Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
bustion within the engine. At no point along its path is oil or gasoline customarily exposed to public
view.
What we see instead, for the most part, is the automobile—a painstakingly crafted exoskeleton
that carries gasoline and humans from place to place—and a landscape substantially altered to suit
its demands. We obsess over our cars: they are our symbols of freedom and status. We judge them
by the elegance of their design, their top speed, their acceleration. We revere their brand names:
Mercedes, Ferrari, Jaguar, Bentley, Cadillac, Lexus. We take for granted the gasoline that makes
them go, until a gauge or warning light on the dashboard forces us to pull over and buy more. Yet
without gas there would be no point to the automobile; even the brawniest Porsche could do no
more than ornament a driveway.
We complain about the price of gasoline, yet at four dollars per gallon it is cheaper than coffee,
beer, or milk—cheaper even than most bottled water.
Unlike those other liquids, gasoline is explosive. It literally gives us a bang—and a fairly
big
bang, at that. Visualize slowly pushing your car miles at a time, your leg and arm muscles straining
to move a ton or two of metal, and you may gain some appreciation for how much power is being
released by each drop of the gasoline that normally speeds it down the road, with virtually no effort
required on your part.
Visualize gasoline-powered civilization arising as if by some maniacally accelerated evolution-
ary process. It all began so recently, in the mid-19th century, and spread across the globe in mere
decades. Automobiles mutated and competed for dominance on vast networks of roads built to ac-
commodate them. Shopping malls and parking garages sprang up to attract and hold them. And
powering it all was an ever-widening but mostly invisible river of gasoline—the poisonous blood
of seven hundred million dinosaur-like machines that now dot landscapes around the world.
Visualize gasoline's combustion by-products spewing out of millions of tailpipes and into the
air our children breathe. As we pump oil out of the ground we transfer ancient carbon from the
Earth's crust into the atmosphere at a rate of 5.2 metric tons per car per year. A car that gets 25 miles
per gallon of gasoline spews out 47 gallons of carbon dioxide for every mile it travels (at standard
temperature and pressure). Like gasoline, carbon dioxide is invisible most of the time; you have to
use your powers of visualization to see the thickening blanket of CO2 that traps more and more of
Earth's heat.
Visualize ancient subterranean oil reservoirs rapidly depleting, with half of Earth's entire inher-
itance of conventional crude converted to CO2 and water during the lifetime of an average baby
boomer (1950-2025). Already, nations are straining to adjust to declining oil abundance, searching
for alternatives, and fighting over what's left. No, we're not
running out
of oil. We've only begun
tapping tar sands, tight oil, and polar oil. But what's left, though impressive in quantity, will be ex-
pensive, risky, and slow to extract.
Visualize a time, years or decades from now, when machines designed to burn gasoline sit idle,
rusting, abandoned. No, we
won't
quickly and easily switch to electric cars. For that to happen, the
economy would have to keep growing, so that more and more people could afford to buy new (and
more costly) automobiles. A more likely scenario: as fuel gets increasingly expensive the economy
will falter, rendering the transition to electric cars too little, too late.
Visualize life without gasoline. You might as well start doing so now, at least in your imagina-
tion; soon enough, this will no longer be an exercise. Already prices are high and volatile. In com-
ing years or decades we may see international conflicts that shut down big portions of the global oil
