[Graeme]

Oil's Customers Will Go Away Before Oil Does

Over the last few decades, the U.S. has built a vast portfolio of powerful technologies to save and replace oil. Yet nobody had totaled exactly how much oil these new technologies could save, until my team at Rocky Mountain Institute did in 2004. Our largely Pentagon-funded study Winning the Oil Endgame showed these technologies could more than replace all U.S. oil use, at an average cost of $15 per barrel (in 2000 dollars). Five years later, that finding looks conservative. Oil, as I'd long predicted, has become uncompetitive even at low prices before it became unavailable even at high prices.

Buy a good hybrid vehicle, drive it properly, and you'll halve your oil use per mile. Make that hybrid out of very lightweight materials and make it aerodynamic, and you'll halve your oil consumption again. Fuel it with 85% ethanol made from woody, inedible cellulose like switchgrass, and you'll save three-fourths of the remaining oil. Make it a plug-in hybrid, and your savings rise to 97%.

forbes

[Colorado-Valley]

Sounds good. In fact where I live, everybody's back to buying giant pick-up trucks. And I only live a few miles away from Amory.

He came over to our high school and gave his Pentagon presentation of hydrogen-powered hyper cars. It sounded good to me, but like I say, everybody's buying pick-ups around here.

They still look like long-term oil customers to me.

[kjmclark]

Lovins really is the nutty professor.

Rocky Mountain Institute's plan (according to their presentation from their book) is:

1. Efficient end-use can save half the oil @ $12/bbl (2000 $)
2. Biofuels can cost-effectively substitute for another fifth
3. Saved gas can displace the rest, preferably via hydrogen
Save net $70 billion a year by 2025, create a million net jobs

The pdf is here.

The worst part is, his plan would partially work. We probably could build the motor vehicles with carbon fiber bodies, and it probably would be cheaper in the end. The only problem is that the "end" is 2025 or so, and it will be the light-rail cars that are built that way, in the few places that can still afford to put in light rail.

Maybe some day, if we don't wipe ourselves out in the world war with China over the remaining oil, we'll figure out cellulosic ethanol and an efficient way to store hydrogen too.

[kiwichick]

i wonder where people will get the money to trade up from
their $5000 ice cars to a new efficient one @ $30000

put it on their home loan??

[aahala2]

Our largely Pentagon-funded study Winning the Oil Endgame showed these technologies could more than replace all U.S. oil use, at an average cost of $15 per barrel (in 2000 dollars). Five years later, that finding looks conservative

It takes a special type of nut to make such a statement.
Is Steve Forbes writing for his own magazine?

[TheDude]

Hybrid Market Dashboard | Hybrid Cars is a great resource for keeping up on sales. Hybrids are 2.6% of US sales - Prii are 1/2 of that - CYTD sales are down 31%. PHEV Prii will be sold in the overwhelming volume of 20-30k cars first year (2012). If we've peaked in oil production these numbers are really the proverbial drop in a bucket. Scrappage will take older hybrids out of the system as well. Cellulose remains lab scale except in the gleamings of the Energy Sec's brain. Carbon fiber body? Maybe if you're one of Huxley's Alphas.

Lovins has good things to say about conservation and efficiency, but usually reduces things to ad absurdum when he makes his case; if we were truly focused on what worked best we could have had 50 mpg Model As, markets don't work that way. I lump him in with Caldicott as an irrational hater of nukes, too.

[TreeFarmer]

It does appear as if changes in car design and composition can save a lot of gasoline as shown in this video. http://gas2.org/2008/05/19/how-to-get-7 ... nda-civic/

Perhaps the real questions are:
1. If cars only used 25% of the gasoline they currently use, what would be the real effect of that savings?
2. What is the real outlook for energy sources other than oil over the next 20 years? I see so many the-sky-is-falling and pie-in-the-sky predictions that the real outlook is very murky. Perhaps Taleb has it best in his book, if you could predict what new inventions would be invented in the future, you would just go ahead and invent them today.

TF

[kublikhan]

Sounds like a bunch of BS to me. If we had viable alternatives to oil at $15 a barrel in 2004, why did oil go to 10x that cost in 2008?
I like his suggestions of conservation, but hate his suggestions for ethanol. Ethanol depletes topsoil and has a poor EROEI:
Why cellulosic ethanol, biofuels are unsustainable and a threat to America

It's good to be looking at technologies to wean us off of oil, but exaggerations and hyperbole are not the way to go. We need honest and frank discussions on this topic.

PS. 1000th post

[Outcast_Searcher]

2. What is the real outlook for energy sources other than oil over the next 20 years? I see so many the-sky-is-falling and pie-in-the-sky predictions that the real outlook is very murky.
TF

TF, you said it all. Studying PO and the economy for the past year, and especially peoples' (experts and the masses both) reactions/analyses of these have led me to a simple (and depressing) conclusion:

The human race's biggest problem is that we're overconfident.

(To expand, the vast majority of folks think they know a lot about many topics, many of which they're basically clueless about. The more ignorant these folks are of a topic, the more overconfident they tend to be about their position. Generally some experts actually realize a situation is so vastly complex they don't know all the answers, but if economics is involved, they generally can't afford to ADMIT it! (i.e. energy analysts)).


Thus, as a species, trying to get folks to agree on what is a problem, much less how critical it is or what to do about it - is a horribly long and unproductive process.

And thus, unfortunately, your observation is right on the money - and unsurprising.