Scale Factor!

You may have been browsing through these pages and / or heard about some numbers in "tons of CO2", "kilowatt hours", or even "barrels of oil." But do we really know what any of these look like? Well, we'll try and make things a little more visual for you so we could get a grasp of how much some of this stuff really is. Just click on the to reveal the answer. If you have any other scale factors you'd like mentioned here, please email us!

	When someone says "one billion tons of CO2", what does that look like?
	Here is the nitty gritty: The air currently contains 0.038% CO2, so one cubic meter of air is 1,000 liters so roughly 1000x0.00038=0.38 liters, divided by 22.4liters per mole=0.0169 moles x 44 grams/mole=~0.746grams per cubic meter. One ton is 1,000Kg or 1,000,000grams so 1,000,000/0.007=~143,000,000 cubic meters of air contains one ton of CO2. So a billion tons would be 143,000,000,000,000,000 cubic meters, which when you think about it, is only 143,000,000 cubic kilometers of air to process. Of course that would be at 100% efficiency. If we assume only 50% efficiency, then you would need to process twice as much air to yield the same one billion tons of CO2. At this 50% efficiency level, this is an amount of air roughly to fill a square 16,000 km on a side and 1 km deep, I believe. This would then be a square ~10,000miles on a side and 0.6 miles deep, or roughly 3,000 feet high. Such a square could be easily visualized spanning much of the Pacific Ocean, but nowhere else on Earth could contain it. If you cut the sides in half to 5,000 miles on a side, then it would need to be 4 times taller or ~12,000 feet high. I'm not sure you could fit such a square over the US and Canada combined, but maybe in Asia it might fit OK. By the way, one ton=1,000 Kg while one ton =2,000lbs. The above calculation also depends on what month that you are in due to air pressure!!

	When we hear "barrel of oil," how much is that? How much gas is in a barrel of oil?
	For the first: 42 gallons per barrel. Oil uses the old American standard barrel, which is based off of the 18th century English wine barrel. When Britain brought in the Imperial Barrel, 55 gal., in the early 19th century, America declined to switch. Since the majority of the oil development in the world was by US companies, the oil volume standard is the American one. Curiously, you almost never see 42 gallon barrels. The size most of us are familiar with is the 55 gallon Imperial size. There's a good article on this in Slate. As for the second question: how much gas per barrel, the short answer is somewhere between 2/3 and 1/3, by volume, depending mostly on the starting oil. Mexican Gulf crudes coming onshore in Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas tend to be light (low density, high API gravity, high thirties to forties is typical), and so can produce more gas. To compare, Californian crude oil is much heavier, typically has an API gravity of 10 or so, and requires much more processing to produce less gasoline. The other factor is that gas, jet fuel, diesel and home heating fuel are all mostly mutually interchangeable. So, if demand for gas is high, home heating fuel will rise in price too, and vice versa. Expect gasoline prices to rise significantly over the winter months. A figure: US uses more than 20 million barrels of oil per day. If you take out a calculator and crunch some numbers, you can see that what we're paying at the pump is a lot cheaper than the price per barrel of oil we see on the news every night! Why? Government oil subsidies in the neighborhood of billions per year to the oil-industry. The good part about this is that it keeps the price per gallon about half of what Europeans are paying, the bad part is that we're rewarding the industry by paying for it through tax dollars - so we're paying for it regardless. Another Catch-22 in subsidy is that at the end of the day we don't have any money left over to invest in alternate fuel initiatives.

	I know what a lightbulb is, but what is a kilowatt hour?
	A Watt is the rate of electrical use at any moment. You've seen your lightbulbs with different ratings - 100W bulb uses 100 watts, a desktop computer uses about 65 watts, and a central air conditioner uses about 3500 watts. If you're given amps, just multiply your amp by 120 (volts) and it gives you the watts. (i.e. 3amps x 120volts = 360 watts. Watt-hours is the energy used since it's measured over a time frame (one hour). Watt-hour is abbreviated as "Wh." (i.e. 1 100watt lamp on for 3 hours = 300Wh) So, 1000 watt-hours = 1 kilowatt-hour (or 1kWh) So if we run our 3500 watt air conditioner for 8 hours, that would mean we used 28kWh. The utility companies charge per kilowatt-hour so now we know what to measure! With our air-conditioner example, if our utility company charges 10cents per kWh (it varies state to state), it cost us $2.80 to run that air conditioner. If it was a warm month, that's $84 of the bill (from the air-conditioner alone!)

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