Net CO2 Emissions Coal vs Heating Oil

Bill,

Thanks for starting the thread. Over time with additional technical expertise and good data it will improve. I've got a friend that's a retired merchant marine engineer. He was a electrical engineering professor at the marine union's engineering school. I'll see him next month and ask him for some leads for good fuel consumption data. The ships he took me on were huge. Engine rooms looked more like a warehouse. Pistons the size of 55 gallon drums. Oil had to be heated first before it could flow.

John

I would think you would need a bunch of tugboats at each end of the trip for that beast filled with oil to dock safely. And you should base the fuel consumption of the supertanker on a round trip if you didn't. I'm sure they use less fuel going back empty but it is still a lot of CO2 left out of the equation. Unless of course they figured out how to use the Enterprise's transporter beams to get them back to Saudi Arabia.

From the EPA's own data the biggest producer of CO2 in the USA is not "COAL" but “OIL”. Besides being the biggest polluter, case in point the Gulf oil spill. A reduction in the use of oil is the easiest place to have quick and substantial improvements. 95% of COAL is used in Electric generation, Any volunteers to turn off their electricity? Sources of CO2: 35% from COAL, 23% from Natural Gas and 42% from OIL. http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissi ... nnex-2.pdf