Thursday, February 21, 2008

Liposuction of fat and the energy crisis

Green Thursday TGIT – Thank Gasoline It’s Thursday

Today I will answer Mark’s question whether liposuction of fat could help the energy crisis. Mark is a fairly new TT reader so he did not get the blog from about a year ago that if we had 10 pounds of fat lipoed from our body we would be able to manufacture about 1.5 gallons of bio-diesel from the 10 pounds of fat. We of course would need about 1 pound of methanol to react with the fat to produce the bio-diesel and that methanol would likely come from natural gas so the operation so to speak would need to rely on some fossil fuel.


Oil prices have again reached $100 per barrel and gasoline will be more expensive when the heavy driving season starts in April. The heavy driving season is actually year round known so it should be renamed the extra heavy driving season. So how much gasoline is wasted carrying around us over weight Americans. I came upon an Australian web site
http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/HV/366.pdf that discusses improved fuel efficiency of vehicles by reducing the mass of the vehicle. The boys downunder tell us that reducing a vehicle’s mass by 100 kg improves the fuel efficiency by 1 liter per 100 km. For us yanks reducing the vehicle mass by 220 pounds will lower the fuel consumption by 0.2638 gallons per 62.5 miles. We should have converted to the metric system but we got to the moon on the old imperial system. So going back to the average yank that is 10 pounds overweight we would save 2.3 gallons per year of gasoline in vehicle (driving 12,000 miles per year) if we shed the 10 pounds of fat. Therefore we use more fuel in a year to move the added mass than we could yield in bio-fuel from the fat we carry. Loosing weight would be a win win situation both for our bodies and our vehicles. It would also be good for our health to loose weight. CNN reported yeaterday that being overweight increases the incidence of strokes in women http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/02/20/obesity.strokes.ap/index.html I am pretty sure the same can be said about men. The scary thing from this article is that in California your chances of surviving the stroke are better if you have it on a weekday versus a weekend. Yes I am sure I can control when I will have stroke???? Maybe they should tell the neurologists to leave the golf course on a Sunday and make their way to the ER?

The US government has pulled out of FutureGen the demonstration plant to gasify coal and produce electricity. It took the department of entropy five years to make the decision that this was an expensive boondoggle. When I was told about the idea back in 2003 when I was the Manager of Sustainable Development at Bechtel, it took me about 5 seconds to come to this conclusion. If you are going to gasify coal you should use the synthesis gas you produce to synthesize valuable chemicals and not run this gas that has only one quarter the BTUs per cubic foot through a turbine. Turbines prefer high BTU gas. Anyway I am glad that the DOE did not take as long as Rip Van Winkel to wake up, and thankfully the Ambien CR wore off after five years
http://www.ambiencr.com/About_AMBIEN_CR/ambien-information.aspx Not to be outdone for stupidity by the Feds, the lone stars of Texas now want their own coal fired power plant with CO2 sequestration http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/usclimateenvironmentenergycoal&printer=1 Yes this branch of the dividians knows what WACO stands for (We Ain’t Coming Out) and that is what they will do with the CO2 when they sequester it, they can say it Ain’t Never Coming Out.

The word of the day is to relegate which can mean to send into exile or banish and that is what them Texans are going to do with CO2


relegate \REL-uh-gayt\, transitive verb:1. To assign to an inferior position, place, or condition.2. To assign to an appropriate category or class.3. To assign or refer (a matter or task, for example) to another for appropriate action.4. To send into exile; to banish.
Employment discrimination locked them out of better paying jobs and relegated them to menial occupations.-- Dennis C. Dickerson,
Militant Mediator: Whitney M. Young Jr.
Worse, the party that had come to mean power itself had been relegated to a minority in the Congress as well, and lost a key governorship.-- Geoffrey Mohan, "Mexico Power Shift", Newsday, July 4, 2000
The EPA, meanwhile, has been developing new rules that essentially would relegate agricultural runoff to the same category as pollution from concentrated sources such as factories and sewage plants.-- John Lancaster, "For Big Hog Farms, Big Subsidies",
Washington Post, August 17, 2001
Their daily care was relegated to Donato, the dozen servants, and a succession of governesses.-- Tag Gallagher,
The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini
The history of ideas can't be done without actually applying ideas; and unless we agree to relegate the writing of our history to Martians, we have to admit that a history of points of view -- which may well be religions -- can't be done without favoring at least one point of view.-- William R. Everdell, "Joyful Noises", New York Times, December 26, 1999
When, in the minority of Carlos II., the regent mother, Maria Anna of Austria, made her German Jesuit confessor Nithard inquisitor-general, it required a popular uprising to get rid of him and relegate him to Rome, for he was speedily becoming the real ruler of Spain.-- Henry Charles Lea, "The Decadence of Spain",
Atlantic Monthly, July 1898
Relegate is from the past participle of Latin relegare, "to send away, to remove, to put aside, to reject," from re- + legare, "to send with a commission or charge."
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for relegate

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