4 Tons Of Plants per Mile to Ride In Your Car 995
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."
burgers (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
What about thermal depolymerization? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
If it *is* plants (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a starter link: Link [cornell.edu]
Hybrid Car (Score:2, Interesting)
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...
use biodiesel (Score:1, Interesting)
Biodiesel is produced from vegetable oil crops such as soy or canola. It is also currently being produced using waste vegetable oil (mostly frier oil from fast food resturants). There is research showing that algae crops would be an even more effective crop for producing the fuel. 1 acre of cropland produces about 100 gallons of fuel currently. My car gets about 40 miles to the gallon for city driving (50 on the highway) too.
burn the bean!
Prehistoric Plants? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Everything comes at a prices, monetary or otherwise. Most environmentalists (or at least, journalists writing on environmentalism) don't seem to grasp this.
So? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:reasonably efficient? (Score:2, Interesting)
Conversion Efficiency (Score:3, Interesting)
Alternatively, plants can be refined to a better state of consumption, i.e. vegetable oils for diesel engines:
http://www.greasecar.com/
Geological POV (Score:1, Interesting)
Petroleum production is special. Not all plant material that has been on the earth becomes oil. Furthermore, Plant material becomes COAL, not oil. Oil comes from sea deposits that have been "cooked" by special conditions. If this is the biomass they are speaking of, then they do not take that into account. They use the asinine assumption that the carboniferous age and subsequent terrestrial plant life became oil.
The factor of time alone invalidates their argument. Few people truly understand time and how much time really has passed here on this earth.
Re:Inefficiency? (Score:3, Interesting)
Very true (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:you assume (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Fossil uel may not be fossils after all (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What are the energy costs of bicycling? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Isn't most of the original mass water? (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Well -- yeah, Are you just figuring this out? (Score:1, Interesting)
>they could be made powerful
>enough for trucks
>and even large SUV's
its a matter of fact, that the german marine uses hydrogen fuel cells to power their current pusuit submarines,
those are too small to be powered by a nuclear reactor, but of course the diesel engine + rechargeable battery -combination - approch used back in WW2 is a little outdated meanwhile
i think what can power a sub should be powerful enough to power trucks
(btw Daimler-Craysler already provided some cities with hydrogen fuel-cell driven buses in some german cities afaik)
cu
Corvus
Re:Well -- yeah, Are you just figuring this out? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Isn't most of the original mass water? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's why it's fraudulent. They needed to artificially inflate the number to make people relate to it. I can think of a million apt analogies, but let's suffice it to say that I could relate any meaning I wanted in any reasearch I wanted to do if I were allowed to multiply the resluting data by 10,000, or
To make maters worse, there are plenty of valid arguments against oil use. There is no reason to fabricate addtional arguments by twisting some meaningless numbers into a suggestive paper.
but studies like these demonstrate just how much of a resource drain it is.
No, studies like this plant a totally false impression of how much of a resource drain it is. We could extract the same energy from far fewer plants because we don't have to throw away 99.990% of the plant before we start.
Actually it's really efficient (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is why biofuel is a red herring ... (Score:3, Interesting)
25 MPG reasonably efficient? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Better than that (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:25 MPG reasonably efficient? (Score:1, Interesting)
Over here in Europe, most of our "reasonably efficient" cars average 40 - 45MPG. At the moment, mine is averaging 49MPG.
Re:Isn't most of the original mass water? (Score:3, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Good News! (Score:2, Interesting)
Of bigger impact than just running out of fuel is the release of millions of years worth of stored CO2 directly into the atmoshphere.
Re:Try oatmeal and bicycles for an example (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm not the original poster, but i do bike about 20 miles each day (to get to work, stores, family/friends) in Michigan. It tops out around 98F and bottoms out at around -20F. I bike through those temperatures, through rain, snow, ice storms - hail is kind of fun. If i'm feverish or hungover it's rather a pain, but still doable.
It is neither impossible nor smelly. Take a change of clothes along, be smart. When i first started, i did not believe i could, but i like to stress my constraints.
say no to idiots (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:burgers (Score:2, Interesting)
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/Producti
for details
Re:burgers (Score:5, Interesting)
Cows themselves are 1000 pounds or so.
A quick search shows that a cow will eat 25 pounds of hay per day [progressivefarmer.com] - and the average age when taken to slaughter is 4-5 years [unhappycows.com].
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 [straightdope.com] (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:say no to cars? (Score:2, Interesting)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Atomic energy will save us... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Plant Matter != Fossil Fuels (Score:2, Interesting)
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 cars? (Score:2, Interesting)
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? (Score:2, Interesting)
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