And, if I recall correctly, Blue Whales average much closer to 80-90 tons (only the largest ever top 150 tons). Plus, there were only about 6,000 Blue Whales in the entire Pacific in 2002. Not sure of the numbers for the Atlantic, Indian, and Southern Oceans, but it’s probably smaller than that.
Just west of England. Duh.
I’ve wondered idly if the massive amount of corn production currently subsidized in the U.S. by the ethanol credit could instead be used for biodeisel.
Diesel cars can run on vegetable oil with only minor modifications, so running a diesel car on whale oil wouldn’t be difficult.
The trouble comes from attempting to catch enough whales. The fact is, the whale fishery has collapsed. The populations of whales of all species has plummetted from what it was in the 1800s, all due to overharvest. The current sustainable harvest of whales is zero.
The problem is that most areas of the ocean are far far less productive than most land areas. Phytoplankton need more than just water and sunlight, they need nutrients and minerals. You can’t just put whales in a cage in the ocean and expect them to eat the plankton in the cage, they’ll starve. Whales need huge areas to get enough food to survive. How big an area? The whole planet. Whales routinely cross the oceans.
So you’d have to provide food for the whales. Where do you get that food? Grow plants, feed the plants to krill, feed the krill to the whales? Why not just grow plants and convert them to alcohol or biodiesel? Every step on the food chain reduces production efficiency by something on the order of 90%. So you’ll get 1% of the potential energy from the plants back as usable whale meat and blubber.
It’s a profoundly stupid idea, the only consolation is that the originator of the idea was only trying to make a joke.
Surely I am not the only one who didn’t find it funny?
I think (or at least, hope) that both of these were offered in jest, but it still bugs me when people spout off such lousy estimates. Let’s suppose that there’s one car per two Americans. Even if we assume that a fat ass could be rendered entirely into usable fuel, the volume of two fat asses is significantly less than that of one fuel tank. So if one implemented this plan, each American would lose his or her fat ass, and in return gain less than one tankful for the family car. The fat ass will eventually grow back, of course, but on a timescale significantly longer than it’d take to empty the gas tank. Likewise for the cadæver idea, except that there, you also have to wait for the person to die, and if the process that kills them involves wasting away (as many causes of death do), then the corpse wouldn’t be useable.
this must be a whoosh!
But heck with the whales, think turkeys. There is a plant in Arkansas that turns turkey leftovers into petroleum via a kind of pressure cooker. It is economical because the turkey processor couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the parts any other way. At least when I last heard of this they were scaling up their prototype plant to production.
You do?
The process is called thermal depolymerization and it is the FUTURE. I’m excited about it on the one hand. It rescues “waste” energy from livestock remains; what’s not to love? Well, it props up the fossil fuel economy, instead of hastening its demise (although every day I drive to work I become a less noble critic of the problem), and it uses waste from animals that we’ve purposefully overfed with purposefully overfertilized plants (but just because vegetarians are more energy efficient doesn’t mean I’ll stop eating bacon cheeseburgers). If we could legally depolymerize our former relatives, instead of using them to take up valuable real estate, don’t you think that we’d be entitled to at least a small gratuity for providing the plant with biomass? Hell, why not depolymerize the remains of prisoners who die before their sentences are up? “I’m sorry, ma’am, but your husband owes the state… hmmmm, food costs, room, board, time remaining… 11.03 barrels of oil.” The state could increase revenues and decrease all the hassles and fees associated with running prisons. Who knows? Some prisoners might begin to feel inexplicably ill after only a decade – or even a year! I’m confident that with efficient management and a complicit medical staff we could get the turnover down to weeks over about one generation. And why stop there? We could depolymerize anyone in a vegetative state, stray dogs and cats, squirrels caught living in state-owned parks, the homeless, and (tries to think of the most offensive thing possible – yes!) endangered baby blue whales!!!