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Driving Without Gas - Chapter 1
Gasoline: Going, Going ...?
"There is no real shortage of gasoline. I don’t believe it. They tell us this to justify raising the price. There’s enough oil in the ground to last long after I’m dead."
If you are more than 70 years old, there may be a little truth in that oft-repeated assertion, but if you are 20, your span of unrestricted private-vehicle driving, with a tankful of petroleum, is sure to be limited. You will adjust to scarcity, and to prices we now consider prohibitive (more than the $3 per gallon some Europeans pay). As time passes, the fuel in your tank will contain more and more alcohol, made from renewable crops, wastes from cities and forests (biomass) or from coal. Before you reach middle age, cars will be made with small, efficient, high-compression engines and fuel injection, expressly designed to run on pure alcohol fuels. Several of these are operating in the United States, Sweden, Germany and Brazil at present.
Motorists’ Misconceptions
The complacency of some American motorists about the reality of an oil shortage is based on three general misconceptions. The first is the Breakthrough Theory: our wonderful technologists somehow will devise ways to make cheap fuel – from shale, from sea water or from nuclear re-actors. Hydrogen is mentioned as the new miracle fuel. Some of these possibilities are examined in this book, but the outlook is hardly promising. The second misconception is that the same clever scientists who may achieve a breakthrough are afflicted with a blind spot. They have miscalculated the extent of petroleum reserves and are crying wolf. The third misconception is that the petroleum industry is withholding supplies of gasoline to raise the price artificially. Apathy and confusion about the
Figure 1-1. If proven U.S. reserves continue decline begun in 1971, new energy alternatives must be sought and developed. Sources: American Petroleum Institute, Canadian Petroleum Institute.
conflicting pressures of industrial energy consumers and the forces of environmental protection do not contribute to an understanding of and sympathy for the oil shortage.
Forecasting Fuel Supplies
It is important, in seeking a reliable and useful estimate of future oil supplies, to understand that changes in production of domestic oil occur very slowly, unlike imported supplies, subject to abrupt political cutoffs. Even more important is the relationship of oil production to the estimates of proven reserves. There is a gap of 8 to 12 years between a new find and actual production. Figure 1-1 shows the relationship of proven United States reserves to actual production over a 31-year period. (In 1946, new finds were increasing the reserves by 1% barrels of oil per barrel produced from wells. The ratio now is a half-barrel found to one being pumped.) When projected to the year 2000, the chart lines suggest increasing dependence on imported foreign oil. But, the availability of these im-ports, even at prices double the present ones, is clouded by uncertainties.
More Fuel Demand
The downward slope of the reserve line and the nearly level trend of production would be serious enough even if transportation and industry needs were to remain at present levels. To keep production adequate to this need requires a discovery rate 50 percent greater than that for the last 10 years. But the United States vehicle fleet is increasing at an annual rate of 4.2 percent. Truck registration alone increased at 6.2 percent over the decade 1967 – 1976. Trucks averaged 8.5 miles per gallon in 1976, and in another decade, with 62 percent more of them, it is difficult to visualize any immediate solution to the expected shortfall other than a huge in-crease in foreign imports.
Only a crisis situation seems to stimulate the American public to action, and political leaders are prone to wait for an energy crisis rather than anticipate. The technological community, by contrast, recognizes the folly of waiting. The retiring president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Roger Revelle, compared this faith in the efficacy of crash programs to a belief that producing a baby in one month can be accomplished by putting nine women on the job.
Figure 1-2. Annual U.S. liquid petroleum supplies, from both foreign and domestic sources, are expected to decline, according to this forecast by Earl T. Hayes, former chief scientist, U.S. Bureau of Mines. (Science, vol. 203, January 19, 1979.)
Reserves Are Vulnerable
While Figure 1-1 shows reserves greater than production, there is no cause for complacency. The figures for reserves include estimates of petroleum deposits in shale, deep wells, and submarine fields. Drawing on these deposits will escalate the price because the oil will be difficult to ex-tract and refine.
The vulnerability of the reserves is shown by the statistics for the most recent year reported, 1978. At the beginning of that year, proven reserves were 29.5 billion barrels. New finds added 1.3 billion barrels, but withdrawals by the producing industry were 3 billion barrels. Hence, the net loss to reserves was 1.7 billion barrels. It is not difficult to foresee the results of this kind of depletion in a couple of decades. Figure 1-3 shows the estimates of production of petroleum liquids over such a period. As domestic production is forced down by increasing difficulties of extraction, the pressure for greater imports must continue to increase. Imports pose an economic problem – the deterioration of our trade balance – as well as a strategic impasse: the reserves in the OPEC fields are finite; most of the
Figure 1-3. American petroleum consumption has exceeded production since the early 1950s, and the deficit has been filled by imported oil. Various authorities, including the Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems (CON-AES), the Department of Commerce and M.K. Hubbert, project a continued production decline in the decades ahead. Exxon and Project Interdependence (P.I.) ore more optimistic.
oil has already been found, and world production in the last decade has taken half of the oil ever produced in the world’s history. It would be most imprudent to assume that OPEC will supply the United States with unlimited oil at any price.
The Solution
The solution, unless it be a reversion to the animal and human energy sources of the nineteenth century, must be found in the gradual substitution of liquid fuels made from renewable raw materials, or abundant fossil solid fuel, coal and shale.
The demand for liquid fuels during the transition period will be modified by economic forces. Growth rates for gasoline consumption, the subject of much disagreement because of flexibilities in demand, have been estimated at 2 to 3 percent per year. At these rates, by 1990, daily consumption of 9 million and 11 million barrels could be expected. But some forecasters recognize several factors that lead them to reduce estimates of daily consumption. Among them:
• U.S. population growth is slowing. Five of the most highly industrialized countries in Europe had dropped below the zero-growth point by 1976. By 2000, the United States rate may be under 1 per-cent per year.
• Price increases and voluntary conservation will reduce consumption of fuel.
• Automobile ownership, now at 2 to 3 cars per family in many cases, will be reduced due to excessive costs. The self-regulatory effect of traffic jams ("fatigue-rationing") will be seen.
• Fuel efficiency of engines will increase from 20 to 50 percent by 2000. Lighter cars and better materials as well as improved engine design will be instrumental.
• Miles traveled each year by the average driver will go down from 9,800 now to 9,300 per year.
• Electric vehicles are expected to reduce gasoline needs.
All of these factors, if applied, could reduce the annual growth rate of gasoline consumption to about 1 percent. But forecasting is not an exact science. In fact, it is more like clairvoyance: part knowledge, part art. For example, in the face of predictions of steady growth, gasoline consumption actually dropped in 1979 to about 7 percent below 1978 levels, according to John C. Sawhill, deputy secretary of the Department of Energy.
If uncertain fuel supplies and ever-increasing prices darken the road ahead for motorists, the history of the internal combustion engine offers some consolation and reassurance. It is a 100-year record of adaptation to new ideas, to new markets; it is the story of improved modes of propulsion, of ingenuity in meeting constraints on sources and supplies. And there is no reason to think alternate fuels and innovative cars can’t be an even larger part of the story in the years ahead.
Copyright 1980 by Garden Way, Inc.
This material provided under "Fair Use" guidelines.
