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

say no to cars?

[QEDog]

Reminds me of an article posted in /. before that said:

"Building more roads to combat traffic congestion is like buying a bigger belt to combat obesity"

Re:say no to cars?

[SubtleNuance]

No, you dont have to stop making people. You have to reduce the resources people use for personal transportation.

More buses, bike lanes, walk-ways, Human-Scale Urban Planning, streetcars, subways etc all have a positive effect of reducing energy used.

Further, Im a litter perturbed with your ignorant, tired argument. The "Environmentalists are luddites" argument is stupidity. Environmentalists want balance. Technology can help achieve that balance. But too often than not, more better bigger stuff is just made for the sake of it... for the sake of consumption. This wasted energy (for instance, the personal 4tonne SUV) is what is The Problem. As this article articulates, the trouble is that we are consuming stored energy at such a rate it is amazing. Humanity needs to understand give and take w/ the Natural World. As it stands, we are destroying this vibrant natural world -- all the life on this planet that we managed to live with for millions of years is jeapordized by the the explosion of consumption over the last 3-400 years (for instance). You may think that Some New Technology will arise to solve our problems -- I dont -- and I have no interest in taking that very risky bet. New technology is welcome and necessary -- but ALL the impact of modern life needs to be assessed. When you expell crap into the air from your SUV, you are soiling the Commons. When you pump up oil, refine it and burn it in your SUV you are *NOT* paying the full cost.

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". Its not, and if there is any sense in Humanity, we had better realize it quick - and not just about Oil. Look around you -- the glue in your chipped-wood desk, the metal PC case, your telephone, the lights, the carpet, drywall, everything around you was made in a giant pollution belching factory somewhere. We *cannot* continue to create all that pollution. The natural resources required to create that stuff (outside of the toxic waste byproducts), *is* ALSO not infinite.

Oil/Cars are one big problem, but not the only one. We are polluting ourselves off the planet, destroying our natural heritage, living in 'the red' wrt Energy use, and telling ourselves how Fucking Smart we are. Get real buddy and wake the hell up.

Re:say no to cars?

[MKalus]

No, you dont have to stop making people. You have to reduce the resources people use for personal transportation.

I got another good one for: Be more local.

The other day in the supermarket I saw some cookies, they sold for 87 cents (plus tax).

Problem is: They were made in Jamaica, sold to Singapore and then finally sold in Canada.

I just guess here, but I would say those cookies travelled more than I did in the past 2 years and most definetly used more than 87 cents worth of energy.

Oh, and as for the caloric value, according to the nutrional information on the back, the pack contains 600 kCal.

M.

Re:say no to cars?

[pmz]

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.

Re:say no to cars?

[onyxruby]

The "Environmentalists are luddites" argument is stupidity. Environmentalists want balance.

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

Asked and answered

As it stands, we are destroying this vibrant natural world -- all the life on this planet that we managed to live with for millions of years is jeapordized by the the explosion of consumption over the last 3-400 years (for instance).

Tell that to the Wooly Mammoth, North American Horse and North American Camel that were all hunted to extinction thousands of years ago. There are many species on this planet that have been hunted well before this 3-400 time period of which you speak. Please check your history before spouting your ignorance of it.

You may think that Some New Technology will arise to solve our problems -- I dont

The "Environmentalists are luddites" argument is stupidity.

Asked and answered no 2.

New technology is welcome and necessary -- but ALL the impact of modern life needs to be assessed

I'll make sure I do a worldwide environmental impact statement before patenting my widget. Perhaps the Earth Simulator in Japan will have a time slot available?

When you expell crap into the air from your SUV

Really! I have an SUV, where can I pick it up? Here I thought the high mileage small cars I have been driving for the last decade were a little cramped for carrying much beyond myself.

Capitalists have managed to convince you that they are Creating Profit when they pump oil (cut rainforests, build suburbs, etc) and sell it

Dictionary.com defines profit as:

The return received on a business undertaking after all operating expenses have been met.

Perhaps your referring to pollution? An environmentalist such as yourself should be familiar with pollution:

The act or process of polluting or the state of being polluted, especially the contamination of soil, water, or the atmosphere by the discharge of harmful substances.

They are ROBBING the planet (which we must all share wisely) and telling you its "ok".

Again, you are having trouble with definitions. I want to introduce you to the word: exploit

To utilize; to make available; to get the value or usefulness out of; as, to exploit a mine or agricultural lands; to exploit public opinion.

You'll notice that this is the exact same word used to describe the process of taking plant material for consumption.

everything around you was made in a giant pollution belching factory somewhere

Now I've heard of painting with a pretty broad brush before, but I think that takes the cake. Remember folks Everything was made in a "pollution belching factory". As I stated in my original comment, the objective is to get everybody back the horse and buggy and you have proven my point for me. Thank-you.

Re:say no to cars?

[JaredOfEuropa]

The "Environmentalists are luddites" argument is stupidity. Environmentalists want balance. Technology can help achieve that balance.

Environmentalists want control.

Environmentalists are often portrayed as selfless idealists who fight for a good cause. For many of the environmentalists, this is true (whether or not their good cause is a misguided one, is another matter). But I do not trust the environmentalists that matter: the ones in political parties, in lobbyists groups, or the loudest individuals in the green movements. They are not selfless, although it may seem so because they aren't after money. It is power, influence and control over other people's lives that they want.

Environmentalists are seen as luddites, because the top dog environmentalists often dismiss technological solutions to environmental problems out of hand. They would prefer a dirty factory to close or to produce less, rather than have its smokestacks fitted with scrubbers. Why? Selfish reasons. If the factory closes, they have shown themselves to be influential and caring for the environment. They'll garner the credits for the positive impact on the environment. And with any luck, they get to tell who can be allowed to use the now scarce products of this factory. In contrast, if the factory is fitted with scrubbers, they do not gain a lot of power, or even recognition: it's the factory owners who will, as 'responsible businessmen'. You can see this behaviour anywhere. The more rabiat environmentalists do not want cleaner cars, they want us to drive less. They don't want cheap energy, they want us using less of it.

I do realise that it might seem that I lump all environmentalists together, but that is not my intention. My point is that the label 'luddite' for environmentalists, is earned for then by the loudest few amongst them. It may also seem that I paint a rather sinister image of these environmentalists. Again, I do not include all of them; I am sure the majority of them are well-meaning individuals. But I do not trust the kind of environmentalists who dismisses solutions for vague reasons, because they are 'impractical', 'only postpone the inevitable', or are 'only seemingly clean', and try to push their preferred measures 'for our own good'. If you hear anyone utter those 4 words, you can be sure that it's their own good they are after.

Re:say no to cars?

[spike hay]

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.

Re:say no to cars?

[MKalus]

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.

What is wrong is simply the cost, I am sure there is more spent on fuel to truck the apples to the store than I pay for it.

Someone has to subsidize it, I wonder who.

Remember, there is no free lunch (or apple).

Besides, Ontario grows quite a lot of their own apples.

Re:say no to cars?

[Nahor]

There will never by a shortage of energy until the Sun goes nova

I don't know about that. I always wondered what would happens if we truly use solar and wind energy? I mean we won't get more energy from the sun everyday because we use it. And that energy today has to go somewhere. Are we going to get another ice age because we use the solar energy to light a bulb instead of warming the planet or drier because less water will evaporate? Are we going to have drier seasons on the east and wetter seasons on the west because the wind won't have enough energy to move the clouds?

Mind, I'm not saying that I prefer to stay with gas, coal and stuff, I'm just wondering. Everything has a cost, even sun and wind. But what is this cost for renewable energy?

Re:say no to cars?

[Glock27]

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?

Right, along with hydrogen for fusion.

The one point I'd make about burning all that oil is that it would be much better used to make plastic (recyclable and long-lived). Making plastic may be fairly difficult once the oil is gone. On the other hand, with unlimited energy making plastic seems a solvable problem...

