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What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

How to save energy through both societal and individual actions.

Re: What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

Unread postby PeakOiler » Mon 25 Aug 2014, 19:45:15

Probably one of my best decisions to reduce my carbon footprint was to get a more efficient car in 2003 for my 92 mile/day round trip commute which ends next year! Hurray! I'll be retired in August 2015 and I look forward to not having a boss... :lol:

Here's a chart of my gasoline cost and use since 1998:

Image

I certainly expect another big drop in 2015-2020+ .

I try to grow some of my own food, but not having the time while working a 40 hr week (+ ~10 hrs/wk driving) has left little time for gardening, but I expect I will have a lot more time for gardening in a year!
There’s a strange irony related to this subject [oil and gas extraction] that the better you do the job at exploiting this oil and gas, the sooner it is gone.

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Re: What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

Unread postby Newfie » Mon 25 Aug 2014, 19:48:12

Re building infrastructure......how come we can find money to build new highways but we can't find money to fix the ones we have?

We just spent billions to extend the damn NJ Turnpike double track portion. Weren't we supposed to be cutting back on travel?

THATS where the real savings are, much more than in you personal use. Personal savings are good but they are no substitute for institutional savings.
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Re: What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

Unread postby kublikhan » Mon 25 Aug 2014, 21:22:51

Newfie, here's a breakdown of the embodied energy in a Yacht.

Our objectives have been to evaluate a 40-ft. LOA monohull yacht for coastal and blue water cruising and racing which would have minimum impact on the environment during construction, operation, maintenance, and eventual decommissioning.

The Value of Petroleum:
A barrel of oil contains about six gigajoules of energy. That's six billion joules or 1,667 kilowatt-hours. No, we don't have any idea how much that is, either, so let's think about the equivalent. Sit a reasonably healthy male adult on an exercise bike wired to an efficient generator, and he can produce 100 watts. After he has pedaled an hour, he has produced 100 watt hours of energy, or 1/10 of a kw-hour. It will take a little more than eight 40-hour weeks to produce the energy in a gallon of gasoline. At minimum wage this gives a value of $2,194 / gallon. To produce the energy in a barrel, he would have to peddle for 8.01 years. This would have a value of $109,169.

Table 1. Embodied Energy of Various Materials in Hull Construction
Glass/Epoxy - 23 barrels of petroleum equivalent
Green Yacht Design Recommendations

Just looking at the hull, we got 23 barrels of oil in that sucker. This is for a glass/epoxy hull type. There's other hull types in the link if you wanted to see their energy content. I didn't get a breakdown of the other components of the boat. But lets assume the hull is about half of the embedded energy in a yacht. So we double our embedded oil to 46 barrels. at $100 a barrel, that's $4,600 worth of oil. I'm not really sure how much a new 40-ft. LOA monohull yacht goes for. We should use the price of a new Yacht, not used. I found prices ranging from $250k to $1.25 million. Perhaps you would know a better range?
$4600 / $250,000 = 2% of the purchase price of a $250k yacht covers the embodied energy.
$4600 / $1,250,000 = 0.4% of the purchase price of $1.25 million a yacht covers the embodied energy.
So a range of less than half a percent to 2%, depending on price. I was surprised by these results. I was with you in thinking that floating piece of oil you are sailing would have embodied energy costs that were more than 10% of it's purchase cost.

But then there is another way to look at it. Let's say we had no fossil fuels. You have to pay someone, at minimum wage, to do the work equivalent of that 46 barrels of oil. So you pay a bunch of guys to pedal on bike generators. If we use the above example of $110k for the value of minimum wage work in a barrel of oil, that comes out to about $5 million. That's just for the cost of the embedded energy. So add that to the cost of the rest of the Yacht.

$5000 worth of oil allows you to sail around on $5 million worth of fossil fuel energy slaves. Nice leverage you got there!
The oil barrel is half-full.
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Re: What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

Unread postby timmac » Tue 26 Aug 2014, 00:06:45

I sold my 26 ft motorhome and bought a 33 ft motorhome with 2 slide outs and flat tow a Jeep Wrangler that sips gas, I also upgraded the interior lights to LED, does this qualify as lowering my carbon foot print..
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Re: What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

Unread postby timmac » Tue 26 Aug 2014, 00:40:19

pstarr wrote:
timmac wrote:I sold my 26 ft motorhome and bought a 33 ft motorhome with 2 slide outs and flat tow a Jeep Wrangler that sips gas, I also upgraded the interior lights to LED, does this qualify as lowering my carbon foot print..
You got me on that one. I almost chuckled. Not a big laugh, but more a little snide grin segueing into a sickened grimace. :badgrin:


Didn't know Liberals could laugh, always thought they just looked down their noses at everybody..
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Re: What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

Unread postby Newfie » Tue 26 Aug 2014, 08:35:19

Kub,

Yes very surprising results indeed.

I'll have to mull this over and look for hidden energy cots but it don't look good for my argument.

BTW, I would use the lower number, more cheap yachts are sold than high quality so that is more representative.

Also, length is not always the best denominator of relative cost. Inexpensive yachts are very lightly built. Displacement or weight can be 100% more for a quality boat. Then the necessary extras to turn the boat from a floating condo to a true passage maker can easily add 50% to the upper price. Then if you trick it out with amenities, that's another whopping increase.

Speaking very round numbers our old 44' steel boat, already a passage maker, coat about $100,000. We have put another $50,000 in improvements so she can be sailed by one oldster. But she weighs 40,000 pounds, nearly three times a modern production boat.
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Re: What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

Unread postby eastbay » Tue 26 Aug 2014, 17:39:54

GASMON wrote:I have done sweet F.A. to lower my Carbon Footprint

I have, however, done a great deal to lower my energy consumption and therefore lower my bills.

