America’s Never-Ending Oil Consumption
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
From an engineering perspective it is energy dense and relatively stable and easy-to-use. I can put a small amount of it in my pickup truck and drive up the side of a mountain. A pilot can fly to the other side of the world in a few hours time with a plane powered by the stuff. A few hundred years ago that level of mobility and conevnience would have been seen as a magic power - the domain of witches and demons.
I don't think Americans are addicted to oil. We are addicts of the capability, the freedom, if you will, that oil enables. In the short term limits on oil limit our ability to do the things we want, many of which require oil to enable. When an alternative technology comes along which gives us the same capability and is cleaner and (most importantly) cheaper, we will gladly move on from oil.
I personally would even support a tax on oil (and thus marginally reduce my freedom) in order to invest in whatever is next and facilitate the change before we permanently impair the earth. Alas my fellow countrymen do not have it in their hearts to tax themselves for this purpose.
It's not about heart, it's that most people aren't doing well enough to care for more taxes. Reduce asset prices for housing, NIMBY politics, etc and maybe they would.
Whether it should or not, it does. If you altruistically reduce your gas consumption, you're decreasing total demand and thus lowering the price. That makes it profitable for the evil corporation down the street to use even more of it.
Then we should be considering a carbon tax.
Government simply cannot be trusted with tax dollars so they should get the absolute minimum needed to do their lawful duties.
So let the private sector figure out what technology can replace oil, prove it in the market, and then you won't even need a tax.
True, but in this case it doesn't matter. The goal of a gas tax is to incorporate its negative externalities into the price signal, so that if burning a gallon benefits you by $1 but costs $1.50 in environmental damage, you won't do it. What the tax revenue is spent on is basically irrelevant.
The just thing would be to compensate/protect the victims who are on the receiving end of those negative externalities.
Also not if the revenue creates a self perpetuating monster that will devour more revenue even when the externality is gone.
And while we're on the subject, doesn't it seem the least bit concerning that funding specific pork through taxes on diffuse externalities creates a pretty huge incentive to keep that externality going? Who came up with the idea to let the people responsible for eliminating the externality also benefit from the taxes you get from it?
The term itself was not originally pejorative (a barrel full of pork can feed a lot of mouths!) but it is generally used negatively by the press or cynically by certain government sectors.
The big issues with oil are due to the source, not the technology itself. Right now the source is underground carbon sinks (fossil fuels). But what if we produced synthetic oil using excess solar energy during daytime? It would pull carbon from the air. And would burn cleaner than any fossil fuel source.
It seems many dream of a battery future. But is it really better to produce millions of batteries instead of just finding better ways to make oil?
It kind of reminds me of the classic desktop app vs web app debate. One big advantage of web app is that upgrages are single source, just update the server. But desktop apps, there may be many multiple old versions out there because users don't always update. In a similar way, why are we focusing on the very difficult and slow task of upgrading all cars to EV? Why not improve the source of oil itself?
Some people are pursuing this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
Personally I think it's a mistake to rely on any single energy source as heavily as we have with oil, so I hope the EV car market continues to grow, but biodiesel may be better suited for some applications.
But we live in an oil world. There are billions of cars out there. Cars are big investments that are handed down generation to generation like houses, especially in developing countries. EV car sales are still a drop in the bucket compared to ICE car sales.
If we want fast and rapid action on climate change, the quickest path is not pushing EV. It would be massive investment in reducing the cost to make synthetic oil. This may seem impossible, but that's what many said about solar competing with fossil fuels. EV car enthusiasts often talk about how EV cars get immediate environmental benefits from power plant upgrades such as burning coal to solar. But how much more orders of magnitude environment improvement would we get from carbon neutral oil creation? If a cost effective way was found that could compete with fossil fuels, billions of cars would immediately benefit environmentally.
Again, another computer analogy. Imagine someone invented a beautiful new elegant programming language that reduces CPU energy use by 50%. At the same time, someone found a way to reduce JVM CPU energy use by 20%. If we wanted the shortest path to worldwide energy reduction in CPU, what would be faster, just update the JVM for millions of servers or rewrite everything in the new programming language?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-diesel
The inputs to this are just energy + water + CO2 = oil. No corn or other plants required. Currently this type of technology is far from cost competitive. But that could potentially change if more was invested into this area.
1. They're fundamentally a materials properties based technology. That is, you're dependent on storage substrates (especially lithium), conductors (especially copper), lightweight body materials (especially aluminium), and various specialty components within parts for the specific set of features of an EV. It turns out that lithium, copper, and aluminium are all at least somewhat constrained in overall availablity, some highly.
A conventional oil-fueled car works pretty well with iron (exceptionally abundant), with carbon added for steel (actually something of a concern: 15% of global coal consumption is for coking fuel), and a few stray odd bits. Overall, an oil-fired ICE auto is far less dependent on specific material properties of scarce material resources than an EV.
