Something contentious to start the ball rolling.
Paul Ritchie posted in News on March 18th, 2006
A couple of years ago, I had an argument in an internet forum about how our future would look when the price of oil made it uneconomical to sit on the freeway for 2 hours as we make our daily treks to and from work.
Not surprisingly, the conspiracy theorists came out of the woodwork saying the oil shortage was a media beat-up and the government is keeping the lid on the fact the world is so awash with oil, they could sell it for $3 a barrel and still make a killing.
I was moved to ask where all this oil might actually be.
For my pains, I was called gullible and naive for not accepting the government is just lying about the oil.
Click here for more good news for those who believe the oil will last forever.
That was $38 per barrel ago.
Whether there is oil or whether there isn’t becomes something of a moot point however, when one considers the emergence of China into the motorized transport era. Chinese demand for oil is going to dwarf everything we’ve ever seen before. Suppliers are in no way going to be able to satisfy Chinese demands for oil.
The parity price is going to going to skyrocket. I’m predicting $120 per barrel within 3 years and $10 per gallon at the bowser.
A little more than a couple of years ago, about 15 years ago to be precise, I heard a lovely little paranoia-based conspiracy theory about an engineer from New Zealand who’d invented an internal combustion engine which ran on water. Fill up at the garden tap kind of thing.
Having seen my highschool science teacher do that water distillation trick where the water disappears and you get one flask full of hydrogen and the other half full of oxygen - and knowing there can be no combustion without oxygen and that hydrogen is explosive (the Pop Test), such an invention didn’t seem all that far fetched to me.
But the story was this engineer met with foul play whilst on some far flung back highway and the blueprints were never seen again. The chap who told me plaintively asked: How would the world’s economies fare if we weren’t all hopelessly dependent on oil? All those taxes they wouldn’t collect, all those jobs lost etc etc etc. Not to mention the moguls of the oil industries themselves would be bankrupted overnight.
Nope, that engineer had to be silenced.
The man who told me was a lecturer in engineering at the University of Otago - Dunedin, N.Z.
Four years later, I heard the story repeated almost verbatim from a stockbroker in Melbourne - creepy or what?
I haven’t heard that story since 1995 now, but supplanting it have been stories regarding the rapid depletion of LPG and the subsequent quadrupling of the price of that alternative fuel source in 10 years, the drive to make ethanol fuel alternatives viable in the market place, electric cars - it was in the early 80’s I saw the first prototype of this beasty and it spectacularly failed to impress even me. There has been a fair bit of noise about hydrogen fuelled cars, probably because it’s part of the scenery if you ever happen to be travelling in Finland - and now, once again, the water fuelled automobile is beginning to bob up as a real alternative.
First things first though, before there was petroleum, there was ethanol.
A quick scan of through the archives of the Southern Illinois University, page 6 of The History of Ethanol Production shows Henry Ford used an ethanol burning engine before designing the Model T.
Produced mostly from the waste material from sugar refineries and even more recently from recycling corn stalks, ethanol is obviously a renewable fuel source. The battles rage over whether ethanol added to petroleum damages engines and fuel systems - knocking appears to be the biggest concern - and the unknown affect 10% of ethanol in a tank of fuel will have on (I have to scoff here) the environment.
More on ethanol in subsequent updates. Feel free to leave your own comments.
To hydrogen as an alternative, and since the Finns are loving their glorious clean cars and nobody’s exploded in a ball of flame from going over a speed bump too fast and making sparks as the chassis hits the hard stuff, and since they have hydrogen at the bowser, making it accessible to Joe Publikkenen, hydrogen as an alternative to fossil fuels has attracted the attention of the world’s largest premium car manufacturer, BMW.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday last, that BMW “will present such a vehicle to the public in less than two years,” a spokesman said, confirming media reports. BMW had said last year its hydrogen-fuelled cars, which emit only water vapour, would make their debut in 2010.” (Link)
2010… I could be dead by then. My kids will already have purchased their V8 rockets with 12 slotters and be leaving rubber on every clean bit of road they can find. (That is, if they can afford to run them.)
I think I have a bit of time up my sleeve before I have to start frantically digging up the juice on those little numbers.
Which brings me to what we have today. Thunderously boring by comparison, Toyota is making the biggest waves with the littlest cars. Hybrids.
More annoying than iPods and Avril Lavigne ringtones is - the Prius.
Everywhere you go, the one car they all eventually talk about is this gas-electricity hybrid.
CNN had this to say about it on Friday…
“By Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNNMoney.com staff writer
March 17, 2006: 2:44 PM EST
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - In a list of the 10 hottest cars now on the market, six of the 10 are products of the Toyota Motor Co. The Prius tops the list and all three of Toyota’s low-priced Scion models are on the list, as well.
Three of the cars, the Toyota Prius, Lexus RX400h and Ford Escape Hybrid, are gas-electric hybrid cars.
To find the 10 hottest cars in America for CNNMoney.com, Edmunds.com, a partner providing data and content for CNN Web sites, looked for three things: Actual selling prices closest to the vehicle’s full sticker price; lowest amounts in rebates or other sales incentives; shortest times spent on dealer lots before being snapped up by buyers.
The Prius scores big in all those areas. While all other cars on the list sell for at least some small amount under their actual sticker price, once incentives are factored in, the Prius still sells for 10 percent over sticker price.”
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/16/Autos/hot_cars/
My prediction? Everyone who buys one will regret it within 3 years.
One thing is for absolute certain: the industry is going to change. The focus will be on alternative fuel sources and whether that’s driven by those smoky figures in hats in doorways watching your every move, or whether - as I suspect will be the case - it’s driven purely by market forces fed to the back teeth with the spiralling costs of fossil fueled vehicles, the times they are a-changing.
The foreseeable future suggests the big winner will be ethanol.
“Some organisations and countries are using ethanol, however (they) are just tinkering around the edges by adding 15% ethanol to diesel (known as dieselhol), or adding ethanol to petrol, proving an insignificant reduction in CO2s.
Only Stockholm, Sweden and a small trial in Mexico City have embarked on a similar project.”
Source: http://www.venturabus.com.au/ethanol.html
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