Re:say no to cars?

[Paracelcus]

When you consider that the conditions needed to create the oil and coal fields were a one time only occurance and will never happen again, isn't it a crying shame to squander these resources on two block trips to the grocery store in a Hummer?

Instead of driving five miles to the park to jog, just walk to the store and back.

My mother used to walk all over Brooklyn pulling a little shopping cart behind her going from store to store buying "whats on sale", she lived to be 75 and was as strong as three cell phone toting yuppies!

Re:say no to cars?

[Suidae]

Are we going to get another ice age because we use the solar energy to light a bulb instead of warming the planet or drier because less water will evaporate?

No, almost all of it turns into heat at the end anyway, turning it into electricity and moving a car around with it before it turns into heat just makes it more useful to us.

Now, if we put orbital collectors up or plate the moon with solar collectors and then transmit that energy to the Earth, then we will be adding more energy to the planet, in effect, we would be making the sun a tiny bit brighter. Probably not enough to have an environmental impact, maybe.

Re:say no to cars?

[Varitek]

It's called free trade.

Despite what you may have learned, "It's free trade" isn't the answer to end all answers. Free trade is notoriously poor at valuing externalities. Transporting goods over long distances, for example, may be profitable, but would be less so if the transporter had to pay the actual cost of the pollution he's creating.

Re:say no to cars?

[MacDude1]

Exactly. Pumping oil from the ground no more robs the planet of resources than you or I would rob the trash can by removing a bananna peel. The earth does not 'need' those oil reserves. They are a byproduct of carbon-based materials that died and subjected to sudden, intense pressure. Granted, it is not a 'renewable' source of energy, but to claim we are robbing the earth is alarmist language - pure and simple.

Should we try to develop more efficient internal combustion engines? Sure. Should we try to develop more efficient and renewable sources of energy? Of course. However, until those resources are available, we do our quality of life a huge disservice by saying we should not use the resources given to us. Does anyone here use tupperware? How about any other plastic products (hint: petroleum based). We need that resource. It is still in abundant supply on our planet - if we would just be left alone to go get it. Fine. Make sure the companies contracted to extract the resource from the ground are responsible for the ecosystem in which they work; but stop all the chicken little hysterics over pulling it from the ground.

Those of you worried about the environmental impact of drilling in areas like the vastly uninhabited ANWR should be more concerned about what is most likely very unsafe conditions in the nuclear power plants being built by the Iranians and the N. Koreans. Use your vehemence and vitriol wisely. Don't waste it on something that will make your life better.

Re:say no to cars?

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

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.

If you can't produce pineapples then it would absolute advantage (not comparative advantage; comparative is when both can produce the product). Anyway...

There are things you capitalists don't consider: the environment (among others). For you, a capitalist, the only thing that matters is price. The fact that you can get apples from your local farmer does not matter if you can import it for less from somewhere else. The fact that the imported apples traver further, resulting in transporation pollution, chemicals being injected into the fruits to keep them preseved, fruits being artificially coloured (did you know that some fruits are artificially "painted" to look like a fresh fruit), etc. Capitalism never considers any of these issues. The only thing that matters is price. IF the environment, for example, was priced into the product, the problem wouldn't exist. But as it is--and as it will always be under capitalism--destroying the environemnt and polluting has zero cost!!!

The funny thing about all this is that these issues will not manifest if the world were egalitarian. Unfortunately, capitalism is elitist and blocks egalitarianism. For instance, if wages were the same everywhere (they should be, since humans are all equal), the environmental policies were the same everywhere, etc, no one would be importing apples from far way. They would, instead, buy it locally. In other words, comparative advantage will become less meaningful.

Capitalists claim to produce wealth and to create efficiency. The fact of the matter is, that is codeword for simply exploiting people. In many cases, the reason companies move to another country, or import products from another country, is simply because the environmental, social, political, etc conditions are not the same. The reason these capitalists create profit is, not because they did anything revolutionary, but because they simply cut say labour costs by moving to another country where people would be willing to work 12 hours a day, without washroom breaks, for low wages. If these people weren't as vulnerable then these capitalists wouldn't be creating any wealth!

It's funny how the capitalists and their allies blame the left-wing for everything, ranging from trade all the way to preventing wealth creation. We, the left wing, are not against trade! Trade is something that existed thousands of years before capitalism manifested itself!!! I, speaking as a leftist, is perfectly fine with trade relating to absolute advantage. If I can't produce something, I'll happily import it. What the left wing is generally against is wealth creation by simply exploitation, generally masked as wealth creation or comparative advantage.

Capitalism Sucks! Thanks for reading :)

Sivaram Velauthapillai

Re:say no to cars?

[Smidge204]

I am sure there is more spent on fuel to truck the apples to the store than I pay for it.

If that were true, then the company selling the product would have to be losing money. There's no way you could turn a profit selling items for less than what they cost you to produce and deliver.

The secret is bulk. They don't send a delivery truck for each can of tuna, and another truck for each bag of potato chips, and a van for each box of cookies. Everything goes into one truck and delivered at the same time.

It costs, say, $40 in fuel to drive a truck from the warehouse to the store and back (About half a tank for most box trucks with the diesel prices around here nowadays). But that truck can carry easily carry over $5000 worth (retail price) of groceries. Go ahead and throw in maintenance, diver salary, and insurance. You're still coming out ahead. That's why you're in the business, after all... to make money.

Now extrapolate that to a container ship that can easily carry a billion dollars worth of assorted cargo and costs $600,000 to sail across the ocean.

If anything, it's more energy efficient to ship things in bulk from halfway around the planet than to harvest only what you need locally. Imagine if every town had to grow it's own food? There's no way hat a hundred million farmers toiling over a hundred million little farms with a hundred million little tractors is more efficient than ten thousand farmers working thousands of acres of land with just three or four machines each.

And I won't even mention that the larger the engine/powerplant gets, the more efficient it becomes. Especially diesel engines and turbines.

In leu of subsidization, it's still cheaper and more efficient to buy in bulk. And if anything, you're paying tariffs on those imported foods!
=Smidge=

Re:say no to cars?

[Stephan Schulz]

Or let's go with fresh fruits, I live in Toronto and guess what, most of my apples come from California. 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.

In fact, the truth is, as usual, in between. There is nothing wrong with us buying pineapples from Thailand (I like pineapple ;-).

What is wrong is that we allow the producers and/or traders to externalize much of the price of actually making and shipping things around, i.e. we all pay for the infrastructure and subsidize energy costs (either directly, e.g. by invading unfriendly but petroleum-rich countries) or indirectly, by not charging for enviromental degradation.

As a result I can often buy a pineapple at about the same price per gramm as apples grown next door. I don't want to pay more for pineapples (I react slighly allergic to plain raw plain apples, and I like pineapples better anyways), but I definitly agree that a more rational system would make them quite a lot more expensive.

Capitalism is very good at optimizing resource usage within a given set of constrainst. It's the job of politics to provide the constraints that lead to a reasonable outcome. And it's our job to elect politicians that actually do something about it, instead of those that just promise lower taxes, higher profits, and cheaper pineapples.

Re:say no to cars?

[abradsn]

I wish that people would get off the "SUV's are evil" kick.

Let me preface this with: I don't own an SUV.

1. Most electricity is derived from burning coal.
2. Coal pollutes, a lot too.
3. Air planes burn a lot of fuel, even though they are a form of mass transit.
4. Sometimes they dump their excess fuel before they land.
5. Try standing under that air plane as it drops hundreds of pounds of fuel over your head.
6. I'm a tough individual, but my eyes were burning.
7. I won't get started on the biggest pollution problem. -- The ocean. Instead I recomend that anyone reading this take a class in marine biology. You will learn all you need to, and you won't have to take my word for the problems we face.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the artical is misleading. Not all of the plant is converted to oil only a small part. This is intuitive, becouse your car dosen't carry 52 tons of gas in its tank. Also, gas is one of the best ways to back that much energy in to a small space.
-James

Re:burgers

[pinkboi]

No, really? What if we just ate those plants instead? Hell, then we could feed more people than just a smaller amount of us fat Americans.
<liberal hippie mode off>

<fat American mode on> Don't worry, it doesn't even come close to the amount of trash I make. If someone doesn't eat those cows, they will just go to waste anyway.

