[lbo-talk] Feeding a keyboard to a hummer. (was Jesse Lemisch on the KC gas station action)

morvany at cs.tcd.ie morvany at cs.tcd.ie
Fri Jul 28 03:43:09 PDT 2006


Michael J. Smith wrote:


> Serious question: my computer keyboard took a certain amount
> of oil to make. How far would that same amount of oil propel
> a Hummer? I'm not being rhetorical here. Does anybody know?

It's kind of tricky to answer as part of the leftover from the refining of crude oil into the gasoline fed to the hummer could be used as raw material for the manufacturing of the keyboard's plastic.

Anyway, according to wikipedia, your keyboard is likely mostly made of Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). "Production of 1 kg of ABS requires the equivalent of about 2 kg of oil for raw materials and energy"

Let's assume your keyboard weighs 1.5kg and that your hummer goes 12 miles per gallon. Roughly 19.5 gallons of gazoline can be refined from 42 gallons of crude (that's a barrel). The density of Texan crude oil is 0.873 kg/L. There are 3.78 liters in a gallon.

Putting it all together:

1.5 * 2 / 0.873 / 3.78 = 0.91 gallons of crude to make the keyboard, that's 0.91 * 19.5 / 42 * 12 = 5.06 miles (8.1km) driving the hummer.

It looks even tinier than I expected, someone might want to doublecheck the computation.

Yann



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