2024 note: this is one of a series of posts from my old personal blog (2007—2010) that I’ve resurrected. More info here.
I was reading an article the other day about how energy-dense gasoline is, and the amount of human labor that equates to a gallon of the golden stuff. I don’t remember the numbers, but my immediate reaction was “Nah, that can’t be right.”
When I did the calculation myself, I was shocked. You can get all the info you need from a few Google searches:
- A human doing sustained manual labor (say a 10 hour day) can supply something like 2 kCal / minute.
- A gallon of gasoline supplies about 124,000 BTU, or 31,000 kCal.
So how much energy is 31,000 kCal? It is a lot. Do the math, and you find that one gallon of gas supplies you with about as much output as having a manual laborer at your disposal 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, for about 5 weeks.
Holy crap!! And I can get a gallon of gasoline for only $4?! That means the pay rate for my mythical laborer is about 1.5 cents / hour. Sounds like a bargain to me…
If you also consider the other uses of petroleum products, like manufacturing plastics and agricultural inputs (fertilizer, pesticides), it seems that our increasingly wanton use of fossil fuels this last 50 or so years has been an absolute orgy of excess. We’ve been rapidly using up an incredibly valuable — but very finite — resource that we should have been mostly saving for future generations.
Whether we like it or not, it now looks like that orgy is going to be winding down over the next decade or two. Our society, which has never been told ‘No!’, is about to have its accustomed way of life rudely taken away.
It has been a wild, extravagant, once in a (planet’s) lifetime experience.
I hope the hangover is not a killer.