Re:burgers

[ekephart]

Convenient, you didn't turn fat American mode off.

Re:burgers

[misterpies]

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.

Re:burgers

[greenhide]

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.

Re:burgers

[b!arg]

Just a random thought, which has probably been refuted before and makes no real economic sense, in any sense of the word. It's also probably the complete wrong direction to go too or is being done already and I'm missing something competely(is that enough qualification for you?). But if we can compress carbon to create diamonds, why can't we grow plants and compress them to create oil? I'll go back to my coding now...

Re:burgers

[MoP030]

i want a burger that contains _any_ actual cow...

Re:burgers

[Merk]

Why do you need to get to that destination? Could you get there by walking, or taking a mountain bike? Sure, someone who buys a hummer but never leaves the pavement is an ass. But that doesn't automatically mean that someone who does leave the pavement needs a Hummer... or that they even need to leave the pavement at all.

Re:burgers

[nizo]

But you know what keeps me up at night? Our bodies are made up of matter that came from dying stars, how many stars had to die to make each one of us???

Re:burgers

[TnkMkr]

Funny you should ask we already do...
It's called biodiesel and is in the proccess of becoming cheaper to use. It is made from vegitable oils at a rate of about 86% output from the oil used.

check the site
http://www.biodiesel.org/pdf_files/Productio n.PDF( sorry about c/p)
for details

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).

Re:burgers

[chainsaw1]

Gasoline is a byproduct of chemical production stocks being separated from crude oil. As long as we need plastics, paint (acryllic acid), pharmaceuticals, solvents (nail polish remover/ acetone), etc. we will have gasoline, propane, butane, etc. as well

I should add that to get relatively (> 96%) pure ethanol from water you need one of those stocks (benzine) to extract it. Water and ethanol form an azeotrope at 96% EtOH to H2O

Re:burgers

[Rogerborg]

I note that you cited a PETA claim as one of your sources. If PETA told me that cows eat grass, I'd go and check myself to make sure.

Beef cattle are slaughtered at 18 months. Add a little more for the breeding cows, and you can push it to two years average. Find your own links.

Since your 700/100 lbs per cow is from a completely unreferenced anecdote, I'll throw in one of my own. McDonalds burgers are 100% beef, because they are (very nearly) 100% of the cow. Picture a huge cow sized grinder, making cow paste. You don't have to believe me; instead, find me anyone who works in the slaughter industry who'll eat a fast food burger.

Re:burgers

[Brandybuck]

We need to conserve people. We're running out of dying stars.

Re:burgers

[bobbis.u]

Yeah, I don't get why the governments don't just introduce an extra, more stringent driving test to drive cars with a mass of more than 1500kg, say.

Overnight you have eliminated an enormous number of SUV's, 4x4's, etc. All of this without really penalising the people that actually _need_ to use them at all. It is also a good idea purely from a safety point of view, because these larger vehicles are inherently more dangerous for pedestrians and other road users due to their greater momentum, poorer handling and reduced maneovreability

you assume

[Anonymous Coward]

That plant material is the source of the oil reserves. I do not think there were ever enough plant mass ever to give us the amount of oil we have presently. FP

Re:you assume

[Anonymous Coward]

That plant material is the source of the oil reserves. I do not think there were ever enough plant mass ever to give us the amount of oil we have presently. FP

Well, it might be that oil didn't just come from bio-matter, but from ancient geological processes during earth's formation/early evolution. At least, that is what the Soviet's believed, and they seemed to have lots of oil.

Re:you assume

[wa5ter]

What are you suggesting? 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. The process of generating them can be simulated very easily.

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:you assume

[Hits_B]

I hate to split hairs here, but as a geologist who has worked in oil and gas exploration I need to clarify a few points. First, if you assume a biogenic origin for hydrocarbon deposits then you realize that different types of organic matter generate different types of hydrocarbons. I need to quote F.K. North from his book Petroleum Geology. In it on page 53 he states " Oil is not derived, as coal is, from terrestrial plant materials." As a result plant material is responsible for the generation of natural gas. Liquid hydrocarbons originate from the sapropelic material that typically is aquatic algae and may include some spores and pollens.

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

[Biff98]

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?

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.)

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

[Sique]

You got it right ;)
The message of those eco-whacko Leftists is: Minimize your footprint. Reduce your energy consumption. Reduce your soil consumption. Reduce your area consumption. Be more efficient. Be more productive with your resources. Turn out more bang for the bucks. Oh wait. That's not eco-whacko. That's purely capitalistic: Get more out of your investment. Produce more with less.

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

[IronTomFlint]

The message of those eco-whacko Leftists is: Minimize your footprint.

By cutting off your feet.

Reduce your energy consumption.

By not consuming any at all - unless you're an eco-whacko Leftist on the way to protest SUVs, in which case it's perfectly acceptable to fly a polluting jet airplane

Reduce your soil consumption.

I'm safe here; I don't eat dirt. However, the eco-whacko Left would prefer that I reduce it anyway by composting myself - as soon as possible

Reduce your area consumption.

By living in straw huts packed with 20 people

Be more efficient.

By vandalizing and destroying other people's goods (so that they must consume more resources in order to repair or replace them) and setting traps for lumberjacks (so that they "reduce their energy consumption").

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

[Biff98]

Lets put it this way -- If you took all the oil (some 200 years supply left at current consumption levels), and instead used it to produce hydrogen, your fossil fuel consumption levels would go WAY down (because cars aren't using them anymore) AND the plants generating the hydrogen would be able to cut emissions better than a car.

Suddenly you have a few millenia to figure out how to make electricity to produce hydrogen without gasoline. Think we can do it?

oil and petrolium

[elrick_the_brave]

Hmm.. I've always wondered if we'd run out of oil (reasonably priced.. when the price is fixed) in my lifetime... some say yes... I really don't care about having a car.. it's convenient... but I do care about plastics and other poly-things that we get from oil-based resources... how long could humanity go without?

reasonably efficient?

[ratbag]

25 miles per gallon is many things, but reasonably efficient isn't one of them.

Rob.

Re:reasonably efficient?

[weave]

A U.S. gallon is 4/5ths that of an Imperial gallon, so once you adjust for that, you're down in the crap range as well!

Re:reasonably efficient?

[MindStalker]

Yes, but we have substatially increased the weight and engine load of the vehicle adding such luxeries as a starter and battery, wide traction tires, automatic transmition, power steering, air conditioning, etc. The Model T. engine had a lot less it had to do.

Re:reasonably efficient?

[Alan Cox]

Not really. An efficient EU car does 50+ so that becomes 40+. Some of the smart cars do a lot better. Amazing how putting fuel costs in tax *on the fuel* motivates the market to innovate instead of letting flat taxes distort it.

Isn't most of the original mass water?

[YetAnotherAnonymousC]

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.

Re:Isn't most of the original mass water?

[andykuan]

Well here are some percent water composition numbers for various fruits and veggies from a Virginia Farm Bureau article.

Let's say plants are 75% water (probably a bit high, but I'm being conservative here). That 4 tons of wet-weight per mile becomes 1 ton of wet-weight per mile. It's all in the same order of magnitude. 2000 pounds of dried spinach to push my car 1 mile is still a lot of plant matter.

Anyway, I think the point of this calculation is similar to the point being made by those illustrative lessons (say, in Time Magazine) about how many miles high a trillion dollars in debt would be if we stacked 1 dollar bills, or how many miles of muscle we have in our body, or the number of land mines per person have been buried in Korea. It just offers a different perspective.

Re:Isn't most of the original mass water?

[ivan256]

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.

Re:Isn't most of the original mass water?

[ivan256]

Sorry, I meant to say if you're not looking for solutions, don't waste money on research...

Re:Isn't most of the original mass water?

[poot_rootbeer]

Could you maybe tell us WHY it's "fraudulent" to include all the parts of the prehistoric plants that don't get turned into gasoline?

Take that away, and you've taken away the part of the figure that people can relate to. We all know what living plants look like, what with their water mass and their insoluble fiber. If you take only the stuff that becomes gasoline, what does that look like? Is that crude oil? I don't even know. Now THAT would be a meaningless statistic.

it doesn't matter how many dead, prehistoric plants were required to make the oil we use.

I disagree. No one would argue that oil is a renewable resource, but studies like these demonstrate just how much of a resource drain it is.

Re:Isn't most of the original mass water?

[ivan256]

Take that away, and you've taken away the part of the figure that people can relate to.

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 .00001.

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.

Re:Isn't most of the original mass water?

[meta-monkey]

You're absolutely right. I think we need to do all we can to be good stewards of the earth...try not to make a mess in the first place, and clean it up when we do. However, I think our dependence on fossil fuels will end long before we run out of fossil fuels. I seriously doubt cars will still be running on gasoline 100 years from now, as new technologies become available, and it becomes harder and harder to extract oil from deeper and deeper in increasingly remote corners of the planet.

I think it was economist Walter Williams who came up with this example, but he may have simply retold it from someone else. Imagine you absolutely love pistachio nuts. A friend presents you with a room, empty but for a giganitc pile of nuts on the floor that take up half the space in the room. You can eat all you want, but the only conditions are that you can't bring the nuts out of the room, nor can you throw the discarded shells out of the room, either. How long until all the nuts are gone?

The answer is never. Eventually, it becomes too expensive to gather the nuts. The unshelled nuts get lost in the mess of the discarded shells, and you give up and go to the store to buy nuts, instead. Same thing with energy...right now, the optimal economic solution is to keep using oil. When it gets to be more and more expensive to use that oil, you won't see our world grind to a halt...you'll see either more effecient use of the oil, or a switch to cheaper forms of energy altogether.

Re:Isn't most of the original mass water?

[CharlieG]

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

Inefficient?

[jeffkjo1]

Even if these numbers are too large, this still makes you think about how inefficient our cars are.

I think it shows how inefficient mother nature is. Stupid nature, not forseeing our need to drive Hummers and Ford Excursions!

What's the point here?

[AnhZone]

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

Re:What's the point here?

[floydigus]

If we were to switch from burning prehistoric plants to modern ones (i.e. veg oil) then we would no longer be adding to carbon emissions by driving cars because the growing plants consume as much C02 as a car generates.

Some people will have you believe that this is pointless because we couldn't grow enough oilseed rape or whatever. I say let's try it and find out.

My next car will be a big, inefficient, carbon neutral monster.

Re:What's the point here?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

The point is we should celebrate. Those plants died believing that that was all there was to their existence. But millions of years later the energy they stored during their lifetimes has found a new purpose. Maybe millions of years after you die you'll find a purpose too. I think it's wonderful.

Better than that

[cybercuzco]

this still makes you think about how inefficient our cars are.

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.

Re:Better than that

[Anonymous Coward]

morons,
for the given temperature range that our automobile engines work in the carnot (perfect) cycle is only like 40% efficient. most gasoline engines that are produced today are around 35-38% efficient. so they are 85-95% efficient for what they can actually achieve.
if you are gonna throw numbers out you need to know what they mean.

Thank goodness for research like this

[TopShelf]

That certainly explains the foul smell I can't get out of the seats...

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.

Comparisons?

[confu2000]

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.

How much gas does that give us?

[Wyatt Earp]

"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."

If there's 600,000,000 of plants and plant material out there to burn in fossil fuels...and we burn a years worth of it a day. And you divide 600 million by 365...that gives us 1643835 years worth of fossil fuels.

A much more optomistic projection that even the Skeptical Environmentalist!

I'm going to go drive my 5.7 liter Chevy truck around then just for the hell of it.

Re:How much gas does that give us?

[RogerWilco]

Please note:
1) The Oil/coal was mainly created during the Carbon Age, so it's only about 80 million years.
2) Only Peat bogs turned into oil/coal, not all plant live, maybe 1% ?
3) The article states that currenlty about 22% of plant life is harvested and replaced each year, and we would need about 33% to have the equivalent carbon energy for a day's worth of consumption.
Now ask yourself the question: How big would this number be without agriculture, say 10%.
=> 80,000,000/365/100/10 = 218 years, which is about the current estimate for coal+oil reserves, of which oil is only about 10%

Oh, and when we're talking big numbers,
Global consuption: 27,481,215,000 barrels per year
= 1,154,211,030,000 gallons/Year
=>100,000,000,000,000 Tons of original plan life.

Adriaan.

Re:How much gas does that give us?

[Wyatt Earp]

They counted plants.

What about the untold megatons of krill and protozoa and mongooses that have been decaying over the megayears?

I never said my figure was the end all be all figure.

It was a wild out my ass number, kind of like the wild out thier ass number the people doing the "report" or "study" used.

Athlons and Pentiums

[Brento]

In a related story, the University of Utah pointed out that modern desktop computer processes consume roughly 14 tons per hour of running SETI, a popular screen saver. "At some point, you have to wonder just how important it is to find alien life," said Professor Ima T. Hugger, "when you're killing so much life here on our own planet just to find out. One little green man simply isn't worth twenty redwood trees - try shutting down your machine once in a while, or switch to that nice screen saver with the rotating Windows logo."

When asked about the energy required to create his polyester pants, Hugger refused comment.

Inefficiency?

[worst_name_ever]

Even if these numbers are too large, this still makes you think about how inefficient our cars are.

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?

Re:Inefficiency?

[pkiguruman]

Yes, from the article:

...only about one-10,750th of the original carbon in ancient plant material actually ends up as oil...

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:If it *is* plants

[Greg151]

Thanks for bringing up Thomas Gold. There is really little evidence to go along with the fossil theory of petroleum, and increasingly more to support Thomas Gold. See this link

Re:If it *is* plants

[mikerich]

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.

Basement usually refers to ancient metamorphic or igneous rocks. AFAIK there are no productive wells in such areas.

Sedimentary rocks can be pushed down beyond 5km in so-called downwarps. In fact they are almost essential since the oil formation process requires the source rocks to enter the so-called 'oil window'. As rocks get buried, the temperature rises, theories suggest that between 80 and 140 Celsius is optimum for oil production - going up to about 200 with decreasing yield of oil (but increasing natural gas production).

The average geothermal gradient is around 25C per km, meaning that the oil window sits comfortably in the 5 to 6 km depth. In many places (particularly those where mountain forming is going on), the geothermal gradient may be as low as 15C per km) - meaning that oil production can go on at even deeper levels in the Crust.

5km wells are highly unusual simply because oil tends to migrate upwards into traps much closer to the surface.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:If it *is* plants

[Tony]

"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.

Does it say

[Kohath]

Does it say how many tons of plants have existed in the last billion years or so?

I bet it's a lot.

Hybrid Car

[kacp]

I just bought a Honda Civic Hybrid, and yes I'm getting the 40-odd MPG. It does so by basicly recycling the enegry expelled. Rather than lose energy in normal cruising conditions and breaking, it stores it in the battery for future use. You use the energy from the battery to power the engine, and you recover a bit of that back.

I know that it still uses gas as its primary source, and that due to thermodynamics I'm never going to be able to recycle all the energy, but the system, I think, is a step to making cars more efficent.

