Cubic mile of oil


The cubic mile of oil is a unit of energy, aiming to give the general public an understanding of large quantities of energy. It is approximately equal to joule. It was created by Hew Crane of SRI International to aid in public understanding of global-scale energy consumption and resources.
Large scale sources of energy include wind, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, nuclear, hydroelectric, oil, coal, natural gas, geothermal, and biomass. Traditionally, many different units are commonly used to measure these sources but only some of them are familiar to a global general public, and some argue that fewer are needed and a standard should be chosen. Still, these common energy units are mainly sized for everyday activities, for example a joule is the energy required to lift a small apple one metre vertically. For regional, national, and global scales, larger energy units, such as exajoule, terawatt-hour, billion barrels of oil equivalent and quad are used. Derived by multiplying the small common units by large powers of ten these larger units pose additional conceptual difficulties for many citizens.
Crane intended the cubic mile of oil to provide a visualizable scale for comparing the contributions of these diverse energy components as a percentage of total worldwide, energy use.
In 2005, the global economy was consuming approximately of oil each year. Numbers of this magnitude are difficult to conceive by most people. The volume occupied by is about. Crane felt that a cubic mile would be an easier concept for the general public than a trillion gallons.

Definition and energy equivalents

The CMO is defined as the energy released by burning a cubic mile of oil. One cubic mile is equal to about, or. Since the energy released by burning oil is about,, the energy released by burning one cubic mile of oil is approximately equal to:
As the energy released by burning natural gas is about, the same energy is released by burning of natural gas.

Annual energy consumption by source

The world consumes approximately 3 CMO annually from all sources. The table
shows the small contribution from alternative energies in 2006.
SourceCMO/yr
Oil1.06
Coal0.81
Natural gas0.61
Biomass0.19
Nuclear0.15
Hydroelectric0.17
Geothermal<0.01
Wind+Photovoltaic+Solar thermal<0.005

A CMO/yr is about 5.084 TW continuous, making current world energy use around 15 TW.

Global energy reserves

are those that can be extracted with reasonable certainty under existing conditions using existing technology. Global proved oil reserves are estimated at approximately. This corresponds to roughly 43 cubic miles, or 43 CMO. At the current rate of use, this would last about 40 years. Technological advances, new discoveries, and political changes will likely lead to additional proved oil reserves in the future. Concurrently, the International Energy Agency predicted in its 2005 World Energy Outlook that the annual consumption will increase by 50% by 2030. Coal and natural gas currently provide 1.42 CMO of energy per year. Global reserves of these fossil resources are as follows:
While oil has many other important uses this section considers only its use as an energy source.
The CMO is a powerful means of understanding the difficulty of replacing oil energy by other sources. In 2007, SRI International chemist Ripudaman Malhotra, working with Crane and colleague Ed Kinderman, used it to describe the looming energy crisis in sobering terms. Malhotra illustrates the problem of producing one CMO energy that we currently derive from oil each year from five different alternative sources. Installing capacity to produce 1 CMO per year requires long and significant development.
Allowing fifty years to develop the requisite capacity, 1 CMO of energy per year could be produced by any one of these developments:
The energy produced is the power rating of the source multiplied by the duration it is operational. These comparisons take into account the variability of available power. In practice, due to losses as waste heat, it takes about of primary heat energy to produce 1 kWh of electricity from coal and other fossil sources. Thus, when considering sources such as wind and solar which directly produce electricity, the required installed capacity was calculated by using 1 kWh as equivalent to.
The environmental, social, and financial costs of such development projects are immense:
For comparison, US$3.2 trillion is the approximate gross domestic product of Germany, China, or the United Kingdom. The total land area of New Zealand is approximately.
At a 2008 market price of US$120 per barrel, the cost of one CMO was about US$3 trillion. So for the cost of about one year's global oil consumption at 2008 market prices, enough wind turbines could be built to generate the same energy for 40 years, assuming sites are available.

Replacement of oil by speculative alternative sources

and solar power above the clouds offers potential future energy technologies. As about five terawatt equals one CMO per year, it would take about 1000 five gigawatt power satellites to replace a CMO. To compete with coal, the maximum cost for space-based solar power plants would be US$2.4 billion per gigawatt. At that, the cost would be about $12 trillion for one CMO or about $36 trillion to replace the entire fossil fuel use of humans, or about 45 % of the gross world product for one year. There is room in geostationary orbit for more than ten times the 2015 energy use. At a peak production of 315 new power satellites per year, it would take less than a decade to get off fossil fuels.
The potential future technology of solar power above the clouds has the advantage that solar can be tapped at 20 km regardless of the local weather.
In both cases, a huge energy flow to carbon-neutral synthetic fuel plants could be utilized for transport sectors where electrification pose a challenge, as of 2020 for example aviation.