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4 Tons Of Plants per Mile to Ride In Your Car
Roland Piquepaille writes "As you might know, I enjoy big numbers. So it's just natural that I was attracted by this news release from the University of Utah, "Bad Mileage: 98 tons of plants per gallon." "A staggering 98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant material is required to produce each gallon of gasoline we burn in our cars, SUVs, trucks and other vehicles." For a reasonably efficient car, riding 25 miles per gallon, this translates to 4 tons of prehistoric plants per mile, or more than two tons per kilometer. The research paper also mentions that everyday, we are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plants growing during a whole year just for our cars. Even if these numbers are too large, this still makes you think about how inefficient our cars are. This analysis describes the calculations and contains other details about the research paper which will be published in November by Climate Change."
"Building more roads to combat traffic congestion is like buying a bigger belt to combat obesity"
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
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?
25 miles per gallon is many things, but reasonably efficient isn't one of them.
Rob.
Isn't most of the original biomass water that does not end up in the oil/coal/gas deposits? Or am I missing something.
I just don't quite see the point of the guy who did the calculations/report... and I did read the article. This is just throwing around big meaningless numbers. At least Ig Nobel candidate material is train-wreck-interesting.
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!
Why do we care about prehistoric plants that turned into underground petrochemical deposits millions for years ago. I agree that cars are ridiculously inefficient, but underground oil is not one of the natural features I am worried about being disturbed. Above-ground pollution, oil spills, global warming, yes, but why cry for rotten prehistoric plants?
John
Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born there. (GBS)
Its even better than that! Internal combustion engines are only about 25% efficient, so for every ten gallons of gas you put into your car, only 2.5 gallons are actually used to propel you forward, the rest is just used to heat up the engine and exhaust.
I read an interesting article at Discover.com. Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year.
I think this is a huge step in the right direction, I'll be very interested to see what happens once the plant is online.
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
I agree that regular gas-powered cars could be made more efficient, but don't the numbers above point more towards the "inefficiency" of the prehistoric plants --> crude oil deposits process?
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Here's a starter link: Link
--- Ban humanity.
Does it say how many tons of plants have existed in the last billion years or so?
I bet it's a lot.
But also about inefficiency of natural fossil fuels.
Key Fact.
Since only about one-10,750th of the original carbon in ancient plant material actually ends up as oil, multiply 4.14 kilograms by 10,750 to get roughly 44,500 kilograms of carbon in ancient plant matter to make a gallon of gas.
google cache of old-news biofuel breakthrough
Note they are claiming they can eliminate dependance on oil importation with agricultural waste alone. No other cultivation necessary.
And the point is. Once we use the biofuels, we are in the carbon cycle. No more pumping carbon out of the earth.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Everything comes at a prices, monetary or otherwise. Most environmentalists (or at least, journalists writing on environmentalism) don't seem to grasp this.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
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.
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.
...how many Libraries of Congress is that?
...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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Environmentalist: We're running out, and our current wasteful practices mean we're running out fast!
Apathetic response: Who cares about a bunch of dead plants anyway?
The answer being, as we (literally) burn through these resources, they not only produce waste that endangers the place we live, they also become more scarce -- leading to the places that have the dead plants, in the form of oil, receiving quite a lot of value for what's left. Scarcity and value, see? Take a look at the extreme wealth of Saudi Arabia's ruling family, examine the Wahaabist faith they've backed using that wealth, all the result of a scarcity of these old dead plants in the world, and then tell me -- is it a potential problem for oil to be the scarce resource we're relying on? Do we want to continue to use inefficient methods of blowing through the oil we've got left, making it more scarce, increasing the upheaval caused by things like Opec's production targets? Or not?
So, see, when environmentalists are worried about this, it's not some tree-hugging lovey-eyed thing on their part, it's self-interest. Similarly, when scientists fret over an oncoming mass extinction, they're worried because no previous mass extinction has allowed the currently dominant group of species to continue in that role. It's not that they're only worried about black-footed ferrets or whatever; they also see that human survival is at stake.
That being the point. Not that "really big numbers" is necessarily the best argument, but human survival is the point.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
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.)
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
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.
Edith Keeler Must Die
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.
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:
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.
: What Constitution?
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.
In a word, NO. Welcome to the world of economies of scale. Cans of tuna are not delivered from the packing plant to your grocer's shelf individually in personal automobiles. They're packed into flats that are loaded onto pallets that are then carried by ship and/or truck to the final destination. Although road tractors don't get stellar fuel economy, they carry a massive amount of cargo and the transportation costs are divided among the entire payload.
For that matter, here in the US, a first-class postal letter costs $0.37. According to your logic, a postal carrier picks my single letter out of my mail box, drives it all the way to California, or where ever, and delivers it to the destination mail box, all for $0.39.
You are! All costs associated with bringing the product to the shelf, plus the fraction of the operating expenses for the store (personnel, electricity, insurance, etc) for you to buy are wrapped up in the purchase price!