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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."
and every time I eat a burger, 2 tons of modern plants died to make that cow (or something like that).
We all know the cars burn too much energy. how long of a period were plants compressed for oil? thus, how long until we run out?
I read an interesting article at Discover.com. Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year.
I think this is a huge step in the right direction, I'll be very interested to see what happens once the plant is online.
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
Anyone want to take a stab at how much a horse eats per mile? I guess to be fair, you'd probably want to multiply it by 4 at least. Even then it's only 4 horsepower versus like 100-150 in your standard economy car.
Here's a starter link: Link
--- Ban humanity.
Everything comes at a prices, monetary or otherwise. Most environmentalists (or at least, journalists writing on environmentalism) don't seem to grasp this.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Yes, from the article:
...only about one-10,750th of the original carbon in ancient plant material actually ends up as oil...
There are several theories that hydrocarbons come from something else than compressed rotting plants.
The evidence is mainly circumstantial, and based on the observation that oil & gas seems to be linked to geographical formations like volcanoes and thin crusts rather than being tied to (e.g.) coal deposits, which would seem more likely.
Coal, after all, does contain plant remains enough to prove that it's most likely compressed peat and bogs.
But oil is a bit wierd. My theory (and it's probably not original) is that hydrocarbons are remains of annobacteria colonies that live off sulphur compounds deep in the earth's crust. Such bacteria are known to exist, observed around volcanic vents in the ocean floor, for instance.
Now imagine _really_ large colonies of such bacteria, living in hot porous sulphur-rich rocks, and dying to rot and produce oil and gas.
Seems more likely than (oil = compressed dinosaur bones and cabbage) to me.
Which also implies that oil is a much more massive resource than previously thought, it won't run out soon, but instead the problems it causes (global heating, oil-driven warfare in poor countries) will continue for a long time to come.
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Actually there is some evidence for a non-biogenic source for some oil reserves. It came as a surprise to me as well when I did my geology degree.
Thomas Gold (most famous for his Steady-State Theory of the Universe) postulated that oil might be formed from organic compounds deep in the Mantle which migrate up to the surface. IIRC he persuaded the Swedes to sink a test well into ancient hard shield rocks (where there should be no signs of hydrocarbons) and indeed traces of such compounds were recovered. Now I don't know whether they excluded the possibility that they were products of the lubricating mud used to drill the well or if they were younger oil seeping into the basement rocks from a distant reservoir.
However, the vast majority of oil reserves are clearly from fossilised plants. The breakdown products of porphyrins (the complex organo metal compounds such as chlorophyll) can be extracted from most crudes.
Finally, oil, coal and natural gas may be found close to one another, but are usually not. For instance, the mainland of the UK has enormous coal reserves, but only one productive oil field and no on-shore gas. British oil probably originates in the Kimmeridge Clay - an organic rich clay that was formed in the late Jurassic. Conversely, the Middle East almost entirely lacks coal, but holds 60% of the World's petroleum reserves. The closest association is usually natural gas and oil - where it has been driven off from oil reservoirs that have been heated.
In the Southern North Sea much of the natural gas probably came from the underlying Coal Measures which have been deeply buried and exposed to intense heat.
Best wishes,
Mike.
It's a selective usage of statistics at best and an irrelevant spin on an irrelevant fact designed to decieve people to win supporters in the most likely case.
This article is fraudulent.
Lets start with the easy one. First, they write off as waste all the other products of the oil that don't become gasoline. So, remove another 50% from the tally...
Next, they add the weight of all the plant that didn't manage to become oil, even after all the water is disregarded. In fact, the multiply their figure by 10,750 (there's a few orders of magnitude in there if you werent counting).
Finally, and most importantly, it doesn't matter how many dead, prehistoric plants were required to make the oil we use. It's an irrelevant number, no matter how large or small. Any meaning derived out of this article was conjured by spin and implication.
Ditch the propaganda. If you don't have solutions, don't waste money on research.
Agreed. From the original post: Even if these numbers are too large, this still makes you think about how inefficient our cars are.
This is a misleading statement; obviously our cars are not directly burning 4 tons per mile! As the AC above states, the 'inefficiency' in this article is really with mother nature, which is what turns that 4 tons of organic matter into fossil fuels. Even then, we refine it even further - what we use in our gas tanks is actually very efficient even compared to raw crude, much less the original decomposing matter!
So to say that our machines are inefficient by this deduction is absolutely incorrect. It's sort of like saying that a candle burns inefficiently because it took so many "bee hours" of labor to create the candle: the creation of the wax has nothing whatsoever to do with the burn rate of the candle. (I can add or remove things from the wax which can raise or lower the burn efficiency independently of how many bees it took to create the wax.)
Take that away, and you've taken away the part of the figure that people can relate to.
.00001.
That's why it's fraudulent. They needed to artificially inflate the number to make people relate to it. I can think of a million apt analogies, but let's suffice it to say that I could relate any meaning I wanted in any reasearch I wanted to do if I were allowed to multiply the resluting data by 10,000, or
To make maters worse, there are plenty of valid arguments against oil use. There is no reason to fabricate addtional arguments by twisting some meaningless numbers into a suggestive paper.
but studies like these demonstrate just how much of a resource drain it is.
No, studies like this plant a totally false impression of how much of a resource drain it is. We could extract the same energy from far fewer plants because we don't have to throw away 99.990% of the plant before we start.
Actually, what I find interesting is "4 tons" like that is a BIG number
I live on a small plot of land in NY - 50x100, and most of THAT is house
From April till Mid October, I take 10 cubic feet of grass clippings/week off my lawn. Call it 28 weeks. That's 280 cubic feet of grass clippings, at 24 lbs/cu ft, or 6720 lbs (Note only about 1/4 of that property is grass) - then figure in leaves from the trees - another 120 cubic feet, at 14lbs/cu ft. Thats 1680 lbs - so I "raise" a total crop of 8400lbs of clippings/leaves per year, or 4.2 tons. Note, this doesn't count growth of the trees. Maple comes in at about 37lbs/cu ft (DRY - green is MORE) Oak is about 45 lbs/cuft. Think how many cubic feet are in an oak tree - you probably have 10 tons or more in a typical full grwn tree
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso