The San Diego UT has a cool piece in their Quest section today called Crude Numbers. It lists some good reasons to conserve and recycle! http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051228/6.html My favorite is this one: A 175pound man can be converted (via thermal depolymerization, a process that uses pressure and heat to reduce complex organic materials) into 38 pounds of oil and 7 pounds of gas, plus minerals and water.
Here are a couple that weren't close enough together in the article for everyone to connect: The United States is the third largest producer of oil in the world after Russia and Saudi Arabia, generating 7.5 million barrels a day. Converting all agricultural waste in the United States into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4 billion barrels annually. In order to put these two into perspective, they should be in the same unit of measure. 7.5 million barrels daily equates to 2,737,500,000 barrels annually. Compared to the 4 billion of agricultural waste. Now, I realize that this is a very smiple-minded approach but there's got to be something we can do to make E85 more available and bring flex-fuel cars to the US.
