All the Oil
--posted by Tony Garcia on 11/30/2005
(H/T: John Adams Blog)
Actually, I guess a Hat Tip is if they point me to something that I want to comment on. The folks at John Adams Blog simply have a must read.
(Listen for the mass of bubble bursting from global warming freaks.)
Click here for the full text.
From 1970 - 2005 the demand for oil in the United States went from 15 - 20 million per day or about an increase of 1% per year. If you extrapolate this from 2005 - 2105, we will use a total of 1.26 trillion barrels of oil over the next 100 years. A barrel of oil is 5.6 cubic feet, therefore, we will use 7.08 trillion cubic feet of oil over the next 100 years.How can so little be even remotely close to the enormous claims of the militant-envrio-nuts?
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However, consider that a cubic mile = 147 billion cubic feet. Thus, all the oil that America will use in the next 100 years would fit in a space of only 48 cubic miles. ...when you consider we are drilling down 6 miles for oil (the Earths crust is roughly 40 miles deep), the city of St. Paul would comprise over 300 cubic [miles] (52 sq miles x 6).
When you consider the entire surface of the earth (we also get oil from the ocean) you have 196,940,400 million square miles x 6 or 1.2 billion cubic miles. Of this amount, 48 square miles comprises less than .0000041% of the space in the earth that could hold oil.
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If the volume of the Earth's atmosphere is more than 10 billion cubic miles, would burning 48 cubic miles of oil into it have any noticable effect?
UPDATE: Lake Superior holds 2900 Cubic miles of water. So all the oil we need for the next 100 years would take up 1.7% of Lake Superior
3 Comments:
Ah - you have some apples and oranges here. First off there is not an even distribution of oil underneath all of the earth surface, and certainly not an even distribution from 100ft down to 40mi. So it may be perfectly reasonable that only .0000041% of the earth as you calculate holds oil. Although this is based on US oil usage not global.
Secondly refined oil that combines with oxygen and powers the explosions in an internal combustion engine leaves many byproducts which are in gaseous form. That is to say that they are much less dense then the oil they are products of. So the question of would burning 48 cubic miles of oil into the atmosphere have an effect is not something that can be answered using simple geometry.
PS - I'm a conservative. If we want to win debates, we can't be oversimplifying the issues.
Your second point is well taken. I stand in error.
The first point...me thinks this is a fair demonstration of the volume taken vs the volume that it is taken from. Even if you account for global usage it is not that big of a difference on the overall percentage.
Here is some oversimplification:
The Sun heats the Earth.
The Sun is more powerful then all of our nuclear bombs combined.
We must defeat the Sun to stop global warming.
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