64 comments on Matt Simmons, a Sasquatch, and a Chimp in Texas Monthly and History Channel 'Doomer Porn' Day
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There is no precise number for this calculation -but this was discussed in detail here:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3412
where many different calculations were arrived at.
It depends a great deal on the assumptions e.g. Lance Armstrong at 600 watts for 30 minutes uses a great deal more calories than me typing this-so a barrel might be only worth 2,300 Lance Armstrong hours if he never slept, etc. - but the bigger point is that fossil fuels are orders of magnitude greater in density and quality than human labor has been in the past -if we include natural gas and coal then my numbers were conservative. In an interview, one can't reasonably spend 1/5 of the time articulating - "the energy in a barrel of oil holds the equivalent in joules of between 5,000 and 30,000 hours of human labor, depending on wattage, how hard people are working, how big they are, if they sleep, what their diet is, etc.". It's directly in the ballpark....
So just to clarify then, we are NOT taking into account the millions of man hours around the world that have been given to energy extraction, or the millions more spent in the factories to create the "conversion devices", i.e., gasoline, Diesel and oil engines and gas turbines that are the only way we have been able to power the world by way of oil and gas? Are we to assume that those blue collar lives in the oil patches of the world, the refineries of the world and the factories that are the very definition of the industrial age, these millions of hours working, bought and paid for with the sweat of the blue collar factory class, were for nothing and contributed nothing to the age of fossil fuels in your calculations?
A century of human labor in sunk costs, unaccounted for?
Just checking.
RC
Wow - millions of man hours? I would guess billions... but at a few hundred barrels per million hours of labour, that's not much in return for the energy we've got from a trillion + barrels...
I think waht you are trying to get to is the term EMERGY or EMbodied enERGY as proposed by Howard T Odum.
http://www.greatchange.org/footnotes-emergy.html
A reply to Nate Hagens
Read the post at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3412
According to the first comment by shargash the calculation has a long pedigree.
If you quoted their figure, clearly it's not a misprint or a miscalculation on your part.
To the person/persons who carried out the original calculation:
The calculator at http://primusweb.com/fitnesspartner/jumpsite/calculat.htm calculates energy requirement for 222 different activities based on weight and duration.
The issue then revolves around what can be realistically defined as “hard human labor,” typing on a keyword, or doing forestry/ general work in a steel mill. Still, the energy requirement varies by much less than 11 folds.
Ywish I can see at least 1 basic error in your calculations:
"Vicki", in your reference, is supplying the calories consumed by the person doing the activity.
Assuming the numbers are right [big assumption - but they sound OK], this IS NOT the energy applied to the load, but the metabolic calories.
I have heard figures of 25% max efficiency for striated muscle eg 25% work 75% heat loss. Add in unfavourable leverages and other losses [eg friction] and 10% useful work sounds about right
pondlife --
According to my notes, the human muscle efficiency (ratio of the mechanical work performed to the metabolic cost) varies between 15% and [as much as] 30% [nearly three times the energy efficiency of average car engine.]
Here's a quote from http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml
I did a very similar calculation in an article for the oildrum a few years back.
I agree that in order to compare apples to apples, you have to measure human output, not input. I used the wattmeter on Floyd Landis' bike (the Tour de France winner accused of androgen use), which registered 230 watts average for the whole riding time of the Tour. I divided by 2 for us less-in-shape people, and then assumed you could put out that power for 6 hours a day on weekdays (not counting breaks).
On the barrel-of-oil side, I used 20 gallons of gasoline from a 42 gallon barrel. Once again, you have to measure useful power output, not input calories, so I assumed it was being burnt in a 25% efficient engine in a car or piece of oil-powered equipment.
That works out to one barrel equals one year of human work. Of course, a human with a brain (which, incidentally, runs on 5-10 watts) could use that power output more strategically -- e.g., by pulling individual weeds instead of a plow -- but sometimes, you just need the power output straight up -- like when a load of concrete is hoisted up to the top of a building, or old concrete is crushed into gravel.