Now, if only Detroit would make such a car, but that's another topic...

For metric system addicts:

[Anonymous Coward]

25 mpg

This isn't just about inefficiency of cars.

[Derek Pomery]

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.

1 day of cars = 1 year of plants

[Saint Stephen]

Gee, that means 1,000,000 years of plants will only last us 2,737 years! And we all know the prehistoric period wasn't measured in hundreds of millions of years!

[For the record, I support Hydrogen so we can tell the Arabs and Environmentists to go jump in a lake and quit bugging me.]

Prehistoric Plants?

[phorm]

While I do agree that currently vehicles are inefficient and that we are eventually heading towards insufficiencies in our supplies of fossil-fuel, one must also consider the vegetation of the eras that became the fossil fuels of today. From what I can gather, many plants were rather humongous in comparison to today. I mean, if say during the period of dinosaurs, plants had to be big enough to feed a pod of 10-15 meter behemoths, I'd say we had a lot of vegetation going at that time. Forget how many plants it takes to power a car, how much did it take to fuel a dinosaur?

And besides, aren't fossil-fuels the product of not only plants, but animal-life as well? I could be wrong on this one, but I think everything was part of the good ol' life-to-petrol cycle.

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.

And I thought

[OverlordQ]

rods to the hogshead was bad enough, now we got Plant ton/(km|mi)!? WHEN WILL IT END!?

So?

[SlamMan]

What's the big deal? Its not like this 4 tons of dead plants are doing anything else if I'm not using it.

One word: bioethanol

[Fnkmaster]

That's right, there are great solutions out there that are far more efficient. But the unfortunate reality right now is that the economics of pumping shit out of the ground is very, very hard to compete with. The cost basis of oil (formed mostly by transportation, corruption and cronyism) vs. any harvested biological feedstocks used to make ethanol or biodiesel may be closer to competitive these days, but it's unlikely that the harvested feedstocks will ever win out by a large enough margin to encourage the capital investment necessary to switch over the huge established infrastructure without substantial government intervention.

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.

Re:One word: bioethanol

[Fnkmaster]

I don't think I spouted anything sensationalist. I thought we all knew how to use Google here.

I'll start you off with this overview link. Then I'll direct you here to read an energy security justification of the Biofuels research program at the DOE. If you are interested in reading a technical and economic assessment of one such program in this area, I encourage you to read this report from the NREL (big PDF warning) which has lots and lots of numbers to backup a feasibility analysis of large scale bioethanol production. Search around the ott.doe.gov/biofuels page, you'll find tons and tons more research and useful information, and hopefully you won't think this is just "snake oil".

Conversion Efficiency

[Keighvin]

Plant matter is quite ineffecient for producing heat, especially when taking into consideration that 80% of a plant's mass is taken up by water - last I was made aware, water is not a particularly good source of fuel unless you can get the hydrogen out.

Alternatively, plants can be refined to a better state of consumption, i.e. vegetable oils for diesel engines:

http://www.greasecar.com/

Very true

[heironymouscoward]

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.

Forgot the entropy?

[prgrmr]

Even if these numbers are too large, this still makes you think about how inefficient our cars are.

Yes, I agree that today's internal combustion engines are ineffienct. However, this is a classic apples-to-oranges comparision gone bad. The prehistoric plant matter in question went through a whole heck of a lot in its journey to becoming crude oil. As another poster already pointed out, a non-trivial part of that transformation was loss of most of the water in the plants, and hence much of their volume. That means his figures for the weight are already suspect.

It would be much more proper to first examine the plants-to-petrol transformation process, and comment on how efficient that process is first, then the petrol-to-MPG process.

This is simply more cargo cult science, and we can and should do better, IMO.

Fossil uel may not be fossils after all

[steven-x]

Some researchers have speculated that hydrocarbon based fossil fuels may be of geological origon as opposed as from plants as most assume. one point in their favor....most all larger planets in our solor system have heavy concentrations of methane (natural gas) in their atmospheres....it would seemn to reason that hydrocarbons were also present in the early eath atmosphere. it also seen logical that a percentage was trapped in rock far below ground, and perhaps converted to heavier hydrocarbons by heat and pressure not unlike the process used to convert hydrocarbons today.

That's interesting, but the real question is...

[pulse2600]

...how many Libraries of Congress is that?

No, what it really is

[Don'tTreadOnMe]

It's not really about how inefficient our automobiles are. It's really about how inefficient the damned plants are at making fuel. There's the tragedy in this !

Atomic energy will save us...

[dpbsmith]

...don't worry, we'll soon have energy too cheap to meter. We'll unleash the limitless, endless, bountiful power of the peaceful atom to provide an inexhaustible supply of energy for all mankind.

A single aspirin-sized pellet of uranium will provide Mr. and Mrs. America with enough power to run their car for a lifetime. And soon, the peaceful atom will provide a propulsion source that will make family helicars practical and affordable.

Scientists expect this to happen in a few short decades--perhaps before the end of the sixties.

At least, that's what the science teacher said when I was in junior high school.

Re:Atomic energy will save us...

[Richthofen80]

The sad thing is, the science teacher was absolutely right.

Uranium, pound for pound, will give you more energy in a nuclear reaction than almost any other substance will give you through combustion. The reason why the Atomic Age never really happened is two-fold: Political and Economic.

Political, because people are scared of nuclear energy. They get scared when a proposal for nuclear power comes to town. Never mind that coal, oil and natural gas power facilities have killed 10 to 100 times the people that nuclear power plants would ever kill. People don't protest coal plants the same way, they don't know the 'coal' symbol like they know the nuclear fallout symbol. There are no 'coal' weapons that obliterate people.

Economic, because nuclear energy became incredibly regulated. There hasn't been a new nuclear plant since TMI, (three mile island) since the cost of building and maintaining one is absurbly expensive. Now, I'm not saying nuclear plants shouldn't be regulated, but perhaps the regulation should be reviewed to make it economically feasible.

Electricity and batter power , not combustion, will be the method of auto transport in the future. and the only way that becomes cheap is to make electricity dirt cheap. the only way to do that is atomic energy.

Are cars inefficient, or...

[Vardan]

Is it the conversion process of plant matter to fossil fuels that is inefficient?

I'm not saying that cars are the most efficient things on the face of the earth, but these numbers don't necessarily imply that cars are uniquely inefficent among all our technology. It just implies that most of our technology relies on an inefficient process (the conversion of normal organic matter to fossil fuels) to power it.

I'd like to see how much prehistoric plant matter it would take to cook my Thanksgiving dinner on my stove, or heat up the water for my 10-15 minute shower in the morning.

Re:What are the energy costs of bicycling?

[ThosLives]

It all depends on the mile bicycled. Is it flat, uphill, or downhill? If it's downhill, you don't burn any more calories than if you were doing nothing. Uphill and you burn a lot more. It also depends on the bike and the rider. I'm a featherweight (75 kg) so I can go a lot farther on a kilocalorie (all else being equal) than someone massing 100 kg.

That's why I don't like "miles per gallon" because while it is a measure of consumption it is NOT a measure of efficiency. Measurements would require something like "pound-miles per gallon" (or "liters per 100 kilogram-kilometers" for our metric friends) to actually compare efficiency. Interestingly enough, SUVs aren't that bad when you look at it that way. Sure moving an SUV takes more fuel, but you are moving more substance, so it may not be less efficient. (Another interesting excersize is looking at how fuel economy changes with payload - adding 6 people to an SUV barely changes its fuel economy, but adding 6 people to a compact car will most likely show a non-negligible effect).

The more important question is not "can we make SUVs more efficient" because they are already as efficient (if not more so) than cars but "do we really need to move things this big?" I think people attack based on "efficiency" because that is seen as a simpler solution.

Good News!

[IronTomFlint]

Why, if we have millions of years' worth of plants as the source of our oil, and if we only consume a year's worth of plants for our cars each day, then we've got enough fossil fuels to last for centuries!

