Another Way of Looking At It...
 

We all bemoan those giant (even smaller) SUV drivers that suck up the gas, couldn't care less for preservation, the environment, and saving money. And even those that drive smaller cars who drive like they stole them....

Then we bemoan price hikes on gas...we all feel the burn, yea?

But what about looking at it like this:

There is a finite amount of "cheap" oil in the ground. Years before it truly runs out, the price will of course sky rocket, right? So maybe these gas sucking SUV drivers are doing us all a favor in the sense that these folks are helping us all by burning through the "cheap" oil fast. Doing this will of course make gas sky rocket as demand will quickly outpace supply, thereby compelling governments, and companies to come up with power solutions that are not tied to oil sooner rather then later. As gas sky rockets, behaviors will finally change, people will ditch their land barges, change their driving habits, and with the help of higher and higher gas sales taxes, this will all conspire to get us out of the oil economy.

This is all idle thinking, and highly speculative, I admit, and forgive me for thinking out loud so to speak, but if the world is going to require a solution that is not oil based, and not forcing us to be beholding to fanatical freedomless countries, then we need to do something sooner then later.

Could crisis be the mother of invention?

Let the soccor moms, the motorsports macho crowd, and other gas guzzlers have their fuel...burn baby burn...lets get it over with sooner rather then later, and lets get to hydrogen or other technology that will finally interdict our adiction to oil...lets get this overwith, and hope the environment will bounce back there after.

Ok, so I know this thinking is radical, if not irresponsible, and I can't say that I even agree with my feeble ramblings here, but sometimes you have to let the "crack adict" hit rock bottom before he starts to help himself, as sad is it may be to watch "someone" spiral under a bit.

It is sad that it may well take what I suggest here before people stop and think, and start to change their attitudes and behaviors with regard to oil usage.

Could conservation only prolong our adiction to oil? COuld it be like adding a filter to a cigarette to make it "safer", instead of just quiting?

Just another angle, and again, not saying I even agree with it, but these ideas kind of struck me as I road the bike into work this morning.

Perhaps I'm dead wrong...even if gas gets to $6 a gallon, the giant SUV drivers will still suck up the gas....it's sad.

Take one step further back to get a little bit more in the picture.... Oil is not used solely for cars and transportation.... Imagine how much higher your medical bill is going to be when medical supplies skyrocket because crude supplies skyrocket -- I doubt they'll revert back to pre-plastic practice, but that's a scary thought.

Just think about all of the oil based products in your home (by chemical composition, not transportation).

Conservation will prolong the addiction... Giving us that extra time to move forward into the age AFTER oil instead of moving back to the age BEFORE oil.

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That is my biggest complaint about people that complain about emissions and such.... I usually get "So what? Do we just stop burning and revert to pre-oil days?" -- I always have to explain that no... we move on to the age after oil. It's like research advances are completely new to them o.0

Agree. Here's a list of things made from oil to start with.

I realize oil serves man more then just powering our cars. And I'm fine with using oil for medical and other uses, but for powering cars, lets get off oil sooner then later.

The point of my thread was that human nature is such that it may well come down to a crisis before governments & private enterprise finally stop showing mock ups of alternative fuel cars at car shows, and start actually selling them, with the required infrastructure in place to distribute whatever alternative fuel will be used. I know this is all easier said then done, but I feel the frustration as many others do too.

Perhaps the president needs to appoint an energy czar, give business tax breaks for R&D spending on alternative fuel cars, that sort of thing...nothing new here...but will it get done?

I completely agree.... But realistically (as you're saying with human nature) it's not viable to happen "fast enough." Transition tech. is in it's infancy and, unfortunately, the people that the auto mfrs. need to have buy them just aren't doing so. But we'll see with the newest wave of hybrid SUVs :thumbdown:


They way you laid it down is very likely to happen... And likely, I'll bet someone out there (perhaps with an SUV) thinks that will happen is is fine with it -- without even thinking/realizing the ramifications in other industries.

Oil isn't necessary to power automobiles. Cars can be powered electrically, and some have been since the start of the twentieth century. The decision as to what energy source we use for transportation is dictated by economics and utility.

When gasoline finally does become too expensive (either through scarcity or taxation) electric power will become the dominant transporation energy.

Higher gas taxes are a good idea to spur electric vehicle development before the oil crunch hits.

Today, oil IS required to power cars...there is no meaningful infrastructure to distribute to cars with alternative fuels today...and how will the electricity required to power those cars be generated?

I fear the burning of fossil fuels will be used to charge batteries these cars will require, right? Oil, coal, so now we're back to oil addiction all over again...

