Filling one’s tank is so utterly mundane an experience that few spare a passing thought for the staggering volume of energy routinely transferred in the process. Occasionally some fool makes a Molotov of himself at the bowser with an unwitting static electricity discharge into the air-fuel vapour mix around the filler neck. Captured on CCTV, it’s the merest blip on the popular radar that petrol is anything other than a benign, unremarkable liquid.

The truth, however, is rather different.

Petrol and its more viscous sibling, diesel, are almost perfect energy storage mediums. They cram so much energy into such a small volume, and they weigh and cost so little, that other fuels – especially alternatives – have real trouble measuring up.

Say you fill up on unleaded. The nozzle might click off automatically at 58 litres. You’re ready for another 600km of driving. For a mere $77 you have just tipped 43kg of stored energy into your tank. It doesn’t sound like a big deal until you actually measure the energy, which in this case is a mammoth two billion joules.

Let’s talk about you. You live in Australia. You consume energy, which pumps CO2 into the atmosphere. You’re part of the global warming problem. Feeling guilty yet?

How big a part of this problem is your driving? Passenger vehicles yield just 7.4 per cent of Australia’s CO2 emissions, and our national emissions are just 1.4 per cent of the world’s total. Crunch those numbers, and Australia’s cars total just over one one-thousandth of global CO2 emissions.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics Australia has 11 million passenger vehicles. So your car represents one one-thousandth of global emissions, divided by 11 million. Conclusion: Your car isn’t

In the one second it took you to decide to read this far in the sentence, the world consumed 150,000 litres of crude oil. It would just fit in a cube 5.3 metres along each edge. This volume is burnt every second of every day of every year.

If the pundits are correct, global demand will jump 50 per cent in the next two decades. The question of supply – the ability to meet demand – is less clear cut.

Crude oil is measured and priced by an arcane yardstick called the barrel. One barrel is 42 US gallons; approximately 159 litres. Perversely, it is no longer sold by the barrel. The minimum purchase quantity for west Texas crude

In addition to beaming re-runs of I Love Lucy into space, human beings can do something amazing, which no other animal can. We can expend more energy than we derive from our food. The rest of the animal kingdom, from the lowliest earthworm in your compost heap to the king of beasts cruising the Serengeti for wildebeest, must devote less energy to catching dinner than they recover from eating it. Otherwise, they will wither and die.

Not us. Not by a long shot. In the developed world, food is a contrivance, a given. We have bigger things on our minds. We can build cars, litigate, use iPods, launch space shuttles, fly business class, film TV sit-coms and rise to the absolute pinnacle of the food chain because of one thing alone: we are no longer shackled to the live-or-die imperative of energy conservation. (Having opposing thumbs has helped, too.)

So transparent has this luxury become that few of us are aware it even exists. Take the simple process of cooking. More energy is spent heating the food than we ingest from it

Arguably, the fuel with some of the most apparent environmental promise is diesel – but not diesel as we know it.

One of the biggest challenges facing many alternative fuels is not their technological development. It is the fact that their mainstream use would require the reinvention of delivery infrastructure required to get the fuel from point of manufacture to the vehicles.

Hydrogen is a prime example. An efficient delivery system for it has get to be contrived, and will require substantial investment if it is. Every service station on Planet Earth will need an extreme makeover … and current engine technology – plus the vehicles that embody it – will be obsolete.

A smoother segue to greener pastures would be to produce fuels compatible with today’s infrastructure and vehicles, using sustainably sourced materials.

It’s happening now. Synthetic diesel is being manufactured using the carbon and hydrogen in ‘biomass’