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."
say no to cars? (Score:5, Funny)
"Building more roads to combat traffic congestion is like buying a bigger belt to combat obesity"
Re:say no to dinosaurs! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:say no to dinosaurs! (Score:3, Informative)
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 farml
Re:say no to cars?.. the hidden benefits of cars (Score:3, Informative)
Driving gives employers access to a much larger pool of potential applicants and people a
Re:say no to cars? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 c
Re:say no to cars? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:say no to cars? (Score:3, Insightful)
Economic Nonsense! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 tr
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
In a word, NO. Welcome to the world of economies of scale [bized.ac.uk]. 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 [refrigeratedtrans.com], 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 [usps.com]. 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!
WWGD? (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:say no to cars? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 e
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 effe
Re:say no to cars? (Score:3, Troll)
Asked and answered
Re:say no to cars? (Score:3, Troll)
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
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?
Re:burgers (Score:3, Informative)
-James
Re:burgers (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but a Hummer is not the best ways to use that energy, which is the real point of the article.
Re:burgers (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (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:burgers (Score:4, Funny)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:burgers (Score:5, Funny)
Re:burgers (Score:3, Funny)
Re:burgers (Score:5, Funny)
you assume (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:you assume (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:you assume (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Good News! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 b
Well -- yeah, Are you just figuring this out? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone for Hydrogen?
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:Well -- yeah, Are you just figuring this out? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
reasonably efficient? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rob.
Re:reasonably efficient? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:reasonably efficient? (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't most of the original mass water? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 l
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 10,7
Re:Isn't most of the original mass water? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Isn't most of the original mass water? (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (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.
Re:Isn't most of the original mass water? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it was ec
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
Inefficient? (Score:5, Funny)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
John
Re:What's the point here? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
It's not about the dead plants, it's about us (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What's the point here? (Score:4, Funny)
Better than that (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Thank goodness for research like this (Score:4, Funny)
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)
How much gas does that give us? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Inefficiency? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
If it *is* plants (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a starter link: Link [cornell.edu]
Re:If it *is* plants (Score:4, Informative)
Just being contrarian :) (Score:3, Insightful)
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 :) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If it *is* plants (Score:3, Informative)
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 temp
Re:If it *is* plants (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet it's a lot.
This isn't just about inefficiency of cars. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [216.239.41.104]
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
[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? (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.
And I thought (Score:3, Funny)
So? (Score:3, Interesting)
One word: bioethanol (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
I'll start you off with this overview link [doe.gov]. Then I'll direct you here to read an energy security justification [doe.gov] 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 [nrel.gov] (big PDF warning) which has lots and lots of numbers to backup a feasibility analysis of large scale bi
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/
Forgot the entropy? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [brocku.ca], and we can and should do better, IMO.
That's interesting, but the real question is... (Score:4, Funny)
Atomic energy will save us... (Score:5, Funny)
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... (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
This says nothing of car efficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
So what? We will never run out of oil (Score:4, Insightful)
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... (Score:3, Insightful)
"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... (Score:5, Funny)
Automobiles are far more inefficient than even this article implies.
Cars inefficient? (Score:3, Insightful)
-matthew
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.
We Need Better Plants (Score:3, Funny)
Won't someone think of the children?
M@
Shamelessly wasteful! (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Hydrocarbon fuels may not be decomposed plants (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] and "The Deep Not Biosphere" by Thomas Gold of Cornell university.
... and their math is wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
News at 11 incredible Solar Energy inefficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
The guy who wrote this seems a bit optimistic (Score:4, Funny)
Timmmmmmberrrrrr!
So let's kill more plants (Score:3, Funny)
Mother nature recycles (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Corn to ethanol (Score:3, Informative)