The fair price of gas

[Il_Mostro]

I find this interesting. How come we pay so little for the energy in oil? Why do some people actually belive this can go on?
[*]Assume you think a fair price for 1 kWh of plant biomass is 0.5 SEK (=$ 0.065 or € 0.055), if you buy it as wood. (Many people think so.) [*]Assume you would think it is fair to pay the same price for the energy embodied in oil. [*]98 tons of plant biomass is about 24,500 kWh (= about 4 kg dry mass per kWh), which is what Siegel estimates is needed to produce a gallon of gasoline.[*]The price for this in biomass of today, in the rate we assumed above, is 12,250 SEK (or $ 1,598 or € 1,345). About $ 1,600 a gallon ! Don't nag about gas prices any more!
link

[fimbulwinter]

me next!!!
a loaf of bread weighs about a pound. if one orders chemically pure fullerines (and the subsequently collides them in an accelerator to render them useful as gaseous methane), compressed nitrogen gas and reaction-grade trace minerals and assembles that loaf themselves, atom-by-atom, it would cost more than the GNP of all countries on earth combined!

It's a shame how ridiculously little we pay for the same thing in different form!!! I weep when I see people buying bread at a mere buck fifty!!! If they only knew the real cost!!!

God bless the crazies.

fim

[PhatTBoll]

[ QUOTE ]
me next!!!
a loaf of bread weighs about a pound. if one orders chemically pure fullerines (and the subsequently collides them in an accelerator to render them useful as gaseous methane), compressed nitrogen gas and reaction-grade trace minerals and assembles that loaf themselves, atom-by-atom, it would cost more than the GNP of all countries on earth combined!

It's a shame how ridiculously little we pay for the same thing in different form!!! I weep when I see people buying bread at a mere buck fifty!!! If they only knew the real cost!!!

God bless the crazies.

[/ QUOTE ]

pwn3d

Well done sir.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Yea, that was pretty good fimbul.

[Il_Mostro]

Ahh, the classic red herring. Introduced whenever someone doesn't want to argue the facts, but prefer to move attention to some other, easier, area.

The fact is that we are paying much much less for energy from oil than from energy from biomass, and still it's the same thing, only some 25 million years later. Why is that? And why do so many people belive this will go on, even though everyone knows that oil will run out. And everyone who has cared enough to look into it knows that it will also be more difficult to extract once we have extracted about half of the total amount we can extract. And that we are just around that point right now.
And everyone who has bothered to look into it also understands that there is no new oil, meaning that if we are to find a new source of energy that source will not be something we just dig out of the ground. No, it will be something highly technical, such as fusion.

[ QUOTE ]
a loaf of bread weighs about a pound. if one orders chemically pure fullerines (and the subsequently collides them in an accelerator to render them useful as gaseous methane), compressed nitrogen gas and reaction-grade trace minerals and assembles that loaf themselves, atom-by-atom, it would cost more than the GNP of all countries on earth combined!

[/ QUOTE ]
Explain to me what this has to do with the original post. I say it's strange that we value oil so little. And you say that it's a shame we don't make bread in the most expensive way possible.

[fimbulwinter]

swing and a miss

fim

[Il_Mostro]

Yes. I know you do not want to discuss this, and prefer to try some misguided humor instead, which is up to you. I still think it's strange that we value oil so little.

[fimbulwinter]

that you cannot properly understand my original post is not surprising. many people do not at all understand the way the world, especially with respect to the interactions between their fellow human beings, works.

a diamond is just the same graphite in my pencils millions of years later. should diamonds cost as much by weight as pencils or should pencils cost as much by weight as diamonds?

Perhaps add the costs per gram and divide by two would be best...?

fim

[Il_Mostro]

[ QUOTE ]
a diamond is just the same graphite in my pencils millions of years later. should diamonds cost as much by weight as pencils or should pencils cost as much by weight as diamonds?

[/ QUOTE ]
You realise that this is exactly the opposite to oil, right? We pay much more for diamond than for graphite pencils because of the time it takes the earth a lot of time to make diamond and the scarcity of it.
Yet we pay much much less for oil than for biomass, even though it takes the earth a lot of time to make oil and the scarcity of it.

So, I don't think it's strange at all that we pay so much for diamonds. But I do think it's strange that we don't think the same way about oil.

[fimbulwinter]

I give up.
Economics must not exist in sweden. Logic too.

fim