Petrol instead of food?

Someone asked this question on another board and I had no idea how to caculate the answer. Anyone want to make a rough guess? ~ If my body used petrol for energy and not food, how much would I need per day to keep me running?

Petrol has about 16,000 calories per gallon, so you’d need a few pints.

This may be way too simple for your purposes, but a gallon of gasoline = about thirty-two thousand kcal, if I haven’t screwed up the math, so if you estimate your normal caloric intake you can get there from here. Here’s a source for the conversion: http://www.pa.uky.edu/~sciworks/heat/preview/theq4.htm

Oops, that’s wrong; diesel has 16,000 calories per pound. Petrol has about 15,000 per pound. So you’d need about a quarter of a pound. I’ll see if I can find this expressed in fluid volume somewhere (the folkloric pint/pound conversions won’t work for fuel, as they are designed for water)

I asked a similar question once.

The consensus? “Don’t drink gasoline”

I’m with the consensus.

hh