Nuclear would be great, but too many hate/distrust Nuclear...

This is demonstrably not true. Pure electric vehicles are already available right now from Meyers Motors, and Electric Motorsports among others.

https://www.myersmotors.com/

https://www.electricmotorsport.com/EGPR/sales.htm

These vehicles use rudimentary technology that limits their range, including lead acid batteries and DC motors. Lithium batteries and AC regenerative motors will give a new generation of vehicles adequate range within 5 years.

Increasing the gas tax would prod car companies into building better electric vehicles.

Hehe... The news report on that site said it "was especially useful after hurricane Wilma" -- just plug it to your outlet and it charges.... I can't remember which hurricane it was... But I do recall one of them knocking out our Natural Gas fueled power plant :thumbdown:

Don't get me wrong -- those plants are much more efficient and generating power compared to an ICE... But it's still using the very same resource that is giving us hell :( Imagine what happens tomorrow if just half of the nation switched over to electric cars... We'd be having a power consumption crisis until the infrastructure is beefed up considerably :/ This is one reason why I think MorningGaser's scenario could be rather realistic :thumbdown: :thumbdown:

Nope, this is not a good solution....the power plants that generate the electricty for charging those batteries burn fossil fuels...so you see, this solution is not complete....in order for this to work, to get us off fossil fuels, the electricity generated by the plants that power the electrical recipticals used to charge the batteries must not burn oil, and coal.

...so even if ALL cars today were electric, this will not be a complete solution unless the power plants use some other means to gen electricity.

It depends on how it's implemented. If all we use are really, really high voltage quick charging stations, then yeah, the grid would peak even more during the day. But if we kept costs down and simply used the home grid hook-up for most charging, likely on a timer, so that the vast majority of EVs would be sucking down juice when the rest of the grid is mostly idle, we could convert ~80% of our fleet to plug-ins or even EVs. There's also the potential for shallow cycling of a plugged in EV fleet during peaks, such as CA heat waves. Electricity is so damn expensive, that it'd probably be worthwhile for the PHEV/EV owner and the state.

Well, DUH! Why didn't I think of that? Maybe perpetual motion generators in each car would power the batteries.

Not to be TOO sacastic, but of course the electric power needs to come from somewhere. Society gets to choose which source. The only reasonable non carbon source is nuclear. Are you pro-nuclear?

I'm pro safe-Nuclear, if it is even possible....I think in the end, Nuclear is an unavoidable solution.

Absolutely...let's go nuclear...get some good plans and designs going and catch back up with the rest of the industrialized world for electricity generation! :-)

MorningGaser -

If you can solve the waste problem, then I'll back you up, but I haven't seen a any real solution yet. It can be argued that nuclear waste is the ultimate crime against future generations.

CarloSW2

I absolutely am :p Which drink do you want? The labeled one or one that's a bit hazy on what's in it. Drink the labeled one - poison control can manage and treat -- drink the unlabeled one, lots of pain and guessing until a solution comes around.

Nuclear waste is manageable and there's a lot less... FF waste is manageable too, but it's much more costly and still isn't completely contained. If we catch up to France, there will be even less waste as WE don't even recycle nuclear fuel - they do.

Just so everyone knows the oil refineries, processing plants and fuel transportation is the single largest consumer of electricity in the US. Darell said he could drive about 30 miles on the electricity it takes to make one gallon of gas in is stock Toyota Rav 4 RV.

trebuchet03: Yeah, that is one thing that worries me. Hospitals can not run at all without technology. Even having the temperatures fluctuate 3-5 degrees can make a doctor cancel a surgery; and trust me, I have seen it happen many times.

zpiloto: I would say that list is just a bit lacking in content. To widen the problem we are looking at (things made from oil) to something broader... think of all the things that technology had a hand in making. Guaranteed you can't think of a single thing in the world that isn't in some way altered or produced by some sort of technology. If there is any input along the way that even somewhat relies on technology then that item is technology dependent.

Sludgy: You are missing the whole picture I believe. While these cars may well in fact be 100% operable on electricity alone, their production IS NOT! They require many oil-based products while they are in the assembly and production phase. All automobiles have a "barrels required per unit" (or something along those lines) that are required to produce them.

cfg83: Thank you very much. These damned fools with absolutely no foresight keep cheering for nuclear. I can't remember what the halflife of that **** is, but it is long enough that NO ONE COULD EVER EVEN COME CLOSE to estimating the future impact that it will have. It is a ridiculous solution that could never be researched enough to possibly weigh the pros and cons and come to a decent solution. A statistical impossibility.

