I kept thinkin' of that exclamation from "The Princess Bride" as we biked along Hwy 101 from Gaviota SP to Goleta/Santa Barbara - as motor vehicle after motor vehicle roared past us (with a wide shoulder for us). Of course, when we looked out over the Pacific there were lots of oil rigs on the horizon; and I was wondering again about the Santa Barbara oil spill. Anyone wanna look it up for me and post a summary of it in the comments? Thanks.
Can someone do some math for me too?
How many gallons of gas do Americans burn every day?
A: 367.08-378 million gallons (depending on source ;data from 2011)
How many pounds of CO2 does that daily combustion produce? ____
(Remember, a gallon of gas weighs about 7 lbs, and in the combustion/oxidation process you add O2. So 1 gallon of gas produces about 20 lbs of CO2.)
And lastly, how many pounds of O2 are removed from our atmosphere for each day of American's consumption of gas?____
(And I'm only thinkin' about motor vehicles at the moment, not buildings, industry, the Pentagon [the largest single consumer of fossil fuels in the world], etc)
Thanks!
From the road
From wikipedia: The Santa Barbara oil spill occurred in January and February 1969 in the Santa Barbara Channel. It was the largest oil spill in United States waters at the time, and now ranks third after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon and 1989 Exxon Valdez spills. It remains the largest oil spill to have occurred in the waters off California.
ReplyDeleteThe source of the spill was a blow-out on January 28, 1969, 6 miles (10 km) from the coast on Union Oil's Platform A in the Dos Cuadras Offshore Oil Field. Within a ten-day period, an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 barrels (13,000 to 16,000 m3)[1] of crude oil spilled into the Channel and onto the beaches of Santa Barbara County in Southern California, fouling the coastline from Goleta to Ventura as well as the northern shores of the four northern Channel Islands. The spill had a significant impact on marine life in the Channel, killing thousands of sea birds, as well as marine animals such as dolphins, elephant seals, and sea lions. The public outrage engendered by the spill, which received prominent media coverage in the United States, resulted in numerous pieces of environmental legislation within the next several years, legislation that forms the legal and regulatory framework for the modern environmental movement in the U.S.
http://jg2090.newsvine.com/_news/2009/09/02/3216613-burning-1-gallon-of-gasoline-produces-20-pounds-of-co2
ReplyDeleteThis 21 pounds of breathable Oxygen was removed from the atmosphere by passing through your car's air filter, through the engine, and out the tailpipe as H2O and CO2.
When you multiply that 21 pounds by the United States daily consumption of gasoline (378 million gallons), the result is 7.9 Billion pounds of Oxygen that we are removing from the atmosphere and converting into 7.5 Billion pounds of CO2 and more than 378 Million pounds of water or water vapor each and every day of the year.