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...

Re:Good News!

[br0ck]

The research paper saying that cars consume the biomass equivalent to a year's worth of plants growth leaves out that only a very small portion of each ancient years growth eventually became usable fossil fuel. Just the fact that oil is concentrated in certain regions shows that it didn't come from the concentration of entire continents but from the plants growing in that region. The biggest argument for this is that it seems pretty clear that we aren't finding anything close to 13,000 years worth of gasoline.

Of bigger impact than just running out of fuel is the release of millions of years worth of stored CO2 directly into the atmoshphere.

It's not about the dead plants, it's about us

[ianscot]

Interesting little synopsis of the usual environmental debate, your post.

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.

What?

[SoupaFly]

Building more buses to combat traffic congestion is like buying a bigger belt to combat obesity

The wonderful thing about cliche arguments is that they are always so easily turned upside down.

Yeah, except that the original quip actually made sense. Increasing the availability and utilization of mass transit actually *does* combat traffic congestion.

Ass.

This says nothing of car efficiency

[Jay Bratcher]

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...

So what? We will never run out of oil

[Helevius]

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

It's interesting...but...

[HardCase]

It's kind of interesting, as trivia goes, but what of it? Given that the large amount of lawn clippings, leaves and such that I put into my composter ends up as a much smaller mass, I'm not surprised that some massive amount of vegetation was required to end up with a gallon of gas.

"Staggering"? Not really. Most of what used to be a plant was water. And if, as the article says, only 1/10750th of the carbon from the plan makes it to become oil, the rest served as fertilizer (to help other plants grow and become oil (and more fertilizer)).

If the idea is to point out that gasoline engines are inefficient, well, duh! If the idea is to point out that oil is an unsustainable energy source, well, duh! If the idea is to point out that we need to develop new energy technologies, well, duh! But "98 tons of plants per gallon" is kind of a red herring. Plants die, the water evaporates, the plant mass decomposes and serves as fertilizer and a little bit, over a long period of time, ends up as oil. As a system, it's somewhat inappropriate to pick out a single element the way that the author of this paper did. Yes, it did take quite a large amount of plant material to make a gallon of gas, but if more of the plant material turned into oil, then less would have been available to enrich the soil and provide for the growth of new plants. The numbers are interesting, but they only tell part of the story.

Oh, and to add to the conclusion of the article, the author left out nuclear power from "other technologies".

-h-

Not only that...

[kindbud]

The steel used to build your car's frame and body was produced in a supernova over 5 billion years ago. Only a tiny fraction of the energy generated by fusing at least 4 solar masses of hydrogen went into the production of the iron, chromium and carbon that was used to make the steel. A whole solar system was likely destroyed in the process.

Automobiles are far more inefficient than even this article implies.

Cars inefficient?

[misleb]

Seems to me that "4 tons of plant material per mile" speaks more to the massive amounts of energy that modern technology and societies require than to its relative (in)efficiency. The average internal combustion engine is, what, 25% efficient? Thats not terribly bad. Lets say you made it 100% efficient. You'd still be using the energy equivilent of 1 ton of plant material per mile. Numbers like this really put into perspective the feasability of switching to renewable sources of energy on a global scale. Can we really expect to generate the energy equivelent of one years global plant growth every day from diffuse sources such as the sun, wind, and ocean? And that is just for our cars. I think it is safe to assume that as we increase efficiency we will also increase total consumption. There are a whole lot of people in teh world that don't own cars, but would love to...

-matthew

Try oatmeal and bicycles for an example

[not-him-again]

This morning, I ate 1/3 cup instant oatmeal (plant matter, if you like), and bicycled 5 miles to my job. Now that's efficient!

I don't think that the words "car" and "efficiency" belong in the same sentence.

Driving = squandering resources. Once squandered, you get this.

Peak Oil

[sbot5000]

Some interesting material... YMMV (no pun intended) ---

Mike Ruppert/FTW

"The Party's Over

"The PARTY'S OVER Oil, War and the fate of Industrial Societies By Richard Heinberg When Mike Bowlin, Chairman of ARCO, said in 1999 that "We've embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil," he was voicing a truth that many others in the petroleum industry knew but dared not utter. Over the past few years, evidence has mounted that global oil production is nearing its historic peak. Oil has been the cheapest and most convenient energy resource ever discovered by humans. During the past two centuries, people in industrial nations accustomed themselves to a regime in which more fossil-fuel energy was available each year, and the global population grew quickly to take advantage of this energy windfall. Industrial nations also came to rely on an economic system built on the assumption that growth is normal and necessary, and that it can go on forever. When oil production peaks, those assumptions will come crashing down. As we move from a historic interval of energy growth to one of energy decline, we are entering uncharted territory. It takes some effort to adjust one's mental frame of reference to this new reality. Richard Heinberg has distilled complex facts, histories, and events into a readable overview of the energy systems that keep today's mass society running. The result is jarring. The Party's Over is the book we need to reorient ourselves for a realistic future. - Chellis Glendinning, Ph.D., author of Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy"

Actually it's really efficient

[n-baxley]

It also took millions of years. However, since the dead plants can't really be used for much else, and we don't since the "processing" time has alread elapsed and the end results are ready for "consumption", then the production process from live plant to oil is already 99% completed. We're just here to pick up the end result.

That's small potatoes

[CatOne]

I mean... you realize the metal in the car had to be generated by a SUPERNOVA explosion right? Which means it had to "burn" in a star for billions of years, and then explode cataclysmically, and then cruise around the universe, and accrete around our star, and eventually for a planet, and go like that for a couple billion years, before it was extracted from ore and made into your car.

How monumentally inefficient! We should all be living as hunter/gatherers, like the Bushmen of the Kalahari. :-/

Which is why biofuel is a red herring ...

[fygment]

... though perhaps that wasn't the intent of the article. Although perhaps blown out of proportion, the article highlights the sheer amount of biomass required to generate fuel. It is doubtful, except in niche markets, that there is a will and a way to convert adequate amounts of agricultural resources (incl. the "waste") over to biofuel production sufficient to meet our current (and future) fuel needs. It seems the dead plants prove the point.

25 MPG reasonably efficient?

[dentar]

...not on your life!!

My PREVIOUS car got 35MPG on the highway and had plenty of power. They don't make cars like that anymore..

Congress, with all its lip-service about ending our dependence on foreign oil, THIS YEAR, voted DOWN a bill requiring car companies to adhere to higher mileage standards.

Misplaced Blame Shows Ecopolitical Bias

[blair1q]

The inefficiency isn't in automobiles, as they are something like 30-50% efficient at retrieving the chemical-bond energy from gasoline.

The inefficiency is in the production of oil from dead plant matter. Oil is one of the lesser byproducts of decaying vegetation undergoing geological stresses. Coal is much more plentiful. And then gasoline is only about 45% of the matter in crude oil. For each gallon of gas you get 1.2 gallons of methane, kerosene, tar, paraffin, etc.

So don't blame Otto, blame Gaia.

We Need Better Plants

[msheppard]

Maybe the PLANTS should work on their efficency of converting sunlight to gasoline. How much sunlight goes to waste?

Won't someone think of the children?

M@

WWGD?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:WWGD?

[rthille]

but a SUV is (sort of by definition) big and heavy. The heavy part can be reduced by advanced materials, but only at great cost. Also, SUV drivers partially purchase/drive SUVs to make themselves feel _powerfull_. So, the solution of putting a little 4cyl diesel into a big Expedition, and making it take 15 minutes to accelerate to its top speed of 67 miles per hour and still having it sell would require just as much social engineering as solution A. A more geeky option of perfecting Mr. Fusion(tm) or some other mater to energy conversion (ie, non-chemical energy) which would allow you to drive 100 miles on a gallon of H20 would require technology which doesn't exist today. Also, a SUV which gets 100 miles per gallon doesn't solve the other problems with SUVs such as traffic congestion, accident fatalities for drivers of smaller cars, obesity, etc.

