The other day I was at the Natural History museum with my friend Rebecca. We were in the hall of energy looking at all the exhibits. We came upon an exhibit designed to show the amount of power that gasoline contains. The idea is that you turn a handle as quickly as possible and the experiment will tell you how much energy you expended in drops of gasoline. She got 2 drops of gasoline.
No, it doesn’t mean that she was weak, that was actually quite good. It does show however the amount of energy stored in gasoline, and that’s the problem. Gasoline has one of the highest energy densities around (about 36 Megajoules per Liter(MJ/L)). This is the amount of energy stored per volume of space.
That amount of energy has revolutionized the way we live in the US. It means that any time that you want you can pack up and move across a continent in a couple of days. A journey that once took up to 6 months. So amazing that it’s now just taken for granted. A truly unappreciated wonder of the age.
Not easy to replace. If you look at the available alternatives you get depressed. Batteries? 4.32 MJ/L. Propane? 26 MJ/L. Nuclear power? 1.55 billion MJ/L. But who wants to pack a nuclear reactor in your car?
We have had a temporary reprieve in gas prices due to hydraulic fracturing (fraccing) but that is not a permanent solution to dwindling hydrocarbon reserves. In a few decades we will again see spikes in energy prices.
Ideally we would see some sort of wireless transmission of energy to receivers of vehicles that could continuously charge batteries and keep them running. Barring that you would probably want some sort of hyper efficient solar power cells or extremely efficient battery that could take massive charges in limited spaces.
Future’s almost here folks. If we don’t prepare for it you might want to take up walking as a sport now before it becomes a necessity.
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