A gallon of gasoline has a heat value of approximately 127,650 Btu's and there are 7.42 gallons per Gigajoule (GJ). For gasoline priced at, not costing, $1.30 (1992 $) a gigajoule costs $9.65. Using European prices for gasoline a gigajoule costs approximately $30. Therefore if we look at power costing 4.2 cents per kilowatt-hour (Table 2) and a European cost there is a difference of about twelve dollars per gallon to pay for processing hydrogen into gasoline using carbon from air. A gigawatt satellite power station would supply enough energy to create approximately 200 million gallons of gasoline per year or on a Btu basis 3.7 million barrels of oil. Solar Power Satellite systems could be viewed as oil fields in the sky. Table 4 -Cost of synthetic fuels in 1984 S Whether this is economical or not, the concept is technically feasible and the economics should improve with declining supplies and rising prices of "natural gasoline." Consequently the conclusion is that there is at least an environmentally benign method of indefinitely sustaining our current long haul global transportation system if energy is supplied from space. Figure 13
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