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 RecommendationsJust 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.