At one time, cars were made without significant petroleum input.

Manufacturers, until about the 1930's, used coal for smelting iron ore and making steel (same as today), wood and leather. Today manufacturers use oil principally to make plastic parts. But even old Henry Ford himself tried soybeans to make plastics. Even today the electricity used in the Midwest car factories comes from coal, not oil.

Oil is not necessary to make cars, but it is cheap and convenient, and that is why manufacturers use it. When it becomes scarce, substitutes will be found.

Do the math and I think that you will see that that cannot be correct. How many kWh would it take to go 30 miles?

Technically, it's natural gas not electricity. But all that natural gas could be electricity, and the natural gas needed to extract/refine oil/gasoline could do about the same useful work if used for electricity via an EV, as the gasoline does via an ICE powered vehicle. The difference being carbon dioxide emissions, pollution, and naturally, t3h mon3yz. Of course, there is still the matter of application. An EV is a poor choice for long range high speed travel, and an ICE powered vehicle is horrible at low load. However, over the EPA highway cycle, iirc the useful work done via electricity compared to the useful work done via gasoline is about the same. It wouldn't be for a car cruising at 80mph, the gasoline vehicle would have the advantage. Otoh, the EV would get way more useful work done when sitting in traffic during CA rush hour. It's a matter of application.

Going on to the whole Nuclear versus fossil fuel debate... Well, it's pretty convoluted, but from what I've gathered, fossil fuel emissions are responsible for plenty of deaths per year, and in the states the figure is in the tens of thousands.
This doesn't include the impact of global climate change, which can only be calculated in hindsight imo.
Otoh, nuclear fission has killed far fewer people, which is due to limited use and strict control of the waste stream. Fact is, centralized power generation will always be cleaner than distributed generation, and the worse the byproducts are, the more we will control their release. Coal releases more radioactive material into the environment than nuclear power does...
Of course, there is the matter of waste disposal. Some byproducts can last for thousands of years, so there's some research going into transmutation.I can't help but wonder why people would be o.k. with radically altering the climate via carbon dioxide, but not o.k. with the potential for local problems due to radioactive materials... Or worrying about potential risks when fossil fuels kill millions per year. Imo, the continued use of fossil fuels is, for the most part, purely economic. Nuclear power isn't nearly as profitable, and fossil fuel owners will take a big hit if we transition away from the fuels they own, to other fuels, because all that coal/oil/whatever will become nearly worthless. They have become extremely wealthy due to the widespread use of their resource, and will likely attempt to influence policy so that their product continues to be used. Even if it isn't the best for our society from an environmental or economic point of view.

*The implication being that there are probably a few million deaths per year due to fossil fuel emissions world wide.

That is an interesting point, never thought of that. Hence the drive to keep coal/NG cheap, to lower the cost of petroleum refining. Nice.

I am now thinking of the emissions created to power the generation of automotive fuel. I know this is a stretch, but the gas powered car has its own emissions plus the emissions of the electric vehicle and whatever emissions are created during refinement. Plus all the heat generated. Gez where is my bike!!! :o

I also read someplace which gives me hope that we can move on from petroleum power to another power source soon:

"The stone age did not end because we ran out of stone"

omgwtfbyobbq

thanks for the info....good stuff. :thumbup:

I'm thinking that what he said was pretty much not true, though. Not through any fault of his own, but rather due to being misinformed by people with an agenda.

If by people with an agenda you mean the state of CA. Then yes.

Np! :)

Ah cool. So, here is what I meant. Quoting from the other thread:
CA refines ~15 billion gallons of gasoline per year, and this requires roughly
7,266 million KWh of electricity and 1,061 million Therms of natural gas.

So that means that each gallon of gas requires about half a kWh to refine. Can an EV go 30 miles on half a kWh? The other thread also says:
With an EV average of 250wh/mile,

So that means that an EV can go two miles on the amount of electricity required to refine a gallon of gas, if you accept the figures in the other thread. A previous poster posted that Darell claimed 30 miles on that amount of electricity. Even if I didn't include something I was supposed to include, I don't think that that makes up for a 15x overstatement. And that is what I mean by "being misled by someone with an agenda."

Anyway, bring on nuclear and grid charged EVs. It's the only thing that makes sense to me right now.

The electricity used is actually pretty small like you stated. It's not explicitly the electricity, but primarily the use of natural gas for extraction/refining, which could be used in a power plant to generate electricity.

