The Post-Oil Era Begins

"The Post-Oil Era Begins" is the lead story in Discover Magazine's January 2009 "100 Top Science Stories of 2008" — and is unfortunately not available online as of this writing. (Shame on you, Discover!)

The article, written by Ben Hewitt, asks what will save us from our reliance on the petroleum-based liquid fuels which form the lion's share of the 28 percent of our country's energy use which isw devoted to transportation today. Biofuels, such as ethanol made from corn? Though 9 billion gallons were made in 2008 and 36 billion gallons will be made in 2022, by current estimates, ethanol (whether made from corn or from other biomass) isn't the answer. It threatens the environment bigtime.

For one thing, burning biofuels still adds to global warming, just as burning gasoline does; though the crops used to make ethanol do remove carbon from the atmosphere, the plant life the crops replace also remove carbon. Yet if ethanol is made from crops grown on land that previously lacked vegetation, copious irrigation must be done, and the resulting fuel costs "28 gallons of water per mile traveled, whereas conventional petroleum uses 0.15 gallon."

Moreover, unless biofuels are made from inedible crops such as switchgrass — for which "the technology is still largely confined to the laboratory" — growing crops for ethanol pushes up food prices around the world and makes nourishment unaffordable for the poorest of the poor.


So, if biofuels are not the answer, what is? Electricity, says the article. We need all-electric cars, and/or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) that run on a battery until the battery runs out, then start up a gasoline engine to recharge the battery in mid-trip and keep the wheels turning.

In 2010, the Chevrolet Volt is expected to be introduced, a PHEV with a cruising range on its battery alone of 40 miles. All-electric vehicles will have cruising ranges of up to 100 miles. " ... if a market for lightweight hybrid and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles were developed," says the article, "the United States could cut its gas consumption by 68 billion gallons — about half our current fuel use — within 27 years."

If we do that, we won't need ethanol at all.

What we will need, though, is some assurance that all those electric car owners won't all recharge their cars in the middle of the day. They will need to "plug in during off-peak hours and allow their batteries to recharge at a modest 120-volt/15-amp rate [assuming] 50 million light-duty PHEVs would constitute a 25 percent market share by 2030." But if they all plug into the electric power grid at 5 PM when everyone is running their air conditioning full blast and, what's more, all use a "beefier, 240-volt/30-amp circuit" to halve their recharging time, "the grid would need 160 additional gigawatts of capacity, requiring the construction of 160 new power plants."


Clearly — though the article doesn't spell this out — we will need incentives galore to make this a reality. For one thing, we already know that GM is going to have a hard time bringing the Chevy Volt to market for less that $40,000. It is unlikely the extra cost of a Volt, versus a Toyota Prius non-plug-in hybrid at $25,000, will pay for itself in lower fuel costs unless the owner drives exactly 40 miles per day (the battery's cruising range) and gets at least a $5,000 tax break (the present amount contemplated by congressional legislation) from Uncle Sam for buying the Volt.

And that's assuming $4.00-a-gallon gas!

In reality, the government should give a much bigger tax break for the Volt. How much? I can't give a hard-and-fast figure, but it should be based on an analysis of the true cost to the environment of continuing to burn liquid carbon-based fuels (including ethanol), thereby failing to head off global warming.