2. Batteries simply don't have the energy densities of liquid fuels. Tesla's success has, frankly, stunned and amazed me, though much of it seems to come from exceptionally good energy management. There are uses to which that's all but certainly not sufficient. Heavy overland freight trucking, marine transport, and air travel -- a future with these in abundance will not run on batteries.
There are some other options. Trucking using catenary cables or (literally) road trains, with battery capacity for a few kilometers of off-grid distribution, could work. Trains can be electrified, though doing so for the US rail network poses high challenges. Ships were once powered by the wind, and may well be in future. High-capacity, high-speed air travel is pretty much impossible without liquid fuels though. The alternatives are either a) hugely expensive or b) much smaller and/or slower.
One option for air might be higher-speed zeppelins, possibly utilising solar power.
The 1930s German zeppelins had peak speeds of about 80 mph, cruising of around 70 mph. That made for about a 30 hour Atlantic ocean crossing. Designs in the works suggest about a 140 mph top speed might be possible. An ultra-light, high-efficiency solar cell over the upper fabric of such an airship might supply much the needed motive power, and lift would be obviated through a lighter-than-air gas (probably helium).
Airships have other problems -- they're fragile, have a limited service ceiling (the Graf Zeppelin cleared a mountain range in the USSR by only 150 feet, close to its 6,000 foot ceiling), and would be dangerous near storms or other disturbances. Landing in high winds is difficult. But they're at least an option.
The distance between NY and London is ~3500 miles, which would make that trip 50 hours at the very minimum, not 30 hours like you suggested.
Travel to other countries would take even longer, unless your plan is to just ferry people over the Atlantic and distribute them via train after.
"The ten westward trips that season took 53 to 78 hours and eastward took 43 to 61 hours."
Given that high-speed land-based rail would be an option, the ferry-to-rail option seems a strong contender, actually.
Remember: the whole concept of moving any significant distance at a rate of more than a few miles an hour is quite modern.
I do find it genuinely exciting. The same benefits of petroleum (safety, stability, portability, storage, and very, very flexible use) apply to any synthetic analogs.
The "problem" is that you pay full cost. Most synthesis methods lose about 50% of the input energy (mostly in hydrogen electrolysis). Where petroleum has historically offered 100:1 energy benefits, and is now typically delivers 20-30x the input energy, synfuels would cost you energy: 1:2 or worse. The equivalent energy cost increase is 40-60x that of present sources. That's not objectively a bad thing, but it's a tremendous shock to a system based on cheap energy.
The research as I said is impressive: Brookhaven National Laboratory (US), M.I.T., and the US Naval Research Lab, going back to Meyer Stienberg at BNL in 1964 (the suggestion itself came from M. King Hubbert, who'd first projected peak oil, in a 1963 paper). Progress, however, has been fairly scant, with only very small-scale tests.
The advantage would be a fuel that's infinitely miscable and substitutable for existing petroleum-based petrol, diesel, kerosene (a/k/a jet fuel), etc. And it can be carbon-neutral (via seawater or atmospheric-based carbon stocks). The disadvantages are cost and complexity as well as input energy. That said, I think it's well-worth pursuing.
1) Fossil fuels costs will eventually start rising and never come down again. How much investment and attention will synthetic production receive when oil is $100/barrel? Or at $200/barrel, or $300/barrel? More investment could lead to significant process improvements.
2) Solar energy has improved tremendously and continues to improve more. But the great weakness of solar is that it's only effective at daytime. Anything produced in excess of daytime demand is basically waste energy. Since it's waste energy, the inefficiency of the oil synthesis process doesn't matter. The only competitor here is other energy storage methods such as batteries. The key question here will be, is it better to store this excess waste energy in batteries or use the synthetic process to make oil? From a pure efficiency standpoint, battery is better. But when considering the existing oil infrastructure, the answer is not as clear.
One of my recent thoughts is that it's not so much that renewables are expensive as that fossil fuels are insanely under-priced, though that gets into a pretty deep economic question of just what price and cost are supposed to be.
For electrical generation, the problem with a fuel-based intermediary storage is that the net efficiency is quite low: 50% loss at fuel formation, at best 45% efficiency from thermal generation (Carnot's Law is a bitch). Fuel cell tech might offer an out, but the catalysts are rare and expensive (though if we can find an all-platinum asteroid out there, solar + synfuel + space-mined catalyst might offer advantages).
Solar costs have fallen, but the efficiency is capped. Moreover, as panel costs fall they're dominated by less-fungible elements, mostly installation and maintenance. There's the 20-year life (multiple systemic decay pathways) which means you need to replace 5% of your total stock every year.
I'm not arguing against solar, but rather, against an abudant-energy future. Even with energy issues addressed, many other factors, including literally dirt (well, topsoil), challenge humans.
Leibig's Law of the Minimum is another bitch.
However, the user should be aware that the tax or subsidy-removal would be regressive. Poor people and small businesses spend more of their income on gas than richer people & businesses.
To discourage use of something, make it more expensive (or less efficient).
To encourage use of something, make it less expensive (or more efficient).
