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."

Comments

burgers

[matticus]

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?

Re:burgers

[CKW]

Nope.

Cows themselves are 1000 pounds or so.

A quick search shows that a cow will eat 25 pounds of hay per day - and the average age when taken to slaughter is 4-5 years.

That means one cow requires 41,000 pounds of feed over it's life, that's 20 tons. The amount of usable meat is around 700 pounds (although only 100 pounds or so is used for hamburger meat, but that's just the typing of the meat).

So for every single pound of (hamburger) meat, you need 58 pounds of hay. (Fair deal if you ask me.)

.
We haven't added in the transportation and processing costs, which if we used current plant matter instead of 10,000,000 year old refined plant matter, would increase it by how much? (Sorry, I'm not going to do that calculation).

What about thermal depolymerization?

[Xiver]

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.

If it *is* plants

[HarveyBirdman]

There's an idea that some oil comes from deeper sources, and has an abiogeneic origin. There are hundreds of wells drilled more than 5 km deep, below the levels of prehistoric plants (what is called "basement rock"), and they are still productive.

Here's a starter link: Link

Re:How many tons of hydrogen

[tbone1]

Not only that, but how much land would be opened up to agriculture if all our fuel came from crops? Would forests be leveled, swamps drained, topsoil eroded, etc?

Everything comes at a prices, monetary or otherwise. Most environmentalists (or at least, journalists writing on environmentalism) don't seem to grasp this.

Re:you assume

[mikerich]

There is no shortage of clear proof that this is where the oil comes from. Coal contains clearly fossilised plant material.. oil and coal and natural gas are often all found together.

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.

Re:Well -- yeah, Are you just figuring this out?

[Mattcelt]

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.)