Carbon, Hydrogen, and OXYGEN: Why didn’t someone tell me?
Posted: March 7th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: environment, sketches | Tags: car, carbon, change, climate, combustion, dioxide, driving, emissions, fuel, global, warming | 6 Comments »I recently read that burning one gallon of gasoline releases about 19 lbs of carbon dioxide.
The mass on either side of a chemical reaction must balance, so I thought to myself, “If a gallon of fuel weighs 6 lbs, where is the other 13 lbs coming from?”
Well, it turns out that the additional weight is from the 21 lbs of oxygen that your car sucks from the atmosphere to burn that gallon of gas! Your car also spits out one gallon (8 lbs) of water in the process. 21 lbs of oxygen fills about four phone booths (~250 cu. ft.), and 19 lbs of carbon dioxide fills about two and a half phone booths (~150 cu. ft.). If your fuel economy is 25 mpg, then the above quantities occur every 25 miles you drive.