So, Geeks pick 'A' because it's a _better_ solution, not because either 'A' or 'B' are achievable.

Shamelessly wasteful!

[guacamolefoo]

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.

Next thing you know, they'll be saying that it takes hundreds of tons of hydrogen to fuse to allow a solar powered car to drive a mile. How wasteful!

GF.

Re:say no to dinosaurs!

[Bytesmiths]

I cut out the middle man. To me, it isn't the amount of plant matter consumed by cars as it is the millions of years it takes to convert it to petroleum products. All that carbon has been sequestered for millennia, and we're just shooting it into the atmosphere.

So I do away with the process of turning plants into petroleum, and burn the plants directly in my engine. Anyone can do it! You only need:

• a diesel powered vehicle, and
• a way to thin vegetable oil, either
  • alcohol and a base catylist (typically methanol and lye), or
  • a heater to bring vegetable oil up to about 80C (180F).

With either method, waste vegetable oil from restaurants can be used, solving two problems at once!

With the exception of nitrous oxide and CO2, vegetable oil powered diesels are MUCH cleaner than petro diesels. Yes, they produce climate-warming CO2 in similar quantities to petro-diesel engines, but the CO2 they release was taken out of the atmosphere last year, NOT millions of years ago.

It is unlikely that Big Oil is going to embrace this, but you don't have to go it alone. Co-ops for producing and/or distributing biodiesel are sprining up like rapeseed oil plants. Google for "biodiesel," "SVO," "WVO" for more info, or visit www.GoBiodiesel.org for more information.

Hydrocarbon fuels may not be decomposed plants

[akuzi]

There are many alternative theories for petrolium formation, many are 'abiogenic' theories that say that 'fossil fuels' are actually primordial, that have existed since the Earth was created.

For more info read see this and "The Deep Not Biosphere" by Thomas Gold of Cornell university.

say no to idiots

[blitz1725]

First, I assume you are typing this on your "green" pc that is being powered by you turning a crank on the generator you built out of sticks while you are sitting on a rock in your cave. If not you're just as much a part of the "problem" as everyone else.

The SUV argument is always my favorite, my JEEP(you call it an SUV if you want if I do it it becomes tempermental) is almost 30 years old and it still gets 21 mpg, now while I realize this isn't earth shattering, consider the number of new vehicles that people haven't had to buy(and therefore have manufactured) over the years because of it. I look at some of the new lightweight fuel efficient cars around now and it's ridiculous how easy they are to total out in a wreck, requiring a new car to be built, and if they are fixable you don't just pound the dent out and repaint, no you tear that part off and replace it, but hey their enviro friendly because they get 35 MPG, horseshit!!

The biggest problem I have with most "enviromentalists" is that they are all for things that are a help in their eyes but anything they view as bad is bad and there's no changing it not matter how good the argument and how much proof you give them.

... and their math is wrong.

[Harik]

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.

Meaningless Statistics

[blackbear]

And if they hadn't all died-off to make that miracle product crude oil then we would all be dead of asphyxiation.

Please invent a car that goes fast(100+ mph), is fun to drive, cheap to operate, relatively save, can haul my entire family around even in the snow and sand, and is affordable enough that I can own two. While doing everything that my SUV does, this future vehicle must not pollute. Please do this so I can buy one. Oh wait, I already own two SUVs that can do all of these things, and I don't really care that they pollute (I live in an uncongested area) so why should I buy a new car?

Anyway you need to make this new vehicle better than mine so I have a reason to buy it. Or maybe you should just get a law passed forcing me to spend the money now so that I have a reason to buy the new car and line the pockets of the lobbyists, politicians, and auto manufacturers for doing nothing of value. Let's further fuck up the economy by placing additional artificial restraints on the markets. Then we can all sit around and complain about how we can't afford anything because we all just bought new cars and couldn't get any value on the trade-in because it's worthless. And now that they are forcing auto dealers to pay you for your old car, the prices are outrageous. Oh, and since they gave the auto manufacturers incentives and tax breaks to lesson the burden on them and insure that they wouldn't simply quit the business, my already burdensome taxes have gone up. I sure hope those people who live on the other side of the country are enjoying the clean air I'm paying for. It's too bad they couldn't solve the problem on their own and had to make my family pay for it.

But please invent that car, I WILL buy one if it's better than mine. I don't want to pollute. I just don't really care that I do because there's no compelling reason not to.

One last observation: this is supposed to be news for nerds. Why do so many nerds want to solve problems by compelling the behavior of others rather than compelling the forces of nature?

News at 11 incredible Solar Energy inefficiency

[p7]

Recent studies show that Solar Energy is grossly inefficient. Scientists at a leading University have determined that solar powerer 100 watt light bulbs use 590,000,000 tons of hydrogen for every hour they are on. Scientists do say that they efficiency will get better as we cover more and more of the earth with solar cells, however they doubt we will ever get to the equivalent efficiency seen with the 78 tons of plant matter to a gallon of gasoline. These results have led many to question the use of solar power.

Just being contrarian :)

[HarveyBirdman]

I'm not sure I buy the theory yet myself. I've read Deep Hot Biosphere, and he does have some compelling stuff on his side. It's one of those fringe theories that just might pan out.

I have to think the environmentalists would be opposed to this idea. The idea that we really have a potentially *unlimited* supply of oil could keep them up at night with visions of the 28-wheel Hummer H5. :-o

Re:Just being contrarian :)

[Greg151]

Hey Harvey, if you read the Wired article, Mr. Gold refers to finding oil 5 miles down through Granite shield material in Sweden. That sounds like a whole lotta proof to me. It shouldn't be there, if it did derive from fossil material.

The guy who wrote this seems a bit optimistic

[FearUncertaintyDoubt]

"We would have to choose between our rain forests and our vehicles and appliances."

Timmmmmmberrrrrr!

So let's kill more plants

[Pedrito]

You know, a lot of people have been complaining about the slash and burn of the Amazon rain forest, but I think people are really just thinking ahead and trying to make more oil. You guys are so short-sighted.

Economic Nonsense!

[JCMay]

There is something horrificly wrong in the way the market works I'd say.

Let's look at your argument: Since your (inexpensive) produce is grown in far-away places and brought to you, something must be wrong with the "market."

First, have you considered that it might not be feasible to grow the things you want locally? Ever grown citrus in a non-tropical climate like you've got there in Toronto? They don't do well in the cold and it often gets too cold even here in Florida: freezing weather harms the trees and can destroy the fruit. Now I imagine that huge greenhouses could be built to grow citrus and other tropical-climate crops in, but you'd find the cost of those greenhouses would have to be ammortized into the selling price of the fruit, and that fruit would be much more expensive as a result.

Manufacturers want to maximize their profits, that is true (think: maximizing return on investment, ROI). One method of controlling profits involves unit (car, banana, whatever) pricing. Most people versed in economic principles know that the price-profit curve is an upside-down saddle shape, sort of like a upside-down parabola. Extremely low prices mean no or even negative profits, no matter how many units they sell. Extremely high prices mean that nobody buys their products, and no profits are realized. By pricing their products optimally, or at the top of the "hill," their profits are maximized.

Another method of controlling profits is to control manufacturing and delivery costs. You seem to be proposing that manufacturing costs be traded for delivery costs: make things locally (lower delivery cost), no matter what infrastructure may be required (manufacturing cost).Here in the United States, many people bemoan the fact that many manufacturing operations have moved overseas, but we'll stick with agriculture products. By concentrating production of climate-specific crops in their natural climates, higher yields are grown for less money.

