By JANA KASPERKEVIC

Hearst Washington Bureau

Four Texas counties rank among the nation’s top ten users of gasoline, according to a new study released today by the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The three environmental groups studied oil consumption in each county in America, as well as per capita usage.

And whether you think it’s a good or a bad thing, Texas was represented on the list more often than any other state.

Harris County finished second in that nation, behind only Los Angeles, with an annual use of nearly 1.7 billion gallons of oil, or 328 gallons of gas per person.

Dallas finished fourth (behind Chicago’s Cook County) at 1.15 billion gallons — but residents in Big D used more gas per capita than their Houston counterparts, 368 gallons to 328.

Tarrant and Bexar Counties finished ninth and tenth in the nation.

Compared to the average county in the U.S., Harris County residents consume about 400 times as much gasoline. On a per person basis, they use more than twice as much as commuters in Los Angeles and 40 percent more than Chicago drivers.

But Houston-area drivers use slightly less, per person, than their big-city competitors in Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio.

If you want to find out more about your county’s oil dependency, you can access the map designed by the Sierra Club here.

Here are the top Texas counties:

2. Harris, Texas: Annual gasoline use of 1,687 million gallons

4. Dallas, Texas: Annual gasoline use of 1,152 million gallons

9. Tarrant, Texas: Annual gasoline use of 759 million gallons

10. Bexar, Texas: Annual gasoline use of 683 million gallons

According to Deron Lovass of NRDC, “just 108 counties out of the nation’s 3,144, or about 3.5 percent of the total consume more than 10 percent of the nation’s oil.” Consequently, he suggests that efforts to reduce our oil dependency should start in these specific geographic hot spots.

Consumption per person in these top oil-guzzling counties can give help further with targeting; those counties with high per-capita consumption levels afford the biggest opportunities for reductions. For example, Los Angeles County’s population is much larger than Dallas County’s, on average each person consumed much less in the former (147 gallons per person). If the per capita consumption in the latter (368 gallons per person) were halved, while still higher than the average Los Angeleno it could save more than a half-million gallons of gasoline a year!

But the real questions is: Are Texans ready to cut down on gas consumption?

“Geography and location affects state energy consumption for transportation. Traditional wisdom indicates that larger and rural states consume more gasoline for transportation than smaller and urban states,” claims Department of Energy‘s website. Texas is second to only Alaska when it comes to size, ranging 261,797 square miles.

It should also be noted that Texas was the top crude oil-producing state in 2011. According to U.S. Energy Information Administration: