Think about how complex modern life is. Most of us are so busy keeping up with it we have a hard time getting perspective on it. The world is 7 Billion people strong, all whizzing around on something, and eating a complex diet and fulfilling so many needs, and in more luxurious places wants, for themselves and others. Global trade is massive as well, just look at how many tons of shipping, or TEU's, the measurement of volume in shipping, about one 20 foot long shipping container, go whizzing to every corner where man is. Plus the way we make life comfortable in every corner with heating, air conditioning, and even humidity control in places. It's all fueled by Fossil Fuels, something like 90% of our mechanical energy demands, transportation and electricity generation, product production and even the food we eat, fertilized by nitrogen cracked from oil... mmmmm, tasty. If 90% of our current societal needs are met with fossil fuels, it's going to take a death by a thousand cuts to take them out of our lives. It's like removing metastasized lymphoma. It's in everything we do, more insidious than High Fructose Corn Syrup, bygum!
So forgetting Natural Gas and Coal for now, huge contributors to global pollution and CO2, but they currently don't power too much of our transportation, which is our eventual topic, which I promise I will get to after some context ( the percentage of natural gas transportation is likely growing right now, from minuscule to negligible, which isn't a horrible thing because it's clean-er (not clean!), but Coal for movement went the way of the steam engine, replaced by more efficient gas around the turn of the century with the creation of oil wells. Coal is bad for the planet, but good for the whales, who were the previous source of energy for many of our needs!) the world uses about 93.6 million barrels of crude oil per day as projected for 2015.
How much oil do we use as a nation, the USA?
We use about 19 million barrels a day, so a low 20 something percent of the world's supply (20.29%ish), down from a peak of 21 million Barrels per day a few years ago before the great recession. Since we are about 1/23 of the world's population, the fact that we use 1/5 of the world's oil means we are using some 4.5 more oil per capita than the average, which we drag up quite a bit to begin with.
A barrel as measured by the world oil markets is 42 US gallons, not the 55 gallon drums we are used to seeing, but close. 300 pounds a piece, so don't try to pick one up unless your name is Magnus Magnusson.
Do some math and that's 262,800,000,000 US gallons per year, at 7.2 lbs per gallon of crude evened out, it's literally about 1 trillion pounds of oil that we use per year. To use the ol' proverbial Olympic swimming pool comparison, it's 398,182 of em... a significant sized lake, or the weight of, no, not your old aunt Betty, but something akin to a small mountain.
When we think of our modern daily lives, the place we deal with fossil fuels most obviously is in transportation, right there at the pump. You stop in about once every week of two and have to fill up, usually about 40 bucks worth. About 60% of American's use of oil, some 10 million barrels a day of the 18 to 21 million barrels we use a day as a nation, is used for transportation, so about 1/9th of the world's oil goes to American steel and muscle, our cars, trucks, planes at 42 gallons a barrel by my math: 153,300,000,000 gallons a year. yup, 153 billion gallons. some really rough math make that a pool 50 ft. wide x 10 ft. deep x 7785 miles long.. that's a long swim...
If you want to keep going down the math of how global warming works given the size of the atmosphere and all emitted greenhouse gasses, click here.
Back to our topic, it's 511 gallons per American per year for transportation. At current prices, 2.60 a gallon national average for good ol' regular, it's $1329 per citizen, but since a lot of that is diesel and some of it is even jet fuel, let's call it an even 1500 bucks, and don't forget last year when OPEC and the oil companies had us over the barrel and it was more like 2500 bucks a year per American. Let's hope those prices were a last gasp, an extinction burst of sorts. switching to economics for just a second, imagine how the economy would boom if we weren't sending half or more of our gas expenditures overseas as profits to foreign exporters of oil?
Back to Ecology and meteorology, take that amount of gallons of just gas x 20 lbs, the amount of atmospheric carbon created by burning one gallon of gas, the most common transportation product, about 4/5 of all the transportation oil is made into gas (this will be a low number since I am not factoring in burning oil, or diesel):
10,220 lbs or about 5 tons per the 300 million Americans per year, just to get around.
If a 6 lb gallon of gas, not to mention the byproducts of diesel, make 20 lbs of CO2 alone, how many pounds is that to fill our 20 mile thick atmosphere? 3 trillion pounds or 1.5 billion tons. To follow this math to it's conclusion, I would do the surface area of the earth, 197,000,000 square miles, times the thickness of the atmosphere and come up with the volume of the air we breathe before it turns to space, and then how much we are loading in per square mile or square yard, but my brain already hurts from all this math, and the guy at the link above can do it better.
If world carbon output through all sources is about 44,000,000,000 tons (75% of that currently man caused, AKA anthropomorphic), we are creating about 3.4% of the world's anthropomorphic atmospheric carbon, and maybe 2.6% of all the atmospheric carbon carbon through running the American transportation machine, which is 253 million cars, trucks, and god knows how many buses, trains and planes strong (There are 30,000 commercial aircraft in the world. how many fly in and out of or inside the US is a good question). Yup, even after Cash for Clunkers which took 250,000 old vehicles off the road, only took 1/10 of one percent of the old beaters (gasoline powered cars) out of the market, although all progress is progress.
Luckily the earth absorbs about 16 trillion tons annually if things continue to go well (ocean acidification could create havoc with that!) but it's where we are currently as an American society, beginning to make a big dent.
How that dent is being made involves a lot of things over the years, from a guy named Tesla to a company named Tesla, and from an organization named DARPA ( I once rode in an old DARPA electric Truck hitchhiking in Vermont in the early oughts.. the guy had worked for them and they knew it made sense.) to guys named Obama and Bush. But here is a simple fact. Right now in the US, not the leader of the pack, but by no means a laggard, pure electric cars make up about one half of one percent of all new car sales, about 5,000 of the 1 million cars sold monthly, but hybrids account for about 2.25 % of that number, so about 30,000 cars per month. Put em both together you get to about 3%, a modest but significant start, especially for the electric which wasn't in production before Tesla produced the roadster in in 2008 at double digit monthly sales. While hybrid sales have leveled off, this small but significant number of electric car sales has seen dramatic annual growth, 27% between 2013 and 2014 alone, and just in the US. Now pure electric vehicles, not plug in hybrids, might be about half that number, maybe 4-5000 sales per month, Teslas, Nissan Leaf's and the new base model BMW i3.
I am going to focus on electric cars, the real holy grail, but let's not discount a hybrid. A Prius get's 50 mpg, and is about to jump closer to 60 in 2016 if Toyota takes the risk of switching to lithiums and upgrading their processors like they are hinting they might. It is replacing the work that would have been done ten years ago by a car perhaps getting 20-25 mpg, so it's a 2 to 2.5 times improvement. Hybrids are partially responsible for leveling out us oil demand, but to quote one of America's great cinematographic masterpieces about our love affair with the automobile, If you ain't first, you are last, so why compromise: Hybrids are a great compromise, but the future is in pure electric drive, and it's no longer the future, it's the present.
To repeat, while hybrids and the increase in CAFE standards and the removal of clunkers represent a big reduction in Carbon output, assuming Americans don't make more radical changes like switching to bikes or public transportation, which is many cases is impractical because we have been essentially building the footprint of our society for the automobile since World War II, for some 70 years now, the holy grail of all of these is the electric car to the environmental movement and the future of our planet. When you buy a pure electric car, you gain efficiencies that include no engine, no life-cycle pollution or CO2 produced for manufacturing a complex internal combustion engine, no energy used to refine and transport liquid fuel to the consumer, many fewer metal parts to move the weight of in a drive-train, so everything from product lifetime environmental impact to just the mechanical efficiency of driving improves (It's why some Tesla's, which look like Limo's, can do 0-60 in 3.2 seconds). And best to many of these people is that they get their go juice, their power, not from the oil companies that have been hampering more aggressive measures to fight global warming for decades now, still profiting them if not less, but an electric you can charge from your local utility, from solar on your roof, heck, like Ed Bagley junior on a toaster tied exercise bike (assuming you can produce sufficient amperage, which is a tough one with a big battery pack, but let's just pretend).
This is as the TED talk crowd likes to obsessively say, a disruptive technology. It's a game changer.
The problem is, it has been for over 100 years. I would be remiss if I didn't tell you that Electric Cars have been around just as long as gasoline cars, if not longer, and that some of the first cars produced at the end of the last century were electric:
Unfortunately they got sidelined by good cheap gas as the oil rush in Pennsylvania led to a national oil rush to places like Texas and an international oil rush by the 1930's to places like Saudi Arabia. While it was good for the whales, which probably wouldn't still be swimming around if we hadn't discovered sub surface oil in Pennsylvania, such was our lust for lighting and lubricants to fuel the industrial revolution before we even dreamed of electric grids and liquid fuel for off track vehicles. It comes down to a calculation of energy density. It's not that we couldn't accomplish our daily needs with the electrics we could create, but this was 20th century America: bigger, faster, stronger, and we didn't have the patience to invest in the energy density of batteries to catch up even if the ride was so much more aesthetically appealing. To again quote the great American observer Resse Bobby, if you ain't first, your last, and gas was pumping faster than batteries were being downsized 100 years ago.
We wanted longer and longer range, not for any particularly practical reason, since the average car ride has never approached he range of a vehicle, but we love convenience, and a once a year road trip. It's just how we thought (and still think!). Improvement became the name of the game for our restless ambition. When a young Dwight Eisenhower was a brevet Lieutenant Colonel in his late 20's ( 'brevet' means a temporary Lieutenant Colonel, which was a war rank since he was only in his late 20's, but since he had been to West Point and was a professional army officer, it put him above the millions of draftees who came in for the great war. He was the age of an army Captain, but had 3 times the responsibility), he was tasked with crossing the US with a convoy from the east to west coasts. It took about 2 months to cross the country and much of it was on dirt roads. It left an impression with him that we should create better automotive infrastructure, and he created the interstate system just as our post war might and lust for independence had us moving to the burbs and producing modern cars for a growing middle class. America was addicted to the independence of the car, to speed, to range, and therefore to oil. As I brought up before, when oil is broken down to gasoline or diesel, it has an incredible amount of disposable energy given it's light weight. Lithium Batteries, the biggest widely available competitor at this time, have an energy density of about 1/6 that of gas. However, if you break down the improvements you get in transportation as I mentioned before, less moving parts in an electric engine and the use of more advanced materials, you can get the relative density difference down to about 1/3. This means nothing if you just need to drive 10-20 miles a day. That technology has literally existed since the turn of the last century. But America turned it's back on it because we dream in possibilities, and we took the world with us since it was 'our century'. While Europeans seem to revel in the predictability of the every day, in the small things, Americans sense of adventure demand a car that can go 350 mile on a tank even if it only happens once a month or once a year or even once a decade. This is what the auto manufacturers believed anyways, and it's why they basically stopped selling electric cars, or we stopped buying them, until Tesla and Nissan started to think big in the middle of the last decade, motivated by the environmental groundswell that was happening in recognition of the growing evidence of global climate change and .the success of the Toyota and Honda Hybrid lines and the GM EV experiment.
Not to give too much credit to Tesla, it was GM, Government Motors as it's now called, an amazing American company which was the largest corporation in the world for I think decades (it's now Oil Company's and Chinese utilities.. have a look: http://fortune.com/global500/ ) with it's multiple lines, GMC, Cadillac, Chevy, Oldsmobile and Pontiac, powering the second half of the American Decade with Detroit Steel, who took the first major risk on the electric of the last half century, but it was so successful it freaked them and the oil companies out, and led to the controversial destruction of the EV-1's and a black eye of controversy on what was seen as an oil company conspiracy and short sighted thinking on GM's behalf, as depicted in Who Killed the Electric Car.
The guys at Tesla and Nissan, and maybe even BMW, were watching. It's hard to know who started working to fill that hole first, but history will give Tesla credit for being the first to market, unencumbered by a more traditional corporate hierarchy which views R&D as a mixed blessing, a bunch of egg heads who don't always get what they think the people want. The heroes of this story realized someone wanted these products and they could be good for the planet and the bottom line. They also realized something else that GM either didn't realize, or refused to admit due to a coziness with big oil: That early adapters will be patient with a less than perfect technology, and that the difference between the technology of the elite and the technology of the masses is just time. In the 1890's internal combustion automobiles were a fetish piece, ten years later a mark of the elite, but 10 years subsequent, they were being mass marketed by Henry Ford. Why did it take a kid from South Africa named Elon to remember such a story only 100 years gone by and realize it could be repeated with batteries? hard to tell, but in fairness, Elon Musk didn't start Tesla, a few other Silicon Valley Smart Guys did, but he stepped in at the right moment with his Pay Pal fame & fortune and his trust in the idea to make it happen on a large scale.
