Energy reality

It seems that everyone is talking about $4 gasoline. There’s a lot of opinion about what is driving that, what effect it will have on our economy, will it continue to increase, what can we do to increase production, develop alternatives, etc; powerful political and industrial figures are proposing solutions to “drive down the price at the pump”. But, before we all get bent out of shape over what we pay for gasoline, we should try to get a better understanding of what the energy contained in that gallon of gasoline is worth to humans.

A fit, healthy person can generate 200 watts of power to do work; and given the right circumstances, can do that for 8 hours a day. They don’t do it leaning on their shovels, either; we’re talking about hard, grueling work.

A gallon of gasoline contains 33.530 KiloWatt-Hours of energy ( = 33530 Watt-hours), so 33,500 Watt-hours/gallon ¸ 200 Watts/person @ 168 person-hours / gallon.

So we see that there are about 168 hours of a person’s equivalent energy contained in a gallon of gasoline. That’s about equal to a month’s worth of 40 hour weeks, so the human-energy content of a gallon of gasoline is approximately equal to one month of human work.

Now, the USA consumes over 388 million gallons of gasoline per day, so 388,600,000 gallons/day * 30 days/month @ 11.658 Billion gallons/month and, 11.658 Billion gallons/month * 1 person-month/gallon @11,658,000,000 persons.

In plain language, we in the USA are utilizing a workforce of more than 11.6 billion (that’s with a B) human-energy-equivalent slaves working 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year to fuel our trips to the mall, idle at teller machines, take business junkets, blow leaves around our neighborhoods and take cross-country vacations every year – among other things.

Gasoline is currently selling for ~ $4/gallon, so the cost of our energy slaves today is 388.6 million gallons/day * $4/gallon ¸ 11.6B persons @ 13¢/day/person. Thirteen cents per day per person. It’s no wonder that we squander an irreplaceable (therefore, priceless) resource on trivial activities, it’s too damn cheap!