Thank Gasoline

TGIT - Thank Gasoline It's Thursday Green Thursday

This week’s blog is brought to you courtesy of that amazing liquid we call gasoline. The average motorist uses two gallons of gasoline a day. This does not sound like a huge amount, however when multiplied by the over two hundred million vehicles in the USA, it is a vast volume of fuel. Gasoline is a mixture of compounds containing carbon and hydrogen atoms (hydrocarbons). This mixture typically has two hydrogen atoms for each carbon atom. Natural gas is composed primarily of methane and has four hydrogen atoms for each carbon atom. http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/514gasoline.html


If one did quick but incorrect math, one may believe that using natural gas instead of gasoline as a transportation fuel would halve your carbon footprint. Doing the math correctly by applying the atomic weights of carbon and hydrogen, and the heats of combustion of methane and gasoline, natural gas as a transportation fuel instead of gasoline will lower your carbon footprint by just over twenty percent. The problem is that natural gas is much more difficult to store onboard a vehicle, therefore only a very few vehicles have been converted to run on compressed or liquefied natural gas.

Each gallon of gasoline has 115,000 British Thermal Units (BTUs) of heating value. A BTU is the amount of energy needed to increase the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. When you take a five minute shower with the water flowing at two gallons per minute at 100 degrees Fahrenheit, you have consumed 3,336 BTUs if the cold water entering your water heater had a temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Your water heater is 80% efficient, therefore one gallon of gasoline, if used to fuel a water heater, could provide the energy for almost all the showers you take in a month. We have flow restrictors in our showers to conserve hot water but we are barking up the wrong tree when it comes to saving energy in large measure. We should have flow restrictors in our automobiles. http://energyhawk.com/waterheater/waterheater8.php

We do have a way of restricting the flow of gasoline in our automobiles. We should be a little more light-footed on our gas pedal. Think of your gas pedal as the flow restrictor for your engine. Those of us who accelerate quickly and brake abruptly are taking long scalding hot showers. You will get far better mileage if you accelerate slowly and if you time your arrival at the traffic lights on Tiburon Boulevard such that you coast to the traffic light without braking. By doing this, you are essentially mimicking the operation of a hybrid vehicle and you will enjoy as much as 20% better fuel efficiency. Also keep your tires fully inflated and keep your trunk empty to avoid schlepping around additional unneeded mass that simply consumes fuel as you accelerate or climb hills. http://www.fueleconomy.gov/FEG/drive.shtml


There is much debate on whether you should fill your tank at night or at midday and whether you are cheated out of some gasoline because of the higher daytime temperature. My view on this is that gasoline is 2% more dense at 50 degrees than it is at 80 degrees so why not fill up early in the morning and gain part of this added mass and also minimize the escape of gasoline vapors from your tank. Certainly in summer months if you choose a gas station that is close to the San Francisco Bay the ground temperature, and hence the gasoline temperature, will be a lot lower than at a gas station in Sonoma. In the summer you will get more pounds of gasoline filling up in Tiburon than in Sonoma if you buy the same number of gallons. In the winter filling up early in the morning in Sonoma would help you gain more pounds of gasoline when purchasing a fixed volume of gallons. Gas stations also typically change their prices at midday. This proves that the early bird does catch the worm if the bird knows where the worm is hiding.

Thank Grass It's Thursday

Green Thursday

This week’s episode of the green machine is brought to you courtesy of your lawn. Lawns are water hogs and also require a substantial amount of energy for their upkeep. Each day one can see numerous pickup trucks with gardeners traversing Tiburon Boulevard near where I live on their way to mow lawns and blow leaves to the other end of someone’s yard. I often have thought a great name for a landscaping company would be “mow and blow”.

The typical lawn is 5,000 square feet and requires mowing some 30 times a year. The amount of gasoline used for fuelling the mowing machines and the pick up trucks to bring and return the gardeners from and to their distant homes must at least equal 2 gallons each time the gardeners visit us to perform their landscaping chores. This means each lawn requires some 60 gallons of gasoline a year to be kept in pristine condition. 60 gallons of gasoline has a carbon dioxide foot print of about 1,300 pounds. There are approximately 3,000 houses on the Tiburon Peninsular so our collective carbon dioxide footprint for having manicured grass lawns is some 2,000 tons per year.