What you're referring to as being misled just seems to be a case of telephone. ;) What Darell said initially was which was a bit off because he didn't take into account the efficiency of turning that natural gas into electricity. This is what I went into. For instance, a 98 RAV-4 gets ~26mpg over the EPA combined cycle. The exact same vehicle as an EV uses ~250wh/mile. So, assuming the likely ~6-7kwh/gallon of gas (With ~5kwh assuming the energy is distributed evenly over all ~40 gallons of refined product per barrel, and ~9kwh/gallon assuming the ~20 gallons of gasoline per barrel takes all the energy), this means a RAV-4 EV could go ~24-28 miles on the energy used to make a gallon of gas in CA, assuming that energy were turned into electricity.

"Damned fools", you write? So what is your solution? I regret you brought childish remarks to an otherwise good debate :-(

MorningGaser -

Take 100 billion out of the US military budget per year and devote it to solar/wind power, conservation, and super clean diesel/hybrid/battery technology. In my mind there's plenty of desert to put the solar panels. I know the desert is also an ecological zone, but I would be willing to sacrifice the desert rather than risk a nuclear meltdown. If the desert is no good, then just start electrifying people's roofs for free. Also, strip Chevron of it's battery patent so we can have 300 mile range electric cars.

This will of course lead to other issues. When Solar goes into massive production, what will the production waste look like? Probably alot like electronics production waste.

What I would like to see is a solar panel manufacturing plant with enough real estate to be powered on 100% solar power. That wouldn't solve the raw material transportation cost, but it would be a step in the right direction.

I'll say it again and again. If you can solve the waste problem, I can accept nuclear power. But I have never seen a viable solution to the waste problem. The best I can think of is space-mailing it into the sun, which isn't a very thrifty-safe proposition. All of these other problems we are causing are what I would call "near term recoverable". That is to say, even with an ice age and mass extinctions, the Earth and human beings will survive in some capacity. The ecosystem will take a long time, but it will recover. In the case of nuclear power, in the event of civilization collapse, I see nuclear power plants eventually falling apart and having their cores melt down into the water table, contaminating regions for eons to come. The Earth will still recover, but instead of hundreds of years, it may come to thousands of years.

CarloSW2

But isn't that efficiency, from natural gas to generation to transmission to distribution to charging the batteries something like 35%?

Here's what I am thinking. A barrel of oil costs something like 60 bucks, or about $1.50 per gallon. A gallon of gas costs less than $2 at the refinery gate. 9kWh of electricity would cost, umm, a little less than 50 cents, I think, for a large refinery? That would mean that the refinery is barely breaking even. Which, right now, is not the case. So that is why I can't make it all go together.

Here's where I'm at. I wish oil would get quite a bit more expensive so that people would be more motivated to find alternatives. That way, we might be able to have a "soft landing", wherein alternative technologies can grow at the right pace and help wean us off the oil.

Thanks for helping to explain it to me.

Yup. Well to wheels efficiency for EVs is something like ~35%, while ICE powered vehicles average ~15%. Efficiency of use I guess, i.e. turning all that energy to useful work. Because generation at one large location can be so much more efficient than distributed generation, EVs have a big leg up.

Wrt gasoline prices, according to this page, refineries make ~50 cents per gallon, which seems to match up with your price of $2 at the refinery gate. Then we add on taxes, ~33% in CA acording to that website, then distribution fees (i.e. gas in Mojave is way cheaper than gas 200 miles away), and we have gas at ~$3/gal. The real crummy thing about it is gas is really inelastic on the short term, meaning it would take something like $6/gal to cut demand by 10%, so any and all decreases in supply, or increases in consumption, can really drive the price up. This is where the American gas guzzler comes into play. If a financial institution that owns a lot of oil stock, can increase demand enough to push against this short term inelasticity, even though their shares of GM or Ford may drop in price, their shares of Exx0n-Mobil, BP, etc... Will jump by a much larger amount. This is also why alternatives can hurt profit from oil so much, and why various companies fought the CA ZEV mandate so much. If 3% of all new cars don't use gas, that would hurt profit margins right now by that elasticity proportion on the world market, which could knock the price way down. A 10% drop in consumption for a year would probably drop the price per gallon down to it's baseline of ~$1.30/gallon. The worst part is, the guys who actually extract the oil, like my cousin, are supposedly still getting paid ~$6/barrel by the oil companies. They are getting paid exactly what they were getting paid a few years ago, none of this increase in profit is trickling down to them, and they are pissed. Why do you think Chavez wants to nationalize all the oil? If they're doing the same thing over in Venezuela that they're doing here, the government/people are getting ripped.

