Stacking Oil Barrels to the Moon

As a follow-up to my prior post helping to visualize the scale of the world's daily crude oil production, I wanted to provide another "scale" eye opener I often use around the office:

So you have realized now (by reading this post on daily oil production) that we produce enough oil each day such that stacking that production in barrels would reach the moon every 5 days.  But do you really appreciate just how far away the moon is?  Let' use an example to illustrate... and here is where I usually ask someone to draw me a circle representing the Earth, then I ask for another circle representing how big the Moon is in comparison (this usually provides some good fun discussion). The typical answer I get is fairly close, something that looks like this:

In reality, the moon's diameter is about 2160 miles and Earth is about 7926 miles, so the Moon is a bit more than 1/4 the diameter of the Earth, (but it's volume is about 1/50th the Earth).  So the 2-dimensional view to the left is fairly close to correct, at least as far as relative size goes.


But then I ask this: "Can you draw me something more to scale now, showing how far the moon is away from the Earth?"  

I get all kinds of answers, many which look much like the drawing above - they don't change the distance between their drawings and might say, "probably about like that":

So I ask: "You are telling me that if I were to "flip" your flat moon over once, it is close enough that it would touch the Earth after just one flip? You are saying that the Moon is just "one moon-width" away? That usually causes them to re-draw it, maybe moving the Moon over about the distance of one or two Earth diameters.

And while that may seem a good distance, the reality is that the moon is much farther away.  At an average distance of about 238,900 miles from Earth, and with the Earth's diameter being 7,926 miles, that means the Moon is about THIRTY (30) Earth diameters away, or about ONE HUNDRED TEN (110) "Moon-diameters" away.  I then like to draw something on my white-board that looks more like this:

Sometimes my full-wall white board isn't big enough, unless I make sure I draw the initial Earth circle small enough.  Either way, I have to move across the room to finish the drawing. And then I stand back dramatically and let them absorb that and say: "That is how far away the Moon is,   and every five days we stack that much oil up. NOW do you understand just how much we produce every day in this world?.... Crazy, huh?"

Then I challenge them to find me another industry that comes even close to that..."Anyone?.... Anyone....?"

How to Visualize What Daily Oil Production Looks Like

I get in all kinds of discussions in various venues about alternative energy. The latest Presidential debates have people talking about various alternative energies and energy independence. As I always say with alternative energy, the first thing one has to ask is "alternative to what?" If you are talking about transportation fuel (gasoline and diesel), then you are looking for an alternative to crude oil and a new way to fuel the transportation market. If you are talking about the electricity generation (power) market, that is another subject entirely. leading to how to displace coal as our top generation source (while the power sector also uses nuclear, natural gas, solar, wind, etc., coal generates close to half our electricity).

For the transportation (crude oil) sector you have heard my prior posts discuss why it is hard to displace crude oil with any ONE solution. Still, many people I talk to have a hard time understanding that many alternative solutions cannot SCALE large enough to displace oil, because realistically the amount of oil we produce every single day is so massive that it is hard for people to get their heads around it. So in order to get people to visualize just how much oil we produce every single day in the world, here's a quiz I used to like to give potential interns:

We produce and use 90 million of barrels of oil EVERY day in the world. If you stacked those barrels on top of each other, how many days of production would it take to reach the moon? 1, 10, 100, 1000?

The answer might be derived in this manner:

1) 90 milliion barrels x 3 feet (approx) height per barrel = 270 million feet tall (one days' production)

2) 270 million feet / 5280 feet per mile = 51,136 miles of production each day

3) Miles from the earth to the moon: approx 238,837 / 51,136 per day = 4.7 days

Resulting answer: about 5 days to reach the moon

So, if you want to replace oil with some liquid fuel derived from algae, corn, etc,, you have to find something that you can stack to the moon every 5 days and do that every day, all year long with no disruptions. Hard to do.

EDIT: Now you can go to my next post titled "Stacking Oil Barrels to the Moon" and see if you really appreciate just how far away the Moon really is.

Does that sound like a great deal of product? It should... Put another way: we speak about oil production in terms of barrels per day because if we talked about annual production the numbers are astronomical:

90 million barrels per day times 365 days a year equates to over 32 BILLION barrels each year (an oil barrel is 42 gallons so that is 1.3 TRILLION gallons of oil).

To yield something like that from any other naturally occurring source of energy is extremely difficult. And to top it off, those barrels of hydrocarbons are VERY energy dense. You can pack a lot of energy into a gallon of gasoline or diesel, which are very portable with today's infrastructure. Portable, dense, abundant. Hard to replicate that for now. That is why there is no ONE solution.

Which is why efficiency is the key, and electrification of the auto allows that while it diversifies the source of the power in front of the electrical plant. See my prior post titled: "The Best Alternative Fuel"