A 5,000 square foot lawn generates about 1,200 lbs a year of grass clippings. Grass clippings have a carbon composition of 40%. Performing all the requisite and tedious math calculations, these grass clippings took in 1,800 pounds of carbon dioxide via their photosynthesis or carbon dioxide and water. This means that the lawn carbon intake exceeds by almost 50% the carbon emissions of the gasoline used by the gardeners performing the maintenance of the lawn. If the lawn clippings are composted and used as fertilizer, owning a lawn is positive with respect to the carbon aspect of the environment even if one utilizes the services of a gardener who lives far away.

The water footprint of a grass lawn is another matter. Given the long dry summers here in Marin County each homeowner’s lawn requires nearly 50,000 gallons a year of irrigation water. There is an alternate to grass lawns. A company named Fieldturf has developed a synthetic lawn using recycled rubber and sand. http://www.fieldturf.com/ Each square foot of Fieldturf requires 3 pounds of rubber and 7 pounds of sand. The carbon composition of rubber is approximately 90% therefore each square foot of Fieldturn contains 2.7 pounds of carbon. Therefore, the average 5,000 square foot Fieldturf lawn has over 13,000 pounds of carbon that has been sequestered from used tires. The Fieldturf lawn also requires no mowing but will need the occasional blowing. If all the residents of the Tiburon Peninsular changed our lawns to FieldTurf, we would save 150 million gallons of irrigation water a year, and the traffic on Tiburon Boulevard would also be reduced.

There are some 25 million acres of lawn in the USA. http://www.thelawninstitute.org/faqs/?c=183313 This is just more than a trillion square feet of lawn. If the entire US got onto the Fieldturf bandwagon we could recycle almost 3 trillion pounds of old tires. Only 280 million tires that in total weigh 6 billion pounds are sold in the USA each year. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4179/is_20060430/ai_n16483711 Fieldturf will need to wait 500 years to replace all of our grass lawns, but when this happens Goodyear would really have a good year and Sears would never sell another riding mower. The result of today’s analysis is that the grass is greener on the both sides of the hill

Thanks Gates

Green ThursdayTGIW - Thank Gates It's WednesdayToday's blog will deal with computers and their energy use. The personalcomputer is now ubiquitous and can be found in homes and offices throughoutthe world. In 1983, the year after I moved to Bay Area, there were 2million PCs in the entire USA (homes, offices, factories, etc.) by 1990there were 54 million. At the time of the Y2K scare the number had grown to169 million in the USA. Worldwide 271 million personal computers were soldlast year and the estimated number of these devices operating somewhere onplanet earth is now more than a billion. By 2015 there will 2 billionpersonal computers operating on this minor planet of an ordinary star tomisquote Stephen Hawking. http://www.intel.com/museum/archives/pctimeline.htm

All these computers need electricity though some more than others. Desktopsneed more power than laptops and desktops with cathode ray tube (CRT)displays use the most energy of any type of PC. Liquid Crystal Displays(LCDs) require less power than CRTs. Liquid Crystals were first describedin 1888 this was 13 years after Hook invented the first CRT. It is quiteamazing that the physics behind these displays were first discovered overone hundred twenty years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystal_display

A new model desktop with a CRT requires about 200 watts of power. The samedesktop with a LCD monitor uses 150 watts of power or some 50 watts less.If one uses the computer 4 hours per day or some 1,500 hours per year simplybuying a LCD monitor saves some 75 kilowatt hours each year. This amount ofelectricity can power an average Tiburon home for 3 days. During the other7,200 hours of the year when the computer is in the idle mode the LCDmonitor will save about 3 watts of power compared with the CRT. This isanother 21 kilowatt hours of annual savings or about another day's worth ofpower usage in the average home. Buying a laptop instead of a desktop andLCD monitor saves 100 watts of power and would save about 150 kilowatt hoursof electricity per year or about 6.5 days worth of the average homes total electricity usage.

