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ATP + H20 -> ADP + P produces only 30kJ/mol. A mole of ATP weighs ~500g. You likely get a lot more energy from burning it (the Wikipedia doesn't say), as you do with jet fuel, but that reaction is too hard to reverse to be useful for organisms.

A mole of glucose produces 2800kJ/mol when you burn it. A mole weighs ~180g.




Using http://lmgtfy.com/?q=jet+fuel+density to get a range of 775.0-840.0 g/L for jet fuel, that gives us 37.4MJ/807.5g (taking the average of the jet fuel's mass) against 2.8MJ/180g for glucose.

Scaling the denominator of each to 1kg, that's ~46.3MJ/kg for jet fuel and ~15.6MJ/kg for glucose.

Given how biochemically cheap glucose is to produce compared to jet fuel, I'm surprised it's only off the state-of-the-art by a factor of three.




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