Carbohydrate-Based Synthesis To Replace Petroleum Derived Hydrocarbons?

A barrel of crude is 42 gallons. So one barrel of crude would make, by your calculations, about 4 gallons of vegetable oil. At current prices of $105/gallon, that would be a cost of about $26 her gallon of vegetable oil.

However, I believe those 10-to-1 figures are for energy, not volume. According to wikipedia, a gallon of crude oil is a standard measurement: 1.7 MWh. Per gallon, that's 40.4 kWh. I can't readily find the energy in vegetable oil from google, however a quick conversion from calories (120 kcal/tbsp = 80,832 kcal/gal) gives us 94 kWh/gal.

That's quite a but more per gallon, giving us only 1.8 gallons of vegetable oil per barrel of crude oil, raising the cost to $56.66 per gallon. Obviously these figures aren't right.

Is that the whole story? Let's consider how vegetable oil is made. Corn oil is rather cheap, so let's look at it. You have to extract the oil from the germ of the corn. Wikipedia again tells us that one bushel of corn yields 1.55 pounds of oil. One bushel is 35.24 L dry. Corn oil has a density of 9.25 g/c^3 (g/mL). Conversions (9.25 g/mL = 77.2 lbs/gal).

Phew! So that 35.24 L (one bushel) of dry corn only yields.02 of a gallon of corn oil! So you need FIFTY bushels of corn to yield one gallon of corn oil!

How much energy is in 50 bushels of corn? Conversions again: one cup of corn (raw) is 132 kcal. So that's 2112 kcal/gal. A bushel is defined as 8 gallons dry, so there are 16,896 kcal/bushel of raw corn. 50 bushels of corn means you need 844,800 kcal of corn to make one gallon of corn oil, which is only 80,832 kcal.

There's your missing energy. You need about 10.5 calories of corn for every calorie of corn oil. Or to put it another way, you need 982.5 kWh of corn energy to produce 94 kWh of corn oil energy.

Take our earlier estimate of 10-to-1 gallon-for-gallon of $56.66, divide by 10.5, and you get a much more reasonable $5.40 for a gallon of corn oil. Figure in some government subsidies, and differences in the two markets and some market fluctuations, and you are very close to your $4 a gallon bulk price for vegetable oil.

Use your brain, think for yourself, but be sure you have all he data and knowledge you need to draw a valid conclusion. The 10-to-1 figure is a general estimate that I just demonstrated is reasonably accurate. Adjust your tinfoil hat and start scrutinizing your conspiracy theories a little more closely.:)

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/udgirR7V8Eg/carbohydrate-based-synthesis-to-replace-petroleum-derived-hydrocarbons

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