In 1997 there were only 100 thousand LCD monitors sold, this year 180,million or 90% of the all the monitors that will be sold in the world arebased on LCD technology. Amazingly 80% of these LCD monitors are now madeon the island of Taiwan and 0% in the USA. This year we will cross thepoint where half of the PCs sold will be laptops. We are indeed fortunatethat more efficient technologies for monitors and computers have beendeveloped. If we assume that half of the next billion PC that will be soldover the next 7 years are laptops, these 500 million computers each saving100 watts of power implies that the peak demand for electricity will be50,000 megawatts less. This means 50 large 1,000 megawatt power plants willnot need to be constructed. The reduced carbon dioxide emissions by nothaving 50 coal fueled power plants operating 1,500 hours per year is aboutequal to twice the carbon content of the entire sugar crop of Brazil of 35million tons of sugar. Conversely the extra 1 billion computers will requirethe construction of 150 large 1,000 megawatt power plants to meet this peakpower demand. The carbon emissions from 150 additional power generationstations, approximately equals the carbon content of the world's entiresugar crop of 150 million tons. This is not so sweet news.

http://www.forrester.com/ER/Press/Release/0,1769,1151,00.html

All these added sales of computers will make Bill Gates a very happy man andthat is why he is the G word of the day.

Thank GM

TGIW - Thank GM It's ThursdayToday's green energy episode explains the hope and hype of the universe's lightest element. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen http://periodic.lanl.gov/elements/1.html On the surface it seems like a wonderful idea to use hydrogen as a fuel as the only resulting emission is water. Hydrogen has been sold as a carbon free fuel. The problem is that hydrogen is mistaken as a fuel, when it is really only an energy carrier like electricity. It takes other fuels or electricity to produce hydrogen and typically these other fuels or the electricity entail the combustion of some carbon containing fuel. Therefore hydrogen has a carbon footprint. If the electricity to produce the hydrogen is generated in a coal fired station, the resulting hydrogen has a carbon footprint the size of Sasquatch. Approximately half of the electricity in the USA is generated using coal as the fuel. Some may argue that the hydrogen should be produced with hydroelectric, wind, or nuclear generated electricity. However this means that the coal based energy would serve other power demand loads, and had the hydrogen not been manufactured then indeed the coal fired stations could have been shut.

Is there a Cinderella rather than a Bigfoot story in hydrogen manufacture where the carbon footprint indeed fits the tiny glass slipper? Producing the hydrogen by steam natural gas reforming does have a smaller carbon footprint but the conversion of natural gas (methane) to hydrogen yields only 75% of the energy and the steam methane reforming plant has carbon emissions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming The methane could have been compressed and used to fuel a vehicle such as the one marketed by Honda that runs on compressed natural gas. http://automobiles.honda.com/civic-gx/ As natural gas has more than three times the energy per unit volume than hydrogen, the compressed natural gas vehicle will have three times the range of hydrogen if the engines are equally efficient. The next trick the hydrogen lobby played on us was that fuel cells are much more efficient than internal combustion engines. Yes this is indeed the case but producing and liquefying hydrogen eliminates the efficiency advantage of the fuel cell over the internal combustion engine.

The fuel cell is expensive and presently costs about half a million dollars to equip a single Honda Civic. http://world.honda.com/FuelCell/ Additionally, the fuel cell in the Honda Civic needs approximately two and a half ounces of platinum to function. Each year a total of two and a half million ounces of platinum are mined worldwide so if all of the platinum was diverted to fuel cells we could equip about one million cars per year. Over 60 million cars are sold worldwide each year so GM the fool who sells fuel cells will never capture more than a small fraction of the market. Try saying this fast “GM the fool who sells fuel cells on the free floor”.

Others are trying to produce hydrogen from cellulose and organic waste. http://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/pdfs/review04/hpd_p5_czernik.pdf Their efforts have yielded some technical success but these sources of hydrogen are miniscule compared to the enormity of the amount of transportation fuel the world requires. Steam methane reforming will remain the pre-eminent method to produce hydrogen and hydrogen will be used as a wonderful chemical to upgrade and refine high sulphur oil, synthesize fertilizers, and sadly to hydrogenate oils to produce margarine that clog your arteries.

The word of the day is paean or a joyous song of praise. The hydrogen economy hoax won’t be playing this song instead we will be just paean more taxes to fund more foolish energy policy

paean \PEE-uhn\, noun:1. A joyous song of praise, triumph, or thanksgiving.2. An expression of praise or joy.

Thank Greenwashing

TGIW – Thank Greenwashing It’s Thursday

Yes just like whitewashing there is now greenwashing going on in the marketplace. Greenwashing is when a false “green” claim is made to mislead consumers about a company’s products or services. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwash The largest greenwashing we consumers have experienced in the past couple of years is bioethanol.

