By Hans De Keulenaer / Published on Wed, 2006-01-04 22:30
Further to yesterday's post, the 'buried sunshine' article calculated the efficiency of 5 chains to convert 1 kJ of incident solar energy into electricity:
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By Hans De Keulenaer / Published on Tue, 2006-01-03 15:29
In this reference article, Jeffrey S Dukes calculates that the amount of fossil fuel consumed in 1998 required 44 Eg Carbon as precursor material (1 Eg = 1 Exagram = 10E18 g or a 1000 billion tonne), i.e. over 400 times the earth's net primary productivity (NPP). A conservative estimate is that it would require 22% of terrestrial NPP to replace fossil fuel consumption with modern biomass. Such a large-scale use of biomass for energy would have a dramatic impact though on other species.
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