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4 Tons Of Plants per Mile to Ride In Your Car
Roland Piquepaille writes "As you might know, I enjoy big numbers. So it's just natural that I was attracted by this news release from the University of Utah, "Bad Mileage: 98 tons of plants per gallon." "A staggering 98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant material is required to produce each gallon of gasoline we burn in our cars, SUVs, trucks and other vehicles." For a reasonably efficient car, riding 25 miles per gallon, this translates to 4 tons of prehistoric plants per mile, or more than two tons per kilometer. The research paper also mentions that everyday, we are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plants growing during a whole year just for our cars. Even if these numbers are too large, this still makes you think about how inefficient our cars are. This analysis describes the calculations and contains other details about the research paper which will be published in November by Climate Change."
Internal combustion engines have ALWAYS been inefficient. There have been attempts to make them more efficient, but there has NEVER been an engine based on gasoline that has exceeded even 35%. Even rotary engines are very poor producers of energy to a set of tires. Just the facts of life.
Anyone for Hydrogen?
25 miles per gallon is many things, but reasonably efficient isn't one of them.
Rob.
Isn't most of the original biomass water that does not end up in the oil/coal/gas deposits? Or am I missing something.
I just don't quite see the point of the guy who did the calculations/report... and I did read the article. This is just throwing around big meaningless numbers. At least Ig Nobel candidate material is train-wreck-interesting.
Why do we care about prehistoric plants that turned into underground petrochemical deposits millions for years ago. I agree that cars are ridiculously inefficient, but underground oil is not one of the natural features I am worried about being disturbed. Above-ground pollution, oil spills, global warming, yes, but why cry for rotten prehistoric plants?
John
Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born there. (GBS)
Its even better than that! Internal combustion engines are only about 25% efficient, so for every ten gallons of gas you put into your car, only 2.5 gallons are actually used to propel you forward, the rest is just used to heat up the engine and exhaust.
I agree that regular gas-powered cars could be made more efficient, but don't the numbers above point more towards the "inefficiency" of the prehistoric plants --> crude oil deposits process?
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Does it say how many tons of plants have existed in the last billion years or so?
I bet it's a lot.
But also about inefficiency of natural fossil fuels.
Key Fact.
Since only about one-10,750th of the original carbon in ancient plant material actually ends up as oil, multiply 4.14 kilograms by 10,750 to get roughly 44,500 kilograms of carbon in ancient plant matter to make a gallon of gas.
google cache of old-news biofuel breakthrough
Note they are claiming they can eliminate dependance on oil importation with agricultural waste alone. No other cultivation necessary.
And the point is. Once we use the biofuels, we are in the carbon cycle. No more pumping carbon out of the earth.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
No, I'm not talking about corn ethanol here, so please stop the silly arguments about how ethanol is inefficient - making it from corn is just silly. There are lots of cheap, far more easily harvested cellose-based plant products that can be broken down with slightly more effort into ethanol, and could provide us with a cheap, plentiful, and substantially more efficient means of storing and transporting biological energy to power our big ole' gas guzzlers.
This is a substantially more realistic and cost effective solution than hydrogen, and it doesn't require us to build massive amounts of new infrastructure (just a limited number of bioethanol plants) or a totally new kind of transportation and distribution network to handle hydrogen. Ethanol is stable, easy to transport, and holds up quite well to most abuse (well, except the drinking kind). It still takes a lot of cellosic material to make a gallon of bioethanol, but it's a lot less than went into that gallon of gas - it's just that the input of biological material happens in the here and now instead of millions of years ago - so we have to bear the cost ourselves. But it's renewable, predictable, and would remove the sick political imperatives behind the distribution and availability of fossil fuels. As an added bonus, no more terrorists.
Let's pretend that we've got just 5 million years' worth of plants as the source for all the oil. That gives us 13,000+ years of oil for our cars. Even if we assume that all other uses of fossil fuels amount to 10 times as much use per year, that still gives us well over 1200 years worth of energy.
Maybe by then the eco-whacko Left will allow us to build nuclear power plants again. I know, I know. Call me a dreamer...
Arrr!
Environmentalist: We're running out, and our current wasteful practices mean we're running out fast!
Apathetic response: Who cares about a bunch of dead plants anyway?
The answer being, as we (literally) burn through these resources, they not only produce waste that endangers the place we live, they also become more scarce -- leading to the places that have the dead plants, in the form of oil, receiving quite a lot of value for what's left. Scarcity and value, see? Take a look at the extreme wealth of Saudi Arabia's ruling family, examine the Wahaabist faith they've backed using that wealth, all the result of a scarcity of these old dead plants in the world, and then tell me -- is it a potential problem for oil to be the scarce resource we're relying on? Do we want to continue to use inefficient methods of blowing through the oil we've got left, making it more scarce, increasing the upheaval caused by things like Opec's production targets? Or not?
So, see, when environmentalists are worried about this, it's not some tree-hugging lovey-eyed thing on their part, it's self-interest. Similarly, when scientists fret over an oncoming mass extinction, they're worried because no previous mass extinction has allowed the currently dominant group of species to continue in that role. It's not that they're only worried about black-footed ferrets or whatever; they also see that human survival is at stake.