Probably the same difference, but I'm sick of all this carbon footprint shyte.

Gas


F. A. Nothing.
That's precisely what I've done, too. It's a solid first step when one realizes there's darn F. A. not a good golly miss Molly damn thing that can be done to stop this overloaded and overbreeded and overfed boat away from its destination which is Mass Extinction Bay, now clearly visible straight ahead. Have a fun ride. :)
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Re: What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

Unread postby Newfie » Tue 26 Aug 2014, 22:36:00

Kub,

I read through that piece you linked very quickly. Thanks.

I do see that they make a reference in one chart to "embedded energy" in the hull. I also note that they are quoting some pretty low weights. Just to give an idea they are saying a 40' steel boat is 6,000 pounds, that MUST be for the hull only. Our 33' boat is 16,000 pounds and our 44' boat is 40,000 pounds.


A new Catalina 38.5 has an advertised (read low ball) weight of 19,000 pounds. Call it 20,000 for a 40' vs the 4,000 pounds for the hull alone.

Bottom line is the hull is more like 20% of the weight rather than 50%. $200,000 is a very rough average price for a new production boat.

So the math is more like
23 x 5 for 115 bbls @ $100 or $11,500 on a $200,000 investment so more like 6%.

But wait theres more....epoxy, the refined oil, is expensive. $60/ gallon in drum quantities. Using that 115 bbls x 42 is 4,400 gallons @ $60 is $260,000 ish. Clearly that's not right either (there is still a lot of stainless, steel, and aluminum, and wood) but it shows how we can't make a simple extraction. I haven't a clue of how many bbl of oil are required to yield one bbl of epoxy, but it sounds like a bunch.

That's where the hidden costs come in. In the refining to get an end product in this case. Also in the sales cost are the manufacturing costs of the plant, it's heat, the offices, etc. all of which are somehow a product of oil.


PS....look at the hull weight/embedded energy chart and note the difference in using virgin steel or aluminum to using recycled products. Pretty impressive, especially aluminum.
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Re: What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

Unread postby kublikhan » Wed 27 Aug 2014, 00:56:30

Thanks for the corrections Newfie. 6% is starting to sound more reasonable. Although the second part where you are doing the epoxy calculation looks questionable. Since the authors already told us the embedded energy value of the hull, including the epoxy, I think it is better to go with your first calculation.

I also agree with you about the energy savings on using recycled materials. I've been harping about that for awhile now. Infact, some have proposed "mining" aluminum from landfills instead of bauxite ore. It's currently uneconomical though. Better to simply increase our recycling rates than to dig up the ore, smelt it, use it, landfill it, than dig it up again. Sounds silly doing it that way. But perhaps many years from now when ores start getting really scarce, this will start looking more economical. Our future progeny could be picking through our landfills and saying "Curse you ancestors for making me do this! Couldn't you have just put the damn can in the box labeled 'recyclables'?" Or perhaps it will be more like "Thank for leaving us this buried treasure! This is more valuable to us than gold!"

The concept of landfill mining was introduced as early as 1953 at the Hiriya landfill operated by the Dan Region Authority next to the city of Tel Aviv, Israel. Waste contains many resources with high value, the most notable of which are non-ferrous metals such as aluminium cans and scrap metal. The concentration of aluminium in many landfills is higher than the concentration of aluminum in bauxite from which the metal is derived.
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Re: What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

Unread postby Newfie » Wed 27 Aug 2014, 07:52:19

Yeah, I knew that was obviously stretching. I still think the numbers are very low but don't want to bore others with digging through it here. Which is another way of saying I'm lazy. :-D

Also I have had similar thoughts on the landfills.
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Re: What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

Unread postby kublikhan » Wed 27 Aug 2014, 12:42:58

I found a detailed breakdown of embodied energy for a car if you were interested:
Cars vs Cell Phone Embodied Energy

Barrels of oil equivalent to joules

They came up with 118 billion joules of embodied energy in a 1828 kg car. That's about the weight of a modern Ford Taurus. And the embodied energy is about the equivalent of 20 barrels of oil. Lets keep the same assumed $100 for a barrel of oil.
I got a price range for a Ford Taurus of $26,115 - $39,430
2000 / 26115 = 8% of purchase price covers price of embodied energy
2000 / 39430 = 5% of purchase price covers price of embodied energy

But then we should also consider that oil is one of the more pricey ways to generate energy. I think it is safe to say alot of that embodied energy was generated with cheaper sources of energy, like natural gas. Natural gas cost is only about $23 for a barrel of oil equivalent in energy. Running the numbers with natural gas instead of oil:
460 / 26115 = 1.7% of purchase price covers price of embodied energy
460 / 39430 = 1.2% of purchase price covers price of embodied energy

So somewhere between 1% and 8% of the purchase price would cover the cost of the embodied energy in a car.
The oil barrel is half-full.
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Re: What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

Unread postby Newfie » Wed 27 Aug 2014, 13:52:29

Definition of embodied energy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_energy

Interesting concept. I'm gonna have to think about this for a bit.
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Re: What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

Unread postby Newfie » Wed 27 Aug 2014, 14:40:50

Pstarr, that is close to the point I was trying to make above.
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Re: What have you done to lower your carbon footprint?

Unread postby Pops » Wed 27 Aug 2014, 15:05:25

I just reject that analysis out of hand, Kub

I dare you to build a Ford Taurus solely via manpower (or little Chinese girl-power for that matter) for 90% of the cost of one built using FFed infrastructure - how silly.
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