[Physics] Alcubierre-White warp drive energy consumption

Question

I can't find any place that gives a number other than for a $10c$, 8 lightyear trip being something like 68 exajoules (off the top of my head, might be wrong). I'm sure the math would tell me this if I understood it, but what I'm looking for is determining energy consumption for a given distance and "speed" from at least $0c$ to $1000c$ and how much the size of the field affects the consumption.

I'd prefer a simple equation that I can input into Google Sheets, or write a small JavaScript program so that I can mess around with the variables to use for my purposes, but I don't know if that is possible.

What I am doing is designing star ships for a sci-fi universe and part of that requires storage capacity of fuel and such, and I'd like it to be relatively accurate.

Answer 1

Here is a report of NASA research on the drive:

Last year, Sonny White revealed a new design (pictured top) for the Alcubierre drive that reduces the energy requirement from the total mass-energy of a planet the size of Jupiter, down to the mass-energy of Voyager-1 (700 kilograms). We say “mass-energy,” because no one quite knows how to fuel an Alcubierre drive, with some research suggesting that it might require more energy than the mass of the observable universe, or possibly negative amounts of energy. Basically, though, according to NASA’s preliminary research, the energy requirements appear to be somewhat feasible if the drive is doughnut shaped (like the image at the top of the story) rather than a flat disc.

This link talks about the economic cost:

the current cost of producing 1 gram of antimatter is about \$100 trillion. But, with completely unsupported optimistic estimates, you might get that down to \$10 billion per gram. So, with the most wild-eyed pie-in-the-sky estimates, fuel alone will cost you \$3.5 quadrillion — roughly the entire economic output of the world for forty years.