That being the point. Not that "really big numbers" is necessarily the best argument, but human survival is the point.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Rather, it says that fossil fuel, and the process it goes through to get to the point that it is useable for a fuel (including the several thousand years it spends underground), is inefficient. The same cars running on grain alcohol use considerably less, as far as I know - I can't imagine 4 tons of corn being used to produce a gallon of grain alcohol...
Major logical fallacy: that 2 tons (or however much) went to make the whole cow, not a single burger. Your single quarter-pounder is no doubt equivalent to several pounds of cowfeed, but that's nothing like as ineffecient as the conversions being talked about here.
Moreover however much the cow ate, its food came from recently grown, mostly sustainable sources (eg hay). It's carbon neutral over a matter of years. Burning up fossil fuels at this rate would be carbon neutral only over thousands if not millions of years, i.e. it would take that may years of plant growth to put that carbon back in the soil.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
I don't see the point of this post. We will never run out of oil. Why? Economics. Assume oil began to become scarce. No new supply is replacing the oil taken from the ground. Assuming fixed demand, the price of oil would rise as the supply diminished. (If demand rose, the price would rise even more.)
As prices rise, alternatives to oil become financially viable. Suddenly fuel cells or wind power or any other technology currently more expensive than oil looks attractive to investors. Those who can afford oil buy it, while others turn to the alternatives. Assuming no new oil is discovered (to address the supply issue), eventually no one cares about oil as everyone has transitioned to other forms of energy. The remaining oil sits in the ground unused.
Of course this adjustment must take place over the mid- to long-run. Short-term adjustments are called "oil shocks," such as we had in the 1970s or during the early days of most recent wars.
Helevius
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Also, gas is one of the best ways to back that much energy in to a small space.
Yeah, but a Hummer is not the best ways to use that energy, which is the real point of the article.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
What would a geek do?
People want to drive SUVs. But SUVs use too much gas and pollute too much. What is the proper geek response to this dilemma?
A. Make everyone walk, take the bus, and drive smaller cars.
B. Invent an SUV that gets 100 miles to the gallon (preferably a gallon of H20).
It amazes me how many geeks reach for the social engineering solution instead of the ingenious, creative technical response that is the hallmark of geekdom.
Capitalists have managed to convince you that they are Creating Profit when they pump oil (cut rainforests, build suburbs, etc) and sell it -- in fact, they are not. They are ROBBING the planet (which we must all share wisely) and telling you its "ok".
No, oil is an energy source. When it is no longer practical and/or desirable, you do understand that the Sun is always a very good Plan B?
There is no shortage of energy. There will never by a shortage of energy until the Sun goes nova and evaporates the earth. Using oil is robbing the earth of nothing, and it is our inefficient and irresponsible use of that oil that is the biggest problem. Low emissions is simply an engineering problem (and one that doesn't need to be driven by legislation, either, as markets for energy-efficient engines become more common).
The best thing you can do is spread awareness of alternative types of engines/power sources/etc. and help create the demand for them and the resulting markets that drive the corporations. Consumer demand does wonders and is more efficient than the government even dreams about.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Or let's go with fresh fruits, I live in Toronto and guess what, most of my apples come from California.
There is something horrificly wrong in the way the market works I'd say.
Just like the AC said, read up on comparative advantage. It's called free trade. I live in a temperate area. I can't get pineapples from my region because you can't grow pineapples in temperate zones. Thus the Thai produce it for me. My regional economy is better suited to producing apples and grapes, so these products are produced in leiu of other products.
It's not horrifically wrong at all. It makes perfect sense and it is the way the world economy should work. That is, unless you'd like to go back to preindustrial conditions and live by the mercy of the harvest.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Assuming that it _DOES_ take 98 tons of plant material to produce one gallon of gasoline, they're still wrong. Gas is just one of the things that comes from crude oil. Think they just throw the rest away? Nope. It all gets used: Grease, Fuel-grade oil, Diesel, whatever. There's a market for every grade. How many plants does it make for a gallon of crude? And how much of that becomes gasoline? That's the real number that matters.
"Robert O. Russell, a wellsite geologist at the first well in North America (at Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada) drilled into crystalline basement granitic shield rocks for the express purpose of commercial hydrocarbon exploration, has pointed out that there are more than 400 wells and fields worldwide, both off-shore and on-shore that produce or have recently produced oil from igneous rocks." (Quoted from here)
There is really no evidence supporting an organic origin of petroleum. At one time, it was the best explanaition we had; now, with oil drilled from beneath basement rock, and from 3B-year-old sandstone, there is no longer any reason to just assume organic origin. Too much evidence points to non-organic origins.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
In a word, NO. Welcome to the world of economies of scale. Cans of tuna are not delivered from the packing plant to your grocer's shelf individually in personal automobiles. They're packed into flats that are loaded onto pallets that are then carried by ship and/or truck to the final destination. Although road tractors don't get stellar fuel economy, they carry a massive amount of cargo and the transportation costs are divided among the entire payload.
For that matter, here in the US, a first-class postal letter costs $0.37. According to your logic, a postal carrier picks my single letter out of my mail box, drives it all the way to California, or where ever, and delivers it to the destination mail box, all for $0.39.
You are! All costs associated with bringing the product to the shelf, plus the fraction of the operating expenses for the store (personnel, electricity, insurance, etc) for you to buy are wrapped up in the purchase price!