What Is A Barrel Of Oil Worth, You Might Ask?

As he drives, Dave indulges in a little academic exercise. He’s comfortable with numbers, quick with calculations. A barrel of oil, he tells you, contains about six gigajoules of energy. That’s six billion joules. Put your average healthy Albertan on a treadmill and wire it to a generator, and in an hour the guy could produce about 100 watts of energy. That’s 360,000 joules. Pay the guy the provincial minimum wage, give him breaks and weekends and statutory holidays off, and it would take 8.6 years for him to produce one barrel of oil equivalent (boe, the standard unit of measure in hydrocarbon circles). And you’d owe him $138,363 in wages. That, Dave tells you, is what a barrel of oil is worth.

An Inconvenient Talk

Dave Hughes’s guide to the end of the fossil fuel age
by Chris Turner

This is a very long and detailed article on the energy crisis we are not told about by our regular media. A good read by Chris Turner, a former winner of the National Magazine Awards president's medal, who is working on a new book about the global sustainability movement. I hope he visits Japan and Asia too before finishing the book. Chris has a blog called The Geography of Hope after the book he wrote. Recommended.

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