What if crude was part of the Atkin's diet?
An interesting bit of trivia that blows my mind.
Petroleum contains about 33,000,000 joules/liter.
This is equivalent to 39,000 calories/teaspoon.
The average well-fed human requires 2500 dietetic calories of energy per day to thrive.
So, if petrol was edible and humans could metabolize the energy within it,
The smallest measuring utensil I own doles out 1/8th teaspoon at a time; cooks refer to half of this amount as "a pinch".
Think about that the next time you (1) look at a crop field, (2) eat a bowl of cereal, or (3) flush your toilet.
UPDATE: This post was a load of crap (for me to poop on!) because of poor dimensional analysis. Thanks to DarkSyde for pointing this out. What it does now show is how the energy content of vegetable oil is similar to petroleum. The sanity check is that people could probably survive for awhile consuming a cup of vegetable oil per day, but they could not by consuming only 1/8 a teaspoon. I also have a better appreciation now for the "greasel" enthusiasts.
What’s the old quote about wisdom being gained from experience and experience is gained from mistakes?
posted by @whut at June 28, 2004
2 Comments:
Yea, I should have done a sanity check. Since vegetable oil can be used to run a car, the energy contained within it should be comparable to gasoline. Sure enough, if I multiply 1/16 by a thousand, you get over a cup. I can imagine people being able to survive by eating a cup of vegetable oil a day, but not 1/16th of a teaspoon.
Thanks for the comments. And to to top it off, as you imply, we have the effective energy content of biofuel; in which we have to subtract the energy that went into processing the veggies and such.
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