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The following table allows you to calculate the Net Cost in $/Million BTU for a variety of Energy Sources.
1 Million BTU's is the amount of energy in about 8.7 gallons of gasoline. The default prices here are roughly April 15th 2008 in Mansfield, Massachusetts. The default efficiencies are for the best available equipment used for making heat such as heating a house. This form can also be used to compare vehicles, but you will need to enter a much lower efficiency as it is very difficult to build any machine/engine that converts HEAT energy to SHAFT WORK at high efficiency. High efficiency conversion to SHAFT WORK (Force times Distance) has only been achieved with electricity or hydrogen fuel cells.
If you want something you can work with yourself, then just download the Excel spreadsheet
version directly. It has a lot of hard to find conversion factors, and shows all the
assumptions. If you find any errors, or just have some suggestions for improvement, then let me know.
Energy Prices 2008rev7.xls
You can also back calculate the unit price and efficiency, just fill in 2 of the fields in any single row and click "solve". This is a useful tool for comparing the relative operating costs for various energy converting equipment. Of course conservation
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