Last Update: July 4, 2015

  1. Fossil Fuel’s gift to the world – modern society, powerful machines, 7+ billion people
  2. How many days of human labor is in a gallon of gasoline?
  3. What’s in Crude Oil? A lotta toxic stuff, Benzene, Tuolene, etc
  4. Health effects of fossil fuel consumption
    1. Health effects of burning Diesel, and the exhaust fumes
    2. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, asthma, from living near diesel exhaust concentrations
  5. Peak Oil, Peak Natural Gas, Peak Resources, Peak Everything
    1. What happens when the power runs out? That is, when Peak Oil really bites us in the butt?
    2. Fracking's false oil-energy boom leading the world to financial collapse?
    3. Peak Oil 101 – Chris Martenson
    4. Peak Oil Reading List
    5. DON’T WORRY, DRIVE ON: Fossil Fools & Fracking Lies
    6. 300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds
    7. U.S. Military rethinking its energy policies; speech by Adm. Mullin at the Energy Security Forum of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
    8. Fueling the Future Force: Preparing the Department of Defense for a post-Petroleum era
  6. The oil companies keep winning as long as we keep giving them money
  7. Natural Gas – the Supposedly Clean Fossil Fuel
  8. Gasoline and Diesel
    1. What is the true price of gasoline? Should it cost $10 per gallon?
    2. Types of Crude Oil sources & constraints
    3. Extracting Crude Oil from the ground
    4. Transporting crude oil to refineries
    5. Refining crude oil to oil products
    6. Delivery to consumers
    7. Oil Products Consumption – burning gasoline, etc
    8. Crude Oil Dispersants – The main tool to mitigate crude oil spill disasters
  9. Coal
    1. Types of Coal
    2. Clean coal? Misnomer?
    3. Coal as a source of electricity or conversion into synthetic crude oil
    4. History of Coal Use
  10. Fracking – Hydraulic Fracturing – Acidizing
    1. Produced Water from Fracking operations
    2. Fracking (waste water injection) probably causes induced earthquakes
    3. Hydraulic Fracturing (fracturare hidraulica) in Romania’s shale gas (gaze de sist) formations
      1. Public perception of shale gas in Romania
      2. The future of shale gas in Romania: questions and policy options
      3. Romania after Nabucco: Energy Security Options
      4. Romania’s Oil and Gas Framework: 2013 highlights
      5. Paleozoic Paleozoic Shale Gas Plays of the Eastern Europe: Romania case study
    4. United States State Department Bureau of Energy Resources – USAID
      1. Fiscal Year 2014 USAID Budget Request contains funding for fracking program
    5. Marathon Oil explains that Hydraulic Fracturing is safe and beneficial
    6. WARNING Fracking An Inconvenient Truth
    7. Truth about Fracking – Wes Wilson – Phil Doe
    8. Costs of Fracking for Oil and Gas

Fossil fuels are ancient sunlight, stored solar energy from millions of years ago which fueled ancient plants and animals, whose bodies have become fossil fuel resources like coal, natural gas and crude oil.  The energy content in these fuels drive the machines around us.  If we did not have those fossil fuels, how many people would be required to run the machines?

Here are some rough calculations to get us into the right ballpark:

1 barrel equates to 6.1 Gigajoules (5.8 million BTUs)
humans use roughly 100-700 Kilocalories per hour
1 kilocalorie (Kcal) = 4,184 joules
1 barrel of oil has 6.1 billion/4,184 = 1,454,459 kcals
human effort is worth a range 2078 and 14544 hours per barrel of oil
that's between 86.5 to 606 days

At 42 gallons of "refined products" from each barrel of oil, a gallon of gasoline represents between 2 and 14.4 days of human labor. [OilDrum] [BioEnergyORNL] [MBSOFT] [RobHopkins] [Wikipedia]

That's what gasoline and diesel and coal are. Energy, highly concentrated into an easily delivered form, that's easily burned to produce the heat or motion which drive the machines around us.

Those machines don't magically drive themselves. Overwhelmingly fossil fuels power them, either directly via a fossil fuel burning fuel engine, or indirectly with electricity from a fossil fuel power plant. The politicians and pundits who talk about technological and scientific progress, but fail to mention the fossil fuels powering the machines which enable this progress, help us to ignore the role fossil fuels play.

When our ancestors only had machines powered by human or animal muscle, humanity was limited in the scope of work we could accomplish. Gasoline or Diesel energy density is bigger the animal-driven machines, enabling us to accomplish bigger tasks. Such as, sailing huge container ships around the globe, loading and unloading them with huge cranes, undermining local economies world-wide.

One result of this is a hugely increased human population, in part enabled by more efficient food production thanks to fossil fuel powered farm machinery and fertilizers derived from fossil fuels. As human population increases, our collectively energy consumption rises, which then causes the oil companies to constantly increase their production. [Graham Zabel] Which begs a question: What happens if (when) the oil companies can no longer increase oil production?

About the Author(s)

David Herron : David Herron is a writer and software engineer focusing on the wise use of technology. He is especially interested in clean energy technologies like solar power, wind power, and electric cars. David worked for nearly 30 years in Silicon Valley on software ranging from electronic mail systems, to video streaming, to the Java programming language, and has published several books on Node.js programming and electric vehicles.
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