What does that sentence mean? It seems like a claim that the energy of 1,400 barrels of crude oil is enough to sustain civilization for a long time, but that seems implausible to me. Also, off by an order of magnitude on the timeline for the sun burning out.
Whenever I read stuff like this now I start to get paranoid that this is written by GPT-3.
* Total ocean volume: 1.3e18 cubic meters, 1.8e21 oil barrels equivalent [1]
* Current oil consumption: 35,442,913,090 barrels per year [2]
* Oil share of total energy consumption: 34% [3]
* Number of years of reserves at current consumption levels: 17,577,561,935 years.
Assumptions:
* Consumption levels are flat, definitely false.
* Energy cost of retrieval: 0, definitely false.
* Retrieval rate: 100%, definitely false, as the concentration dilutes over time.
[1] https://ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/etopo1_ocean_volumes.html
But I do have a friend who works at the UK's fusion research centre, obviously she believes in what they're doing!
So there is definitely a need for small scale to very small scale energy generators, and dismissing a technology because it's unsuitable for large-scale generation doesn't seem wise to me.