Saving Energy By Finding Oil Substitutions For Transportation

Saving Energy by Finding Oil Substitutions for Transportation

Our global economy is currently outgrowing the capacity of the Earth to support it, pushing our early 21st century civilization ever closer to decline and possible collapse. In our preoccupation with quarterly earnings reports and year-to-year economic growth we have lost sight of how large the human enterprise has become relative to the Earth’s resources.

Fortunately there is a consensus emerging among scientists on the broad outlines of the changes needed. If economic progress is to be sustained then we have to replace the fossil fueled-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy with a new economic model.

According to an article in The Japan Times, China has now become the world’s leading consumer in the Earth’s resources. However, the United States is still holding the lead in oil consumption. Startlingly the U.S. consumes about 20.4 million barrels of oil per day vs. China’s 6.5 million barrels. So that means we are consuming about three times as much oil as China.

To say the least Americans love their cars and they love to drive, and as American television and advertising are mainstays of programming worldwide, viewers across the globe are being seduced into the same love affair. Unfortunately, cars are not the benign love toys that advertisers would have us believe.

We currently have about one car on the road for every 10 people on Earth вЂ" and counting. "Transportation has the fastest-growing carbon emissions of any economic sector. Proliferating numbers of automobiles are a key reason. More than 600 million passenger cars are now on the world's roads, and each year some 67 million new ones roll out of manufacturing plants," writes Michael Renner, a senior researcher at the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute environmental research organization, in a piece published online last week.

Greater numbers mean more problems, including traffic jams, accidents, local and global pollution impacts, declining oil supplies, and rising gasoline prices. But the environmental impacts of cars are not limited to the carbon dioxide and other pollutants emitted during a car's lifetime. Other impacts, created when cars are manufactured and junked add to the total environmental cost of each vehicle. The steel, aluminum and copper that are used, as well as the oil needed to make plastic components, are extracted, processed and refined, requiring further energy use. Intentional and inadvertent environmental degradation costs include strip mines and oil spills.

Thousands of gallons of water is also used to produce each car that rolls off the assembly line, and from cradle to grave toxic chemicals are released into the atmosphere as byproducts of production and in exhaust gases. Our car culture also demands clearing, construction, paving and concrete to provide roads, highways and parking space for our burgeoning fleet of cars and trucks.

Multiplying these impacts by the hundreds of millions of vehicles in use around the world today, it is obvious that cars will continue to cause serious environmental degradation simply because there are so many of them.

Land consumption is becoming a major problem due to the ever growing amount of automobiles on the road. Huge tracts of land are being cleared and locked-up to provide transportation corridors, removing these acres from constructive uses. The constructive uses lost to land consumption includes: meadows, wetlands, forests and farmlands lost forever under concrete and barren median strips. The land consumption is also greatly reducing the number of wildlife habitats for fish and game, and endangered species.

Transportation is perhaps the biggest contributor to pollution in the world today, particularly global environmental issues such as the greenhouse effect. Vehicle emissions are one of the number one sources of air pollution. Diesel trucks and cars emit a wide variety of unhealthy gases such as; carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and other products of incomplete combustion.

Chemicals gases and particles which are released by cars and trucks eventually fall out of the air onto street surfaces and land which causes water and land pollution. To add to the list of ways vehicles pollute water and land is the fact that vehicles will often leak oil, gas, brake fluid, windshield detergent and engine coolant which can then wash into storm sewers, allowing these pollutants to wash directly into lakes and streams without any filtration.

Today, transportation accounts for most oil use. In order for us to substitute different fuels for transportation the government will have to take bold action. Battery-driven vehicles are possible for many modes of transportation, but are still limited because of few new breakthroughs in that technology. Congress put a big down payment on bio-fuels in last month’s energy bill according to an article from the Tri-State Observer. However, it is still pushing corn-based ethanol, when less energy-intensive bio-fuels would be better.

Production of bio-fuels in 2005 equaled nearly 2% of world gasoline use. From 2000 to 2005, ethanol production worldwide increased from 4.6 billion to 12.2 billion gallons, a jump of 165%! Biodiesel, starting from a small base of 251 million gallons in 2000 more than tripled to an estimated 790 million gallons in 2005, according to Earth Policy Institute figures.

In 1978, Congress all but ordered U.S. electric utilities to end their use of oil. As a result the percentage of electric power produced from oil dropped from 17% to 3%. Can the same be done in transportation? In Brazil they have moved quickly since 2003 to become independent of oil imports by forcing the use of cane ethanol for vehicles. Now this may not be the exact same course for the U.S. to follow, but the precedent is there for bold action in oil substitution.

For the first time, oil prices have risen above $100 a barrel. Gasoline now costs about 73 cents a gallon more than it did last year. In past decades, such price jumps brought a knee-jerking reaction to conserve or find more oil. The world has now done both, yet this problem has still not been resolved. So now is the time that we find an alternative to using oil for transportation. There are other choices out there to run vehicles such as: electricity, methanol, hydrogen, ethanol and etc. We just need to focus our attention on these alternatives.

The U.S. could easily cut its gasoline use in half by converting its automobile fleet to hybrid cars as efficient as the Toyota Prius or the Honda Civic Hybrid. This could be accomplished without any change in the number of vehicles,