Mother Nature never intended to have photosynthesis propel hundreds of millions of vehicles traveling trillions of miles per year. Yes Americans drove more than 3 trillion miles in 2006 http://www.ohsonline.com/articles/57291/ Photosynthesis is a very slow and inefficient conversion of sunlight into biomass. The new buzzword in bioethanol we now hear each day from politicians mouths is “Cellulosic”. I love the way the President pronounces cellulosic, it is about as funny as when he pronounces nuclear. Now that these cretins on both sides of the house have used the food we have for fuel ,they think we will believe them that the have managed to separate the wheat from the chaff, and suddenly and mysteriously the chaff can be used for producing bioethanol. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff

Photosynthesis typically coverts 0.1% to 0.4% of the incident solar radiation into biomass. For the USA which is far less sunny than Brazil we average about 6 tons per year of biomass production on each acre of land irrespective of whether the biomass is switchgrass, corn, poplar trees, or wheat. Converting this biomass into ethanol will yield approximately 400 gallons per year per acre. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2004-02-20-kantor_x.htm A gallon of ethanol has a heat of combustion of about 23 kilowatt hours. Therefore before accounting for all the energy inputs to plant, cultivate, fertilize, harvest, transport, ferment, and distil the biomass to produce ethanol, our acre of land yields less than 10,000 kilowatt hours per year. Had we erected wind turbines on our land we would yield 100,000 kilowatt hours of dispatchable electricity per acre per year. Had we instead decided to place photovoltaic cells on the acre of land we could dispatch 1,500,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.

Now the zinger in the overall energy equation. The government provides cash subsidies to the farmer as well as the ethanol distiller that total over $1 per gallon of ethanol. The acre of land enjoys a subsidy of $500 per year or about 5 cents of each gross kilowatt hour produced. At best, ethanol production is 50% efficient, therefore our wonderful elected officials are subsidizing this food wasting enterprise to the extent of 10 cents per kilowatt hour of net energy produced. Let the farmers enjoy a 10 cent per kilowatt hour subsidy for wind energy and the Great Plains will support vast wind energy farms and the land will still be available for food production.

There is now a word called vog to describe the mixture of valcano gases and fog that is now occurring in Hawaii. The sulfur dioxide containing gases are also killing the protea flower plantations on the island. I am very fond of proteas as they are the national flower of South Africa where i spent my youth. Sulfur Dioxide also results in the combustion of coal and oil. http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/05/06/hawaii.vog.ap/index.html

The word of the day is contrite. The proponents of corn ethanol are contrite sinners for their crimes against nature.

Today's Word Yesterday's Word Previous Words Subscribe for Free Help
contrite \KON-tryt; kuhn-TRYT\, adjective:1. Deeply affected with grief and regret for having done wrong; penitent; as, "a contrite sinner."2. Expressing or arising from contrition; as, "contrite words."

Thank Groceries

TGIT - Thank Groceries It's ThursdayYes today's blog is brought to you by extra amount you are paying for your grocery bill. You can thank your local government, the US Government, the EU, just about every politician, Archer Daniel Midland, and the extremely incompetent group at UC Berkeley that work in the so called Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab. http://rael.berkeley.edu/ Yes the Wasteful and Inappropriate Lab at Berkeley was perhaps the loudest proponent over the past five years for bioethanol. When I confronted their director and staff five years ago to stop "selling" the bad science of "food for fuel" they turned a deaf ear and a blind eye. I kind of remember before the Iraq war the UN had this "oil for food" program with old Saddam. At least some of the oil Saddam sold bought food. Our incompetent leaders, our greedy commodity traders, and even the faculty of what was once the premier public university in the land sold out. Yes UC Berkeley has sold out to BP for $500 million and RAEL certainly was an active participant in this transaction. http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml This food for oil is a crock pot of sewage and will yield more waste of land, higher food prices, and more global misery. Your groceries now cost a lot more but at least in Marin County we can eat a single sourdough baguette for the ridiculous cost of $3.29. Talking about our dough going sour, the magician of the year award goes to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson for the trick of turning the dollar into a third world currency in no time at all. The sad point to all of this is that the poor people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America work for less per day than what a baguette now costs in Golden State.

