I just finished watching a TED talk about this issue by Amory B. Lovins. In the talk he claims that improvements in efficiency can reduce or eliminate our need for oil. The book is supposed to back up his claims. One of the things in the talk (from 2007, I believe) that he mentions was the gains to be had by converting the air fleet to blended wing body designs. I was under the impression that plans for that had been scrapped due to the problems of pressurizing the cabin and how to bank when customers are seated near the wingtips. He also states that carbon fiber car bodies can be made quickly and cheaply. Outside of exotics, I have never heard of a carbon fiber car, nor am I aware of plans to build a production vehicle out of one. To what extent are the books based on wishful thinking?
Keeping in mind that Amory Lovins was trained as a physicist, not an engineer, I would expect most of his recommendations to be theoretically correct, but difficult to implement in practice. Physicists tend to gloss over the implementation phase of solving a problem, when in fact most of the hard work and innovation is in the engineering part of the solution.
Given the cost of carbon fiber parts, I doubt carbon fiber bodies could be made cheaply. Some manufacturers are starting to use it, but it’s… not cheap still.
More efficient cars and airplanes just means you use oil more slowly. A carbon fiber bodied car that gets 50 mpg from a conventional engine is just an efficient car, that is powered by a finite resource.
The only way to stop using oil is to change the powerplant. Or, change the source of the oil–we can imagine a future where we all use the same old gasoline powered engines of today, but the gasoline is produced by bioengineered algae.
Whether that’s an efficient way of using whatever energy inputs we’ll be using is another story. It’s physically possible to just manufacture octane through various methods, that doesn’t mean it would make economic or environmental sense. We can imagine a gigantic nuclear power plant that powers a gigantic chemical factory that sucks carbon dioxide and water out of the air and spits out octane and diesel fuel that is loaded into trucks and distributed all over the country and sold at already existing gas station and put into already existing conventional vehicles.
But it’s gonna be a lot more efficient to just use the electric power generated by the nuclear plant to charge batteries for electric vehicles.
Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, either. It’s possible, for instance, that we’ll switch over to electric cars and possibly trains for ground use, but that we can’t manage to get batteries or capacitors energy-dense enough to be practical for intercontinental airplanes, and thus manufacture hydrocarbon fuels for them.
Suppose that, all else being equal, airplanes are made more fuel-efficient so that they use much less fuel per mile of travel. Suppose that, all else being equal, cars are made more fuel-efficient so that they use much less fuel per mile of travel. In both cases, the most likely scenario is that flying and driving become cheaper and people do more of it. This might then mean that the same amount of oil is used per year.
As others have noted, improvements in efficiency can result in effectively “increasing” the oil supply, and this is something that’s occuring every day and has been for years.
I find it fascinating that just last year (2009) the US used less oil than in 1978, though supporting a far larger economy. Since 1978, barrels of oil per unit of adjusted (2009) GDP has essentially doubled, from $1,000 GDP per barrel of oil to $2,111 GDP per barrel of oil.
America became so oil efficient that the 1978 record of 18.847 million barrels/day wasn’t broken until 1998, twenty years later.
As far as the carbon nanotube aeroplanes or whatever, I don’t know anything about that. But yes, improvements in efficiencies effectively “increase” the supply.
Also consider this. Planes have a certain payload to total weight capacity. IIRC its typically something like 0.5. That means even IF you could make a magical airplane that weighed NOTHING empty and that this magic material it was made out of was FREE, you are only going to about double the airplanes efficiency.
The guy writing this book should know better. There are some pretty hard limits when it comes to aerodynamics, materials engineering, engine efficiencies and so on and so on even if money isnt an object. Yeah, some science/engineering magic MIGHT happen that totally rewrites our technological world, but what we know know today IMO indicates that probably WON"T happen.
Yeah, we can get a few percent here, some there, do this or that a little differently and it will all help. But drastic improvements arent going to happen and drastic reductions in oil usage will most likely take drastic reductions in lifestyles.
If we want to improve energy efficiency, homes and offices are a better candidate that airplanes. Lots of old houses leak like sieves. People have old appliances that are energy hogs.
But why don’t we replace these old houses and old appliances now? Because people don’t care about how much energy they use, they care about how much it costs. And bulldozing your house and building a new energy efficient house costs a heck of a lot more than heating your leaky house.
But we just spent a decade in an orgy of house building. Maybe bulldozing some white elephant energy hogs would be a good idea.
Same thing with transportation. People don’t care about the cost of oil, they care about how much it costs to get around, including non-monetary costs. So a super-efficient carbon fiber car doesn’t make sense unless it actually saves money. And it won’t actually save money if it costs a lot more than a regular old car. Everybody acts like fuel costs are critical, but fuel costs are only a fraction (of course a large fraction) of total transportation costs. You’ve also got vehicle cost, maintenance, fees, road construction, road maintenance, and so on.
But you can reduce your fuel consumption dramatically by making lifestyle changes. Suppose you can work from home sometimes, and carpool, and get a slightly more efficient vehicle, live closer to work, and have stores and amenities closer to your house. Even if you drive the same gas guzzling SUV you can reduce your cost by making lifestyle changes. Of course, nobody says that making these changes would be easy or painless. But if you want to live 70 miles from your office in a suburb where the nearest grocery store is 20 miles away, you’re going to have to pay for it, one way or another. So the future doesn’t have to be superadvanced cars with high tech construction and exotic power sources. It can be something as simple as in the future more people live in high rise apartment buildings and take the subway to work.