Now, the thing is, government isn't going to go after Big 0il, 1nvestment Firms, and Americ4n Car Co's for privateering because they have tons of money, and the government makes more via tax if that group of rich mofos profits more. And we can all just go out an buy more fuel efficient vehicles if we want to, which is true, to an extent. Otoh, without more taxation pf gas, or tougher CAFE standards, manufacturers can build fleets with averages that will suck up any slack in supply, driving the price up and up. That's called good bidness! ;)

This isn't something that's isolated, other companies may behave in similar fashion. Take Appl3 making the Ip0d for an example. They probably could've spent zip, zero, and zlich on ads for the damn thing, and made a lot of them for ~$30-60 bucks per player. But, if no one knows about it, or it flops for some other reason, or if it just does o.k., they won't be able to maximize profit. They pick a price point and a certain amount to advertise thanks to input from market research, and base the price on what they feel will make them the most profit, as opposed to what's most affordable for the consumer. It's just how some bidness be imo. :thumbdown:

I never thought of elasticity the other way around. If consumers could just get their stuff together and drop consumption 10 or 20 percent, then the price of gas would plummet. Hmmm.

I'm pretty sure it's commutative over the same range, so if price doubles because of a 1% drop in supply, and all things being equal, supply increases 1%, price should drop back down to whatever it was initially. It won't drop past the price floor, but elasticity should work both ways,

I am curious as to how you see that this *cannot be correct* if you don't know how many miles you can drive an EV on a kWh. (the answer, BTW is about 4 miles/kWh).

I have done the math - as many of us have...with the sketchy info that we have - and I can certainly drive at least 30 miles on the energy input to make a gallon of gasoline. That energy input certainly comes from many sources, as OMG pointed out (and knows well!)

The fact still remains that the oil industry is the SINGLE biggest consumer of electricity. It takes GOBS of electricity to make gasoline. And even if we did use fossil fuels to power our EVs, we'd still pollute less. Even with conversion losses hurting the cause, the efficiency of EVs is orders of magnitude better than a mobile ICE. And turning fossil fuels into electricity can be much cleaner than turning it directly into motive force in a mobile application.

Unless I'm mistaken, that 15% for ICE is the average of *tanks* to wheels efficiency of our current cars. The tank to wheels efficiency of an EV is above ~ 95%. So if we've talking about well to wheels, I think that an ICE vehicle must be quite a bit lower than 15%.

It's yet another dumbass example of how the way we measure things impacts our perception of them imo. In this case, by riding around in big vehicles at high speeds, for significant time periods, the average car in America does operate at ~20% efficiency (I think it's actually ~18-19%), with the peak being ~35%. But, this is somewhat disingenuous, because a Fjord Expl0rer at 80mph and ~30% engine efficiency will still get worse mileage than a H0nda Acc0rd at the same speed and ~20% efficiency, even if the Fjord's well to wheel efficiency is higher.

Since well to wheels doesn't include the efficiency of using however much vehicle to transport just one human, by having lots of big vehicles moving quickly, the apparent efficiency of the average car, according to the well to wheels calc, is inflated. I could have a small little pod akin to the 1L prototype that got 300mpg, but if the engine is only operating at 10% eff, my well to wheels efficiency is going to be worse than the Fjord's. :rolleyes:

What will help make ends meet for your math is the fact that while the oil industry IS the biggest electricity purchaser from the grid, they also make lots of their own (by burning whatever flamable left-overs that have sitting around :)) They make lots of electricity on-site for several reasons. One is expense and another is that the grid couldn't handle the demand.

So the bottom line here is that their electricity is CHEAP. Much cheaper than you are imagining.

Absolutely! And we're awash in that kind of thing.

When people wish to talk bad about EVs, what's the first thing they say? They mention that that we're just moving the pollution from the tail pipe to the electric plant. The assumption is that the only pollution caused by a gas car is at the tail pipe - completely ignoring the upstream pollution of gasoline, while focussion completely on the upstream pollution of electricity.

And then there's my recent favorite of comparing the EPA mpg rating of a given car with the *real world* reports of a car like the Prius. Everybody loves doing that!

In mild defense of the apples to oranges folks, it does get terribly tricky to compare things like the pollution from creating gasoline to the pollution of making electricity. So many freaking variables (even to the point of what you call "pollution.") that it is difficult at best.

I always enjoy reading your stuff, OMG.

Yup, definitely. VOCs alone could be discussed w/ no resolution for some time. And then there's favorable treatment of industry. So CA will ban small diesel cars, but still allow the sales of "heavy duty" diesel pickups, which will both be used for the same thing nine times out of ten. :rolleyes:
Thanks btw! :)

Well, I went with 9 kwh for 50 cents, which is about 1/3 what you and I pay, huh?