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It Takes A Hundred Million Years to Refuel Your Car

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We continually hear the tired old argument that electric cars take too long to recharge. Even Supercharging a Tesla's battery to 80% state-of-charge in 30 minutes seems too long for most folks when, they like to point out, it only takes a few minutes to refuel a gasoline-powered car.

That is total BS. In fact, it takes millions of years to refuel your car.

Huh?

That's right: millions and more likely, tens of millions of years. In fact, no one knows exactly how long, but it's a very long, long, long time. The best guess is the process started sometime around the Cretaceous period, 100 million years ago.

Back in 2010, the New York Times ran an article entitled, "Tracing Oil Reserves to Their Tiny Origins." There's a reason by most of the world's oil fields are found either in basins once formed by ancient seas or still buried deep below today's Arabian Sea or Gulf of Mexico. Writes William Broad in the Times…

"The process typically starts in warm seas ideal for the incubation of microscopic life. The sheer mass is hard to imagine. But scientists note that every drop of seawater contains more than a million tiny organisms.

"Oil production begins when surface waters become so rich in microscopic life that the rain of debris outpaces decay on the seabed. The result is thickening accumulations of biologic sludge."

Over the mindless millennia, geological forces pushed this nutrient-rich 'sludge' deeper, exposing it to every higher pressures and temperatures, gradually cooking it into a highly concentrated form of ancient sunlight that we call petroleum. Similar geologic processes gradually converted hundreds of millions of tons of plant matter into thick beds of what became known as coal; the quality and characteristics of which vary widely, as does petroleum, depending on the original source materials and 'cooking' times.

For unfathomable periods of time we simply can't comprehend or appreciate, these vast stores of hydrocarbons (coal, oil, natural gas) sat untapped in their rock vaults. Rare leaks of methane like those believed to have inspired the legends of the Oracles of Delphi and tiny surface pools of bitumen only hinted at the ancient treasure hidden below.

By the 19th century, mankind had figured out how to make use of coal and by the 20th century wells were pumping petroleum as quickly as they could be sunk into the ground, literally fueling an explosion of prosperity and population.

The trouble is that we're now using it up faster than nature can replenish it. The same biological and geological processes that formed it in the first place continue apace, but at a rate modern civilization can't depend on for future growth.

We and our descendants have to begin to rely again on the immediate forms of energy nature provides: wind, gravity, sunlight; even the same pressure cooker that gave us the fossil fuels in the first place: geothermal energy. Only now we have the ability to do it smarter than our pre-petroleum age ancestors. And yet, with the exception of gravity, which is the principle force behind hydroelectric power, you don't tap into more than a tiny fraction of these nearly limitless energy sources.

Instead we make use of ones that took a 100 million years to make. We extract them, refine them, pump them into our cars, trains and planes, and then immediately burn them up, producing climate-altering carbon dioxide as a result. Then we superciliously boast how little time it takes to refuel our cars compared to the agonizingly slow process of recharging an electric car.

Now in fairness, I should point out that what applies to a gasoline, diesel, propane, or CNG vehicle, applies equally to an electric car whose primary power comes from an electric utility that burns to coal or natural gas. Unless you're charging directly from a wind turbine, tidal turbine or solar PV system, for example, you're still depending on the planet's vast, yes, but limited and terribly slow energy concentration process.

So, don't dare suggest that refueling a gasoline car is 'faster' than an electric car, especially one recharged by renewable energy. A few hours sitting under a solar canopy being recharged by sunlight is infinitely faster than what it takes to make any fossil fuel.

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