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Comment by gmarceau | Hacker News Reader

Jet fuel sells for $2.88 per gallon (76 cents per liter), http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=jet-fuel

If the entire world worth of jet fuel was obtained from Nevada, it would inject around 4 billion dollar per year into Nevada's economy, or around $1500 per capita every year. I can imagine them choosing the money over the land.

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The actual land would likely be distributed. Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas would probably build plants, as would Australia, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt, Mali, South Africa, Namibia and countries in other major deserts. In fact, African production developed by Chinese companies may be a major competitor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deserts_by_area

That might only be an upper limit on the economic potential. After all, buyers need to be incentivized to switch suppliers, and the fuel needs to be transported to where it is needed.

I used Nevada as an example because it's a low population density, highly undeveloped, sunlight-rich state, which makes it ideal for solar production plants. I'm sure other production facilities will spring up in the California desert and similarly situated regions around the world.

What excites me most about solar energy plants is that it's ideal for our empty desert regions - Lots of sunlight, lots of undeveloped land, low population.

Edit: The $4 billion figure seems off. If global demand is 60 billion liters, that's $45.6 billion at $0.76/liter. Am I missing something?

It may not be the State's choice, though. Something like 85% of Nevada is Federal land.

I'm finding a daily consumption of 200M gallons, or 73B gallons annually. This would work out to a global consumption of about $220B worth of jet fuel, not $4B.

Where are you finding that 73B gallons/year figure? That's more than 4x the number I found at http://www.transtats.bts.gov/fuel.asp

That was from the indexmundi site:

http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?product=jet-fuel&graph...

I think the difference comes from global vs US numbers.

Economic logic dictates that the prices would drop significantly in this case

that's not really how it will work. If to generate $1500 per year each person needs to invest $150,000, then it ain't gonna happen.

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