http://www.teslamotors.com/about
http://techcrunch.com/gallery/a-brief-history-of-tesla/
and the rest, they will likely say, is history:
It's funny to me that if you peek into Tesla's battery pack, it's made of hundreds of AA's stacked between two contacts, crude as that, like a massive remote control. Why? I think (I speculate) it might be because the oil companies snatched up the Patents for Large Lithiums and wouldn't licence it and this was the only end run. This is speculation, but I saw something recently that confirmed my hunch. Anyhow, back to what I do know.
Now this isn't the only solution, the Electric Car...let's briefly go back to our math. If all 7 billion of us had a Tesla, it would be pretty nice, but there won't be much room for much else, the world would be one big quiet traffic jam. It's a multi solution approach that's obviously going to occur, but if you take all the world's transportation and phase in technologies like this, and we are 1/5 of the way to our solution, 1/5 a year further from 500ppm atmospheric carbon (we just passed 400ppm and things are already getting nuts) and who knows what kind of traumatic consequences, well needed time bought,4 years become 5 to come up with other solutions. People ride mopeds, planes, trains buses and what have you, but nothing is more hugely symbolic to the american and world mainstream than the car. Buses are following suit:http://www.byd.com/na/auto/ElectricBus.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_bus
BYD, a Chinese company, is the Tesla of Buses (and the Tesla of cars inside china, I must admit), and other companies are working at it as well. If buses were as sexy as a Tesla, you wold have heard of them too, but sadly, buses aren't that sexy, are they Napoleon?
Tesla plus BYD (Plus BMW I's and Nissan Leaf's, the only other two major car manufacturers who are currently making a ground up designed electric, with GM about to jump in with the Bolt. Everyone else is playing catchup, with apparently only Volkswagon with an ace up it's sleeve in terms of new battery technology) means something like 10% of world carbon output potentially covered by commercially available electric technology, with adaptation to come as fast as people can buy them.
In Asia, people get around on Mopeds.. are they electric?.. they can be:
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/meijs-motorman/
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33183031
And increasingly, in places like China and Europe where they are already popular, they are:
http://enviroprojects.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-electric-motorbikes-of-shenzen.html
http://www.superscootersales.com/product/super-lithium-1500-brushless-electric-scooter/
We just saved a few percent more.. man.. fixing global warming is easy!
Anyhow, Planes and Boats, it's gonna take a bit longer.. water and electricity don't mix well, and you have no doubt heard the line that there are old pilots, bold pilots, but no old bold pilots. Aerospace moves slow, and weight is such a huge factor that it will take one more jump in battery technology past the Lithiums, one that is perhaps half again as light, jacket-less lithium or something else being dreamed up in some lab as we speak, to bring that adaptation, but the cars are pulling, in, winning at the track and at the stop light, and avoiding the pump entirely.. Check out these sales numbers and check them in a few years after Tesla releases a 40,000$ car, it's planned next project, and the Bolt starts competing with the Leaf, and like a Virginia Slims girl, you will say, We've come a long way baby!
Let's just hope the grid can keep up with all the Gigawatts, Marty, and someday, America being America, 350 miles of range will be a laughable thing of the past like your father's Oldsmobile.. trust me.. They are going to pass the internal combustion on the same road it passed them 100 years and some almost a billion units ago, like the hare and the now quite quick tortuous.
The Electric Car will keep selling because people want to drive it. It makes economic sense for many, incentives exist to make it make sense for even more. It makes idealistic sense for others who calculate in the consequences of their choices that don't show up in simple consumer math, and the technology will keep improving so much that it will surpass the performance of the internal combustion and hybrid due to it's natural lean design. This time there will be no going back, and it will be replaced by something as novel to us now as the garbage disposal at the end of Back to the Future, but don't take my word for it. If you need evidence that the electric car is now a consumer reality, go out and test drive one. experiencing is believing, and it's no longer a thing of Popular Mechanics lore, it's now Consumer Reports reality.. and a good reality at that. The Tesla was the highest rated car ever driven, and the other's in the pack aren't too far behind.. that's good for all of us.. now how can I get my hands on one?
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