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If the road calls this holiday weekend, odds are you'll spend some time stuck in traffic. One researcher has learned how much ancient matter it took to make the gallons you're guzzling. This ScienCentral News video has more.
Plant Power
One ecologist discovered something about your gasoline that sounds like the start of a bad joke: What does a gallon of gas have in common with the Space Shuttle? But the answer isn't funny. With a typical payload, the Space Shuttle weighs a hefty 104 tons, almost the same amount of ancient plant matter that scientist Jeffrey Dukes estimated it took to make a single gallon of the gas your car may be guzzling.
"It's an enormous amount of ancient plant matter that went into every single gallon of gasoline that we burn today," says Dukes, an ecologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Dukes began his study after an odyssey out West. "I was looking out the window and thinking about the gasoline that we were burning in this big, Chevy suburban," he says. "And I was thinking, 'My Gosh, where does all that come from?' And I realized I didn't know…I thought that I could just go back to my desk after this trip was over and get on the web."
No dice. Dukes dug, but every query came up empty. That's when the sleuthing started. "I had to draw information from lots of different fields, from geology, from petroleum industry records, from biogeochemical journals, from ocean journals," he says. Once he culled enough data — like measures of fixed and stored carbon used to make energy — Dukes organized the information with mathematical formulas that generated estimates of how much ancient matter make up fossil fuels, like oil, coal and natural gas, that we use today.
The process starts with photosynthesis, when plants turn sunlight into chemical energy. "[Plants] have these natural antennae that essentially capture solar energy and allow them to do things with it," says Dukes. "They incorporate the carbon from carbon dioxide into their own structure." But there's a hitch. "When you look at how efficient [plants] are at capturing solar energy it turns out that they are only about one to two percent efficient," he says, not nearly good enough to keep us energy consumers sated.
Hard to believe, but this fairly inefficient natural process is what's behind the revving of our global engine; however, nature seemed to take care of us by providing plenty of pockets of trapped energy. Think gas by way of example. We have stores from phytoplankton — tiny plants that float in the ocean — that died and settled in seafloor sediment millions of years ago. Over time, the mixture formed kerogen, a rock-like substance that converts to hydrocarbons, raw materials used in fuel production.
Hybrid car image: Ballard Power Systems
The problem is, we're blowing through our cache way too fast. As reported in Discover Magazine, we've burned "the amount of fossil fuel that would have come from all the plants on Earth for 13,300 years" in less than 300 years. Scary, considering that these deposits — 83 percent of which Dukes says power the world — are finite. "We've got this bank account of solar energy that we're drawing on like crazy," he says. "And we don't really know how big the account is. We don't know how much we're spending, how fast we're spending and when we're going to run out. There are going to be some real consequences of running out...so, when you're sitting there pumping gas, it might be good to think about what future generations are going to do when…it's no longer feasible to use these fossil fuels because of environmental consequences [like global warming]. How are we going to get around then?"
Probably not by zipping about as breezily as the 37 million Americans — up 2.2 percent from last year — who the American Automobile Association estimates will road trip this Memorial Day weekend. Right now, the pinch they'll one day feel when developing giants like China and India dip further into the world's fuel supply isn't too injurious. But Dukes warns: "We're going to have increasing political issues as we continue to depend on fossil fuels. So, there are many reasons, from the environmental and the national security point of view, that we should be switching away from fossil fuels as quickly as we can."
Much to what Dukes says is his dismay, change isn't happening fast enough. "There haven't been people in this country that have really wanted to…lead us out of our current dependence on fossil fuel into a new, reduced fossil fuel economy. And I don't think that that's going to take much to change. I just think we need a couple of people to step forward and say, 'This is the direction we need to go.'"
In such a leader's absence, drivers, you may want to think twice before starting your engines.
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