Fuel Cell Performance

--- In ssi_list@... "victoriatangoman"

> Here's a good study, with a witty title, to start with:
> Bad Mileage: 98 tons of plants per gallon
> http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-10/uou-bm9102603.php
>
> The 2,100 ft^2 average house would use about 608 gallons of
> oil.http://www.atmosenergy.com/about/gas/home/heating.html
>
> Assume the same efficiency for a gas-burning engine and an oil
> furnace and you've used 59,600 acres of ancient biomatter per year
> for your home heating.
>
> TangoMan

Just a follow-up.

The land area of the Earth is 57,285,000 miles^2.

There are 640 acrea per square mile.

Throughout history if 1/2 of the land had vegetation on it then
there would have been 18,331,200,000 acres of land producing
biomatter.

All the biomatter produced on Earth could support 308,000 household
heating requirements for one year.

Let's say we've accumulated 2 billion years of biomatter.

Let's say that there are the equivalent of half a billion households
on Earth that use as much heating oil as our example.

Thus it would take 1,623 years of past biomatter decay to provide
the fuel for one year.

Over the 2 billion year history of the Earth, enough plant material
decayed to provide 1.2 million years of heating oil for 500,000,000
households.

I know there are lots of suppositions to this analysis but it does
put some perspective on the geologic time scales that are involved.

TangoMan