|
- By Lee Dye of
ABCNEWS.com
We're burning a lot of gas," noted Dukes, then a
postdoctoral researcher in ecology at the University of
Utah. "Where does all that gas come from?" he asked his
wife, also an ecologist.
Months
later, after extensive research, Dukes has found his
answer. And it casts a new light on the precarious hole
that modern humans have dug for themselves.
It
turns out that it took tons and tons of tiny plants and
animals, buried at the bottom of the seas, lakes or river
deltas, to produce every gallon of gasoline that poured
through the big engine of that SUV.
It took
98 tons, to be exact, or 196,000 pounds for every gallon.
Lot of Dead Matter
"That's
a shocking number," says Dukes, who is now en route to a
new post at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
And of
course nobody burns just one gallon of gasoline. That
probably barely got the engine started in Dukes' SUV. We
burn millions of gallons every day, and we rely on fossil
fuel for a wide range of other energy needs. So how much
prehistoric plant and animal material do we need to get
through a single year?
Dukes
zeroed in on the year 1997, and relying on reports from
various agencies, including the United Nations, he came up
with statistics that are really astonishing.
He
found that the total amount of fossil fuel burned that
year amounted to 97 million billion pounds of carbon.
That's equivalent to more than 400 times the plant
material produced by the entire world during a single
year.
So
every day, the amount of prehistoric biological material
needed to produce the fossil fuels that we burn that day
is more than the entire world's production over an entire
year.
Phew.
At that
rate, it would seem that we should have run out a long
time ago, but "fortunately for us, there were huge
reserves to begin with,'' Dukes says, thus paving the way
for the Industrial Revolution and ultimately, his
university's SUV. But his research shows in more graphic
terms than most that there are limits to this finite
source, and time may well be running out.
The End Matter
Dukes
is not your basic alarmist. He didn't set out to scare the
daylights out of us. He just wanted to answer a simple
question that very few others have tried to answer.
"I
decided to try to find out just what goes into a gallon of
gas," says Dukes, who first thought that would be a simple
task. "I figured I could just do a Web search and find
out. That didn't work."
But as
a trained scientist with access to all sorts of research,
he figured he would just have to dig a little deeper to
find a professional paper that answered his basic
question.
"I have
access to all kinds of great information and searching
tools, and I still couldn't find a paper with the answer,"
he says. "Not even a ballpark estimate."
But he
kept digging and soon found himself surrounded by bits and
pieces of information. Scientists from various disciplines
had looked at different parts of the issue, determining
for example how much organic material is lost at each step
of the multimillion-year process that turns green
organisms into fossil fuel.
There
are losses all along the way as the organic material is
trapped in a geological formation where it will remain for
millions of years while it decays into fossil fuels. The
amount of loss at each step in the process is known fairly
well because of the extensive research needed to find and
develop fuel deposits.
By
adding up all the factors, Dukes determined how much
organic material was required to produce the oil, coal and
gas deposits that are available to us today. Or perhaps
more to the point, how much of what was originally there
was lost due to erosion or other natural forces and never
joined the fossil fuel pool.
And
that led to another astonishing figure.
Dwindling Supply
Only
one-eleventh of the carbon in plants deposited in peat
bogs ends up as coal, according to his calculations. But
that's amazingly efficient compared to the process that
turns biological material that was deposited in ancient
marine environments into oil and natural gas.
And
here's the shocker. Only one atom out of every 10,750
carbon atoms ended up as oil or natural gas. The rest
washed off, blew away, or was somehow returned to the
earth's carbon bank.
It's
amazing that the process worked at all because only a tiny
percentage of organic material "grew in a place where it
could eventually become stored and turned into a fossil
fuel that we could reach today," Dukes says.
"And so
you would think that we would have run out a long time
ago, but fortunately there were millions and millions of
years during which this fossil fuel was accumulating in
all its various forms."
Nowadays, "we are clearly running through it quite fast,"
he says. That's why he titled a report on his research,
published in the November issue of the journal Climatic
Change, "Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption of
Ancient Solar Energy."
Many
experts believe the world's production of fossil fuels has
already peaked. After this, if they are right, it's all
down hill.
It will
take a while to get there, of course. But along the way
the world's political power will shift increasingly toward
countries that have it, and away from countries that have
already spent it.
The
societies that survive will be those that figured out
other ways to produce the fuel they needed to power their
homes, factories, and transportation devices. It's hard
not to wonder why that isn't the No. 1 priority in the
world today. |
MFA
Oil Company, headquartered in Columbia, Missouri, recently
opened their first of many E85 pumps on November 20, 2003
at a Break Time in Columbia. The pump plans to fuel many
of the city’s postal service vehicles. 
“One
of the greatest challenges to increased use of alternative
fuels is providing an adequate number of locations where
E85 is available to fleets and the public.” Ecleberry
adds, “Modern has been a leader in the development of
product compatible fueling technology. We think that,
with ready availability of product and continuing
education of the public about the benefits of alternative
fuels, this market will grow very significantly in the
next few years.”