Man, what a sweet car!

Crude oil is at a record high price around $60/barrel.

Meanwhile, one of the most common fuels for humans, refined sugar, is down around $0.09/lb on the wholesale markets.

At these prices, crude oil costs just under $10.00 per gigajoule of energy (a gigajoule is the energy equivalent of about 8.5 gallons of gasoline). Sugar costs only a little more, just over $12.00 per gigajoule.

But the price for sugar is for a highly refined product, whereas crude oil needs to be made into stuff like gasoline, kerosene, etc., before it is useful. At current wholesale gasoline prices of around $1.50/gallon, it costs just under $13.00 per gigajoule. At the pump, you pay something like $20/gigajoule.

In other words, at the wholesale level, table sugar is currently a less expensive fuel than gasoline and other petroleum products.

How long before we can fuel up the Posche with the 25-lb bag from Costco?

[ASIDE: For those who think running a car on table sugar is hopelessly impractical, consider this: (1) Technology currently exists to run engines on solid fuels, and table sugar is in many ways ideal (it comes in a fine-grained highly pure form with very consistent properties). (2) Many power plants currently run on solid fuels like coal and waste wood (though at about $2-$3 per gigajoule, coal is much cheaper than oil or sugar). (3) Sugar is renewable, safe when spilled, nontoxic, does not contribute to global warming, and readily available almost anywhere in the world. So this idea isn't as goofy as it may seem....]

Addenda: For those who don't grok metric, one gigajoule is roughly one million BTU, or 300 kilowatt-hours.

Also, residential electricity is around $30/gigajoule (depending on where you live). Electricity will always be more expensive than raw fuel because burning fuel to generate electricity is only 30% to 50% efficient.

Finally, soybean oil, which can be turned into biodiesel fuel with a simple chemical reaction, currently costs $14-$15 per gigajoule wholesale. So we are nearly at the point where biodiesel will be cheaper than petroleum diesel even without tax breaks and subsidies.