Sure: I could grow peaches here in Florida, but I'd have to do it indoors with a greenhouse I can cool to freezing weather for about a month (peaches need the cold weather to set fruit). You can grow oranges in Toronto in a greenhouse if you want. It's just not economically feasible to do so. Coffee and cacao only grows in areas like the mountains of Central America and West Africa, unless somebody pays to build a greenhouse that can simulate the high-altitude conditions those crops grow in. When's the last time you saw a Canadian-grown Macadamia tree or date palm?

Re:Ride a motorcycle.

[Ummon]

Except it sucks to ride a motorcycle in the snow. And the rain. I'd love to ride my motorcycle ('02 VFR800) 365 days a year, but here in Colorado the weather only cooperates about half the year. I saw a vehicle in Europe that was an enclosed 2 person motorcycle and haven't been able to find out who manufactures it. If I could get one of those, I'd ditch my car.

What?

[JCMay]

Let me put it this way: If I pay 65 cent/l for gas (as of this morning), I get 9l to a 100K, then I can see quite clearly that somehow 87cents (no matter how cheap the bulk rate for fuel is) will pay for the transport alone. I would say someone is someone giving money to allow this stuff to be so cheap, no?

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.

Actually my point is that what we pay for our produce at the register is not an accurate reflection of the true costs. There is a lot of hidden costs (e.g. Transportation) that we obviously don't seem to pay for. Having said that, the question would be: Who is paying for that?

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!

What's inefficient, cars or nature?

[Phat_Tony]

From the article- "makes you think about how inefficient our cars are"

Umm, just pointing out how many tons of plant matter went into making a gallon gas is irrelevant to how efficient cars are- unless someone can engineer a car that will start manufacturing gasoline more efficiently from plant matter.

The efficiency of cars is only determined by how much of the available energy in the gasoline is put into useful work in the car. Figuring out how much plant matter went into producing the gasoline is a measure of the energy efficieny of the natural process that made the gas, not of the vehicle.

-Phat Tony.

Re:Corn to ethanol

[iggymanz]

oops, forgot this

Mother nature recycles

[RockyMountain]

Even if these numbers are too large, this still makes you think about how inefficient our cars are.

Several posters have countered with the suggestion that mother nature is inefficient, using so much plant material to make so little fuel.

But, both the "cars are inefficeint" and "nature is inefficient" arguements miss one important point: That the huge amount of biomass was spread out over millions of years of growth, with the vast majority of the material being recycled from one growth generation to the next. Obviously, just by virtue of the fact that a gallon of petrol weighs a lot less than a small forrest, we must conclude that most of the material didn't become fuel. Most of it became fertilizer/compost, and fueled the next generation of growth.

Adding up the mass of all these generations of plant growth is really just repeatedly counting the same material over and over.

Cows are not "natural" (was Re:burgers)

[rsmah]

This is probably less than optimal if you are trying to manufacturing cow meat instead of robust, self-reproducing organisims that exist in harmony with their natural environment.

You know, it constantly amazes me just how little people know about agricultural history.

Cows do not, and never have, existed "in harmony with their natural environment". Animals which people today would recognize as "cows" did not exist prior to about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. We (humans) made them. We bred them from, now extinct, animals called aurochs.

Same with grain crops like wheat. What we today call "wheat" is a plant that simply would not be able to survive without humans. They are a mutant strain that does not shed its seed kernals when they are fertile. This is good for us (we can harvest the grain and eat it), but bad for the plant (no seeds on the ground to reproduce).

Almost nothing we eat today existed prior to about 10,000 years ago. We humans bioengineered it all: wheat, rice, apples, corn, cows, etc, etc, etc. Yes, I'm sure you can find a few food staples that exist in the wild, but they are few and far between.

Plant Matter != Fossil Fuels

[jgoemat]

I don't know where they get the firgure that only 1 out of every 10,750 kg of carbon from plant life made it into oil...

There is debate on whether oil even comes from ancient plant matter. Scientists have made oil from granite, water, and immense pressure in the lab, they think that the oil we use today could have just as easily been made by that process than by the decay of plant matter, maybe even more easily.

Re:say no to dinosaurs!

[Bytesmiths]

"Soybeans are terrible for the soil."

Who said anything about soybeans? Any plant that produces oil can produce transportation and heating fuel. It doesn't even have to be a wonderful nitrogen fixer like soybeans. (I would disagree they're "terrible for the soil.") Or you can alternate nitrogen-depletors like corn with beans, getting two oil crops that complement each other's soil use. (I grew up on a farm, so please don't tell me what is good or bad unless you can claim the same.)

"We are converting farmland back into forest in the US and if we met domestic demand for diesel through vegetable oil we would be back to deforesting and depleting. Bad idea."

First, I would argue both that we are NOT "converting farmland... to forest" in any significant quantity, and also that any resulting "managed" forest is no better than farmland with respect to environmental factors.

I never claimed that we should get all our transportation needs from farm crops. Indeed, if you re-read what I wrote, I was advocating using WASTE cooking oil. How you got from there to "soybeans" and "farmland" is beyond me.

"A far better option seem to be CWT. These guy say they can change any carbon into distilled water, balanced organic fertilizer and gasoline."

Well, I couldn't find any place where they claimed that!

Their process seems to consume unspecified hydrocarbons and produces various hydrocarbons. It appears to be energy- and water-intensive, with lots of heat and pressure required. It is unclear exactly what the feedstock is and exactly what the result is, except that it consumes a great deal of water and energy in the process.

A hydrogen energy economy is decades away. Vegetable oil diesel can serve as an important part of a transition away from fossil fuels. This can be done with today's technology -- indeed, in a handyman's garage -- using a waste stream that is currently a disposal problem.

Just don't tell me it can't be done, or I'll have to un-drive all those miles I've driven, powered by waste vegetable oil!

Incorrect Premise

[RKBA]

The only problem with the article is that oil is not a product of prehistoric plant material - it is instead derived from materials incorporated in the mantle at the time of the Earth's formation. See http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/usgs.html

Re:say no to cars?.. the hidden benefits of cars

[G4from128k]

Many environmentalists and not a few posters to this thread noted the hidden costs of cars -- pollution, asphalt wastelands, and urban sprawl are real problems not bundled into the price of cars and gasoline. But nobody talked about the hidden benefits of cars to society. High-speed time-efficient personal transportation both reduces the personal cost of consumer goods and provides a better workforce to companies.

Driving gives employers access to a much larger pool of potential applicants and people acccess to a much larger pool of employers. An article a few years ago in Sci. Am. noted that the average daily commute for people is remarkably the same across time and cultures. Its usually about 15 min to 1 hour each way whether you walk, ride a horse, take a bus, or drive. With a constant commute-time, a doubling of the speed gives a 4X increase in area (and a car is usually twice as fast as mass transit in most, but not all, locations). This greater pool of applicants and job opportunities means that employers find better people and people find better jobs. Imagine if you had to find a job within walking distance of your house -- it would probably suck.

Driving also lets people buy a much wider selection of low-cost consumer goods. Rather than be forced to pay high prices at cramped neighborhood stores, people can find a wider selection of goods at low prices at the big-box stores built on low-cost land at the edge of town. As much as people hate the big corporate retailers on a spiritual level, they love to shop at them. The car makes that possible.

Cars may suck at energy efficiency, but they are vastly superior at time-efficiency -- taking people, their kids, and cargo from any point to any point in the least time. In this day and age, it is labor costs that dominate the equation on both a personal and global-economic level. Until they invent a scheme that lets someone go from work to the store to the kid's school to the kid's after school activities and to home in one fast, easy, wait-free process, the car will continue to dominate.

I'm not even sure how to estimate the economic benefits of 4 times the worker pool or access to low-cost goods, but I'd bet that some economist has estimated it someplace. So whether car and gas are underpriced or overpriced in the bigger scheme of things is unknown.

BTW, for the record, I'm not some assUVhole in the lane next to any of you. I don't own a car and my commute the less than 30 seconds.