With the possibility of a job looming (I finally got an interview for a contract gig somewhere), I was thinking about my commute to the client location and how much carbon I'd be emitting.

The commute is about equal to the average MPG that my car gets in morning traffic, so I knew I could estimate it at 2 gallons a day. I Googled for a figure on the emissions from a gallon of gas and found the official EPA estimates. I was shocked, because they said each 8-pound gallon of gasoline burned creates 19.4 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO₂).

I couldn't wrap my mind around this initially. How could 8 pounds of gas produce 19.4 pounds of CO₂? Then it hit me. Burning gasoline breaks the bonds between the gasoline's hydrogen and carbon atoms, then binds one atmospheric oxygen molecule (O₂) to each carbon atom to create one CO₂ molecule. And while the atomic weight of carbon is 12, once you add two oxygen atoms, the resulting CO₂ molecule has an atomic weight of 44.

So when you factor that the 8 pounds of gasoline contains 5.33 pounds of carbon, and around 99% of that 5.33 pounds gets turned into CO₂ which weighs around 3.7 times as much, 19.4 pounds is no longer so mind-boggling.

So now we can look at my commute. Each day, I would put 38.4 pounds of CO₂ into the air, with around 10.5 pounds of that being carbon. If I were able to telecommute 1 day a week, meaning that was 52 days a year less that I drove, I'd save 104 gallons, or 2017 pounds of CO₂, or around 549 pounds of carbon. So for each day per week I was able to telecommute, on average, I'd put one less ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

So if you're trying to jockey for some telecommuting priveleges at work, that's a relatively compelling number. If your commute burns a gallon each way, each day per week you can telecommute adds up to saving a ton of CO₂ emissions over the course of a year.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Cars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.