In the article, I also noted the difficult situation with non-renewable helium, given that I mostly do MRI for a living.
Marty
Marty
That's good!
Incidentally, according to a number of different sources including:
1.Drubach, Daniel. The Brain Explained. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2000.
and
2.Physics of Body. Macmillan Encyclopedia of Physics. New York: Macmillan, 1996.
The average human brain runs on 20-25W.
Looks like a violation of thermodynamic laws if you truly believe humans convert energy to work at 15-30% efficiency. The temperature difference between core body temperature and the skin is only 17 kelvins. With perfect mechanical efficiency that works out to only 5.48%. As the load increases the difference between core and skin temperature may decrease causing efficiency to drop further. From this low figure the energy needed for basal metabolism needs to be included. That 12% at the wheels starts to look pretty good.
Humans are not pure heat engines. We take chemical energy that is captured by other organisms and convert it. Perhaps a wound-up spring is a useful analogy.
A reply to Nate Hagens continued...
The point raised here concerns a crisis of confidence. At stake is the credibility of person(s) who manufactured the original figure. How does a layperson factor in an 11-fold discrepancy if the same guys published a whole bunch of other predictions concerning dates, reserves, future prices...?
You already explained 1/2 of the 11 fold discrepancy in your first post:
636.3/119.3=5.33. The rest can be explained by the fact that people currently only work 8-10 hours a day in modern society - though they still burn calories during the other 14-16. They work 5 days per week and 50 weeks per year. The number quoted was 12.5 years, which working 40 hours per week equates to 25,000 hours. This becomes very conservative if we change total energy use into barrel of oil equivalents, because then we (an average american) use 57 boe (2005). This calculation is not a precise number and never can be, due to the higher energy quality of fossil fuels (how could you run a city like New York on a human labor with its current energy dense infrastructure?)
I don't know where the original quote came from, but since I have used this number myself, I've looked into it and am comfortable that 12.5 years/ 25,000 hours is in the ballpark. Even if that is off by a factor of 2, does it change anything?
I will write a short post on this in the future and you can add whatever calculations you wish into the comments. The point is we have moved up the energy quality and quantity ladder like a rocket compared to a few centuries ago. 99.9% of our past history we dealt directly with solar flows - now we are burning very valuable, in dollar and energy terms, fossil stocks.
No I haven’t. Your data refers to “hard human labor.” Computer work is not hard human labor. You are transforming the argument into the Sorites paradox (Continuum fallacy!) Does 1,000 hours added to the calculation make any difference? Then 2, 5, or 10,000 hours... shouldn't change the outcome either [sic.]
So do their neighbors and spouses, they all burn calories throughout the day, but that has nothing to do with your calculation!
I have shown that it has the same amount of energy of about 2,300 hours of "hard human labor," which is about 57.5 weeks (5 days x 8 hours).
Sure, if I get the time!
On that we agree!
The grandfather keeps steam engines [they ate all the forests], the son keeps cars [they guzzled all the oil], the grandson keeps nothing [save for a bare, polluted, diseased, globally warmed planet.]
A variation on Richard St. Barbe Baker, My life My Trees
Ywish - I hear your points. Had I to do that magazine interview again, I would not have used the word 'hard' preceding human labor. But in calculating how many energy 'slaves' we have, I ignored coal and natural gas, etc. So the number of 'laborers' we have, unseen, behind us numbers in the hundreds per year. Whether its 100, or 438.6, is beyond my ken, and depends almost completely on assumptions. But at 60 barrel of oil equivalent per year, even using your numbers, which are not adjusted for energy quality which counts a great deal, we arrive at 70 years of labor behind each Americans annual use of fossil fuels.
Nate Hagens:
I hear you!
In my book, that's sheer unadulterated malevolence, and crime against nature!
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Even if that is off by a factor of 2, does it change anything?
LOL GO NATE GO!!!
Seriously nitpicking about the numbers as you say is pointless its the message here :)
If Oil goes byebye good comes labor intensive.. Go ahead and try to Flintstones that car aye?