgi/data.exe/cenret/nrt447sa
the human mind is truly a rationalizing machine - when you look hard enough for a reason you will always find it, even when the data is bad.