Energy in the Texas Panhandle

I've now been through the Texas Panhandle a few times, always going through Amarillo either east-west or north-south. It's flat out there. In fact to the west of Amarillo is the flattest part of the world I've ever seen. Like a table to the horizon in every direction. In fact it IS a table - a huge Mesa - that the road finally drops off to descend into eastern New Mexico (which then rises back up to 8,000 feet before Albuquerque).

As is common in lots of places with old oil deposits, pump-jacks dot many parts of the panhandle. If you're not familiar with these, they're automated relatively low-volume but relatively high efficiency pumps which continually pull oil (or water in some situations) from the ground.

Think old hand-pumped water pump with an electric motor. The Los Angeles basin, especially near the coast line, is also dotted with them.

A more recent addition to the panhandle is the multitude of wind turbines.
There are literally hundreds, likely a few thousand all told in the panhandle.

Seeing these two automated 'energy harvesting devices' in such close proximity got me wondering about comparing the two.

For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume for this exercise that each wind turbine I see out here is a one megawatt version. Most of the latest wind turbines being installed are larger - up to about 3 megawatts - but I'll keep the math simpler this way.

I'll also assume that out here in the panhandle the wind is running at 26 mph (I don't have my anemometer with me but it was definitely windier than 20mph while I was standing in the Walmart parking lot just north of Amarillo. Why anyone would choose to live in such a windy area is something I'll never understand.). A 26mph wind speed would allow the turbine to actually generate 1 megawatt hour of energy every hour.

Compare that to the pump-jack.
Every gallon of gasoline (I know gasoline is a highly refined form of the heavy west Texas crude that these babies are pulling up, but I'll just keep the math simple) contains 1.3 x 10^8 Joules of energy. 1 Kilowatt = 3.6 x10^6 Joules or approximately 40 Kilowatt hours.

Each pump jack will produce about 10 gallons of crude per stroke, pulling about 6 strokes per minute (10 seconds each) to bring up about 60 gallons per minute, which is 3600 gallons per hour, which equals about 144,000 Kilowatts/hour.

So each one megawatt wind turbine will produce about as much energy (at full power) as about seven pump-jacks. Hmmmm While that is truly a comparison of apples to oranges, it's still interesting to note.