On a more positive note my blog was mentioned in the April report of a website downunder called www.emergentfutures.com The monthly newsletter is free and more importantly informative. The local newspaper that reports on the Tiburon Peninsular is now carrying my articles which will appear weekly are titled "Lindsay Leveen The Green Machine" http://www.thearknewspaper.com/ I will use these articles which are limited to 500 words to teach laypeople about the hope and hype of energy alternates.

It is very interesting to see in the news today that the Rockefeller Family is at odds with the management of Exxon Mobil about Exxon's avoidance of renewable energy as part of its portfolio http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080430/bs_nm/exxon_dc Yes old John D may be turning in his grave now that his descendants have a preference for the color green in something other than the color of money.

Some good news on the conservation front. Gasoline usage in the USA dropped in February and is likely to continue to drop this year compared with last. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080407/us_nm/usa_eia_gasoline_dc Conservation is the only real and appropriate alternate to overcome the high price of energy and the resulting massive emissions of carbon. A real dent will be made by individuals driving less, eating less, heating less, and making fewer latte runs to Starbucks. I had previously blogged about the 140 Degree Latte, Looks like old Starbucks should merge with Stone Cold Ice Cream as Starbuck's profit has dropped by 27% and they are going to be stone cold even with their new drink called Rigor Mortis http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/fewer-latte-runs-sends-starbucks-2q/n20080430203109990008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigor_mortis

Thank Gaylord

TGIT - Thank Gaylord It's Tuesday

Today I blog a couple days earlier in the week. Today is a very important day for the color green. Today is Earth Day. We can thank Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin for Earth day. yes it was Gaylord who had the foresight to conceive Earth Day way back in 1970. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Day

Actually my favorite and home city of San Francisco beat Gaylord by a month by the then mayor Alioto declaring Earth Day in the city on March 21, 1970. Gaylord's first universal Earth day was held on April 22 1970.

Yes back in 1969 when Apollo 11 made it to the moon and landed humans on the moon for the first time there was great debate of the ruination of the earth. I guess not much has changed except we use almost twice as much oil in our global economy. We are still debating global warming and the need for energy conservation and sustainable development. Even good old Uncle Sam is in the Earth Day mood. yes the government has an Earth Day web site. http://www.earthday.gov/ Yes we see a picture of the President and First Lady in front of a national park sign celebrating their green accomplishment of attempting to reduce the backlog of maintenance to national parks. This makes playing the fiddle while Rome burned miniscule in comparison to mending the fence of Yellowstone while the planet consumes over 85 million barrels a day. By George He Has Got It Professor Henry Hyde Higgins exclaimed.

Back in 1969, when Alioto was mayor of the city by the bay, gas cost 30 cents a gallon. Today the news proclaimed that the average price for Regular Grade gasoline in San Francisco exceeded $4 a gallon for the first time. Gavin the Gavel Newsome our fame seeking mayor was seen drinking bio ethanol and chasing after the wife of one of his friends to celebrate his accomplishment of having the most expensive gas in the nation. But one could have bought a mansion in Pacific Heights in 1970 for $100,000, now the same mansion costs $5 million so gas is really not that expensive. Gas would need to be $15 a gallon to reach parity with that mansion. Old Gavy is considering an $11 a gallon gas tax to pay for his public works boondoggles. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/18/MNO4107CO5.DTL


Now that I have picked on both sides of the aisle in a fair and balanced way, do I see any hope as we "celebrate" Earth day 2008? Actually I do. Battery technology is improving and Lithium will come to our rescue in doubling the average fuel efficiency of vehicles. LED lighting will replace the inefficient vacuum technology of both incandescent and florescent light bulbs. Solar energy will increasing be used for heating spaces and water as well as generating PV electricity. Wind turbines are becoming common and are already competitive with fossil fuel power generation. Folks have woken up and seen the hoax being played out in hydrogen and bio-ethanol from corn and bio diesel from soy. Mostly there is money being made in being green and the greenback is the electromotive force for change in energy policy. I feel good and know that old Gaylord caused a sea change in the indiscriminate pollution of the planet with known toxins circa 1970. There will be new Gaylords in business, Congress and the White House and our great country will do more than mend fences in Yellowstone, we will show how the world how we can drive efficient vehicles, live in more efficient homes, have better public transportation, increase the fraction of our renewable electric power generation, and yet continue to enjoy economic growth without wasteful subsidies in corn ethanol or a hydrogen highway that leads to nowhere.