Increasing efficiency increases overall consumption: the Jevons paradox (1865).
Jevons was also an early peak-fossil-fuels theorist, though his area was coal (oil had just been discovered, the 4-cycle internal combustion engine was 20 years off).
If zoning rules allowed developers to build larger, taller, and more numerous buildings, we would all have better, cheaper, and more transportationally efficient housing.
Zoning as well.
2. They're not being built where the jobs are. Take the SF Bay Area and the SV jobs/housing crisis. Much the problem is that many of the jobs (still) are on the Penninsula and South Bay, while high-density housing (and only somewhat so at that) is in San Francisco. Santa Clara and San Mateo counties are largely suburban sprawl, with very few exceptions. Transit stinks (virtually no usable busses, little rail other than CalTrain and VTA), and even riding a bicycle is a dicey proposition with traffic densities and poor bike lanes.
3. Schools. In the US, housing choices, especially for families, are driven by school access. Good schools are typically suburban. E.g., sprawl.
4. Urban blight. Less an issue now than previously as there's a flight back to cities, but the dense early housing belts around older US cities build in the period 1900 - 1945, that is, before the automobile was widely used, tended to be less attractive due to crime, poor schools, and, well, the attraction of a cheaper, brighter, cleaner outer-suburban belt. The point remains that denser housing stock is also quite often older housing stock.
5. Building codes. Various factors, including safety, appliances, access (doors, steps, stairs, etc.), have tended to make homes larger. One of the reasons the "tiny homes" movement has a preference for building on trailer platforms is that trailer and mobile home requirements are far less stringent.
6. Lending availability. Again, for various reasons, financing is more available for newer, larger, and suburban homes (additional reasons including redlining and government policies from local to national levels have also existed historically). Older and smaller homes are harder to buy, and to sell.
7. Builder and architect familiarity. There's an existing workforce and skillset around the "conventional" product. Building experimental, high-density, high-efficiency, or exotic (often, ironically, highly local or available) material homes pushes you to odd skillsets. It's a bit like basing a tech startup on a little-used programming language or operating system.
8. Major builders and planning departments. The "easy" direction for major builders, and for city and county planning departments, is what they know and what they know will sell. Given that a major builder might easily account for a substantial amount of all home construction nationwide, that's not an inconsiderable concern.
The upshot is a lot of structural obstacles to constructing a widely different housing stock, particularly doing so throughout an entire town (let alone a city), which is what would be required to bring up overall densities. One household building one small home won't make the difference. You'd have to change an entire community's mindset. That's ... challenging.
As to big homes. You can't find much under 2000sqft unless it was built in a different era. I've got a listing open right now in another tab 2bd/3.5ba. Seriously, WTF?!
I'd say that things are moving away from racism fairly rapidly.
What they're trying to implement is a revenue-neutral fee on carbon emissions: a fee is collected on fossil fuels at the source (the well, the mine, whatever), and the money from the fee is placed in a fund. At the end of the year, the money is then redistributed to every citizen. About 2/3 of citizens would net positive on this fee.
What can help is the policies. E.g. Higher gas tax, denser cities with better public transport, higher taxes on cars...
As to consumption, conservation, price, encouragement, and discouragement, the problem's complicated.
As torpfactory notes here, oil is close to a perfect fuel. It's high in energy density (by weight or volume), exceptionally stable (proven multi-million year stability), liquid (so it flows, unlike solids, but stays in what you put it in, unlike gas), safe (little or no protective equipment is needed near it, and while I wouldn't advise bathing in it, you can touch it with little harm), and works in thermal and motive systems ranging from thimble-sized to the size of a large house. The immediate exhaust products are mostly harmless (CO2 and water -- though yes, over time the CO2 becomes quite problematic).
There's little else that's so immensely attractive as a fuel.
It was also abundant and cheap, for a time. But it's ultimately finite, supplies we've used took tens, possibly hundreds of millions of years to form, and we're consuming them at the rate of ~5 million years of formation per year of consumption. Jeffrey S. Dukes' paper, "Burning Buried Sunshine", describes this calculus in detail, and I highly recommend it.
If you want people to use more of something, lower prices and increase efficiency. If you want them to use less, increase prices and decrease efficiency. The fact that increased efficiency increases overall production has long been noted, William Stanley Jevons is credited with describing his eponymous paradox in The Coal Question, 1865.
Oil's price is another problem. Carbon taxes address externalities on the consumption side, but in extraction, I'm coming to the conclusion that typical market forces tend to ignore, to their error, the embodied creation costs of oil. It's as if you were living off a trust fund but considered only the cab fare to cross town to the bank to make a withdrawal, and not a depletion allowance based on actual costs of replacement for the funds removed. Properly accounted, oil would cost hundreds, thousands, possibly millions of times what we account for it.
There's also the problem that a democratic populace is an ultimate "shoot the messenger" manager. The public wants to hear what it wants to hear, and the lessons of US presidents Carter and Reagan should be closely studied. Carter told the inconvenient truth, Reagan the attractive lie.