Titan Has Enough Propane For 23 Million Trips Around the Earth

New findings from the Cassini mission to Titan — Saturn’s largest moon — show that its atmosphere contains about 29 billion gallons of propane.

Given that the average new car fuel economy in the US is currently about 20 miles per gallon, and that propane-converted cars get about the same mileage as regular gas cars, there’s enough propane on Titan to take one average car more than 23 million times around the Earth’s equator.

Wow! So what you say? Even though that may sound staggering, you still aren’t convinced that it really means anything to you? What if I told you this: that’s only enough propane to satisfy the propane needs of the US for 18 months.

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Now that’s truly impressive. Think about that. All of the propane on Titan is only enough to satisfy the needs of the US for a year and a half. A whole planet’s worth of propane.

We hear so much about how good propane could be for reducing emissions because it burns cleaner than gas. Converting a gas powered car to run on propane is a relatively easy and inexpensive thing to do (PDF), and there are currently about 190,000 propane-fueled vehicles on US roads (uh, please ignore the risk of a botched conversion).

While it may be true that propane cars are spewing less pollution into our atmosphere than gas cars, the US already uses so much propane that in 18 months it would deplete all the propane out of the atmosphere of a planet that has roughly 16% the land area of Earth.

To me, statistics like this put some real perspective on why we need to shift away from fossil fuels in general. Any fossil fuel we choose (oil, coal, propane, etc.), regardless of how less polluting it is than other ones, is still just a band-aid on the problem that eventually we will run out of them.

I’m a big believer in doing things right the first time. It saves a lot of hassle. If you’re constantly just putting band-aids on the problem and doing a half-assed job you end up doing way more work down the road. If we’re talking about our energy future and how to make it sustainable for, well, ever, it doesn’t make sense to plan on using any fossil fuels at all. Let’s do it right the first time.

Source: NASA (Via ScienceDaily)

Image Credit: NASA

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