Scientists Create New Gasoline Substitute Out of Plants

Ok, I'm skeptical too. Let's check it out! I apologise in advance for large numbers.

From this website [tradingeconomics.com] I've got a figure of just over 4 million sq. kilometers of arable land in the United States. This website [uoregon.edu] gives daily cross-year average sunlight falling on a square meter of ground as about 160 W. That's 640 x 10^12 W-days of power falling on the land, per day. Wikipedia cites that plants have a metabolic conversion efficiency of six per cent [wikipedia.org]. This website [uoregon.edu] cites a biomass-to-energy conversion efficiency of 20 per cent. So, if we assume that only 1 per cent of arable land was actually covered with plant, and then turned into electricity, total daily production would be 77 x10^9 W-days of power. This sounds like a lot; obviously there will be some more production and transport inefficiencies in there.

For comparison, the US consumes 1.39 x10^9 [eia.gov] litres of fuel per day. According to Wikipedia, the energy density of petrol is 49.2 x 10^6 J/L [wikipedia.org], so that's 684 x10^12 J of energy per day... or, expressed in Watt-days (86400 seconds in a day), that's 7.91 x10^9 W-days of energy.

There are a lot of real world factors not being included in these estimates, but the 10-to-1 ratio here indicates to me that the energies involved are of a comparable scale; if we devoted 10 per cent of arable land to agriculture, we could (with highly efficient processes), conceivably put a sizable dent in our energy usage.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/tTsh-jw4SXI/story01.htm

mark zuckerberg mark zuckerberg maurice jones drew Yash Chopra George McGovern braxton miller braxton miller