Doing without oil

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Doing without oil President Bush has called on America to end its addiction to oil and has set a target of replacing "more than 75% of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025" Does this mean Bush is going green? Not necessarily. Whether or not he worries about the impact of fossil fuel consumption on the earth's climate, he has two other key reasons for wanting to kick the oil habit, one geopolitical the other economic. His geo-political worry is that the West is too reliant on a highly unstable part of the world - the Middle East - that produces some 30% of the world's petroleum and supplies 17% of US needs. True that leaves 70% to he gleaned from elsewhere, but the global oil price is still very sensitive to events in the Gulf region. And that reinforces Bush's other worry, which is fear of what will happen to the Western standard of life when the market starts to register that the oil is running out and the oil price shoots through the roof. But is the oil really running out? Not in the short term, no, but we are near to what is called "the topping point" - the point where half the world's known petrol reserves are gone - and at a time when demand for oil (notably from China and India) is soaring. Some experts, including geologist Jeremy Leggett, professor at the Royal School of Mines, think the significance of this point will suddenly dawn on people and provoke a crisis. "One apocalyptic week," he writes in his book, The Empty Tank, "a germ of panic will take root and spread like wildfire through the markets. The price of oil... will begin to climb toward the ceiling. Frantic oil traders will scream at each other on trading floors, eyes wild and hair akimbo." Such a doom-laden scenario would not occur, however, if the markets were sufficiently confident that technologies were being developed to power our economic systems that did not rely on oil, and which were not that much dearer than oil-based ones. And are such technologies in the offing? A few technologies - producing electricity from nuclear power or from "clean coal" (coal whose harmful emissions have largely been contained) - are already almost commercial at current fuel costs, though the political and social costs are far from resolved. But these don't really affect oil consumption: their main function is to make electricity (which accounts for a third to a half of the West's consumption of raw energy) or to produce heat for industrial or domestic purposes (a fifth). Oil, by contrast, is mainly consumed in transport (nearly half of raw energy consumption): just 0.4% of Britain's electricity supply derives from oil. Hence if we're serious about reducing oil usage, we'll have to find new ways to power our cars. What might these be? The new hybrid cars that run off both petrol and electricity, cars like the Toyota Prius driven by the Prince of Wales (and this week scheduled for use as ministerial cars) are part of the answer, since over short trips they can substitute electricity for petrol. But electric vehicle batteries have limited storage capacity and the long-term hope for transport lies in the fuel cell - a battery that produces electricity as long as it's fed with hydrogen, and that creates only water as a by-product. Fuel cells have been used as generators in space exploration, but remain very costly. Parts of the battery need to be built from platinum, and at present it requires too much platinum for the cell's cost to be anything like comparable to that of a combustion engine. Will they get round that problem? It's just a matter of time. But the technical hurdles that must be jumped before the hydrogen economy becomes a reality are much larger than producing an economic fuel cell. Hydrogen itself is the world's commonest element and can be extracted from the gas or from water of which it forms a part, by applying an electric current. It can then be used when needed, in conjunction with a fuel cell, to create electricity. The trouble is that it's a tricky substance: a highly explosive gas that is hard to store, transport and use safely. So the infrastructure of the hydrogen economy is also a problem. And where would motorists load up with hydrogen? Green activists dream of the day that fuel cell car owners would all have solar panels on the roofs of their homes to electrolyse water and so produce the hydrogen fuel for their cars. But trials at a Honda plant in California suggest that an average two-car family (driving 15,000 miles a year) would need solar panels completely covering the south-facing rooftops of between four to eight houses. Cost? $160,000. In fact, to power its 230 million vehicles with electrolysed hydrogen, the US would have to double its electricity output. To do this economically would either require technologies not favoured by most greens (e.g. nuclear and "clean" coal] or the adoption of a quite different approach. So Is there an alternative to the hydrogen economy? Some hope the answer is ethanol, which comes from sugar-based plants like maize (Americans call it corn) and biodiesel, produced from vegetable oil or animal fat. These are relatively easily substituted for petrol in cars, making them cheaper and more practical to bring on stream than hydrogen. Indeed, Henry Ford planned to run his Model T on ethanol, and the first diesel engine at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris burned pure peanut oil. Of the two, ethanol is more environmentally friendly as biodiesel emits increased levels of harmful nitrogen oxide emissions. What's more, a big chunk of world supplies come in the form of Indonesian palm oil, which is displacing rainforest. And who uses ethanol? Brazil has a huge programme to convert sugar-cane to ethanol: in five years it expects to power 80% of its transport fleet with it. Sweden is pledged to an oil-free economy in 15 years and is working with Saab and Volvo to develop cars and lorries that burn ethanol. But its use remains limited because of the cost of production. EU and US production relies on vast subsidies to farmers and producers. And even if the oil price rose enough for ethanol to be economic, there would still be the question of whether there would be enough land to produce meaningful quantities of it. Can the hydrogen economy be green? Iceland has announced its intention to run its cars only on hydrogen fuel from electrolysed water, but then it's in the unique position of having a very small population and abundant supplies of very low cost geothermal and hydroelectric energy. The UK's windy weather might one day prove a similar natural asset, but until then we would need a different solution. Hydrogen could be used, however, to make good the deficiencies of "green" renewable energy systems like solar and wind power. These suffer the great drawback of being only intermittently available (often there is no wind, or it is overcast) and so contribute much less to the stability and security of electricity supplies than fossil fuels. But some scientists are now considering the possibility of using offshore wind-farms to produce electricity that then produces hydrogen; and the hydrogen is then transported and stored until such a time as the electricity is needed again. And under current estimates the cost of such electricity might only be double what we pay today See also: New energy source from pond life?
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