"Bill Funk" <
[email protected]> wrote in message
news:
[email protected]...
>
> Thinking ahead is a good thing, obviously.
Well, yeah. And of course, I am quite confident that non of us are going to
be around when the oil finally does run out. I've read some experts that
feel
that there's more oil located offshore than all the land-based proven
reserves
now. And of course, while as long as oil is pumping from the Mid-East,
ANWR will be safe, once that goes down then they are going to drill
in there regardless of what the environmentalists want.
And then there's things like oil shale, where the United States has the
largest
reserves of it, that are estimated to produce enough oil to last for
centuries.
It's going to be at least 500-1000 years I feel before humanity has sucked
the very last drop of recoverable oil out of the ground. Of course, the bad
news is that extracting oil from shale, from played-out oil fields with
steam,
and from offshore, is going to be a lot more expensive than just importing
it
from the Mid East today. What we can hope is that what has happened with
population in Europe (it is heading down) as Europe has got more civilized,
will happen in the rest of the developed world. One of the biggest and most
obvious ways to reduce oil consumption is simply to reduce the population
by everyone having fewer babies. Nature alone would do it if
everyone had just 2 kids. But this is another discussion, of course.
So, yes, a lot of this is really science fiction. But as the easy-to-pump
oil fields dry up, and we start switching to harder-to-extract oil, there
will be a rise in fuel costs that will level off again, thus forcing some of
these
transportation changes.
> Let's think ahead on the lines of electric cars...
> *For now*, there's not enough storage (batteries) available for any
> but the most mundane, urban commuter cars. And there's no problem with
> that, per se. Using such cars would solve several problems.
> This would also bring on other problems, though.
> Chief among tham would be the inadequacy of the present power grid to
> handle the load.
> Can you imaging an appreciable percentage of commuters plugging in
> their electric cars to recharge at the same time? The load would
> immediately shut down entire cities.
No it wouldn't. Most electric cars would be recharged at night when
power use is very low. And the power companies can easily enforce
this, they have been ramping up for this as a matter of fact. A number
have pilot programs that used computerized meters, that report usage
back via cellular. Industry has got used to paying different rates for
power consumed during peak periods, and if electric cars became widely
used, the power companies would simply change tariffs to allow them to
charge a lower rate for off-peak power, and a higher rate for peak power
for residential users. It's unlikely the PUC's would object because the rate
structure can be designed simply to make it more expensive to charge
electric
cars during the day, while otherwise the average rate paid would be little
changed.
Keep in mind that the power distribution grid has to be designed to supply
enough power for everyone in the city to switch on their A/C unit
in the middle of 100+ temperatures in the city. Most of the time it
is loafing along.
The big problem is generation capacity, espically in some areas (like
California for example) The cost to bring new generation capacity
online today is five times what it cost to bring it online 30 years ago.
This is due to the requirement that the emissions requirements for
new plants are more stringent than for old ones, also because now
everyone and their dog can try to delay construction with environmental
complaints and such during the environmental impact statement period.
And unfortunately the only really available fuel we can use for power
genration on a large scale is coal.
> Power load centers are the cheapest practical solution, as these would
> spread the load over a longer time. But, as more people switched to
> these cars, the problem gets worse.
> The long-term solution would be to re0build the infradtructure.
> However, if you want to see an urban planner tremble with panic, just
> mention this need in a public meeting.
>
> Electric cars for uses other than short hop commuting, though, remains
> always "just a few years away."
>
That is OK, though. We have a long, long time before the price of oil
becomes impossible to use it for fuel. If the price of it doubles, then
electric cars will become cheaper than gasoline for city people, even
though gasoline still won't be too expensive to use for trucks and other
shipping, as well as long-haul family vacations and road trips.
After all consider the last time you took your boat up to the lake (or
equivalent)
It probably only cost about $30 in fuel. Now double that. While it
hurts a bit, it's still not impossible to keep using gasoline for
recreational
use, hauling sheetrock, etc. But merely doubling it would be enough
to get a lot of 2-car owner families in the city who own 2 gasoline cars to
switch
over to 1 gas burner, 1 electric, or to switch to 2 electrics, and 1 gas
burner, assuming of course that electric power plants with their
increased efficiencies of converting oil/coal into electricity are able to
hold the line or just slightly increase electric power costs.
Ultimately of course in the far future when the cost of oil really does
go up ten times over today's costs, your going to see a lot of both
short-hop and long-hop commuting switch over to electric rail
lines. This already is cost-effective and very popular in cities like
New York, and it is catching on as above-ground light rail in many
other cities. And also people forget that once oil is pumped out
of the world and the supply of it dimishes, the cost of aviation gas is
going to skyrocket. And nobody has figured out how to power
non-military airplanes from anything other than liquid fuel. Hence the
interest in high-speed bullet trains.
When the choices are going to be electric cars and electric rail or nothing,
people are going to take the electric cars and mass transit.
> How about hybrids?
> Now there's a solution that could actually seem to work, even for
> non-short-hop commuting.
> Except that those batteries don't do much on a long trip.
> Hybrids are great for urban driving, because the batteries can supply
> the power needed for accelleration, letting the car use a smaller
> engine, reducing the fuel needs.
> But for longer trips, accelleration isn't as great a factor, and the
> engine is pretty luch loafing at a reasonable cruising speed. The
> weight of the batteries in such a car actually *reduces* efficiency.
>
Your forgetting one thing and that is that it's possible to design a
_constant_velocity_ engine to be more efficient than a
variable speed engine. You can tune the ports and a lot of
other things. If the hybrid designs were a highly efficient engine
coupled to a generator that fed motors in the wheels, with a
battery for idling speeds, you might use even less fuel. The big
problem here is that accelleration is ****, which is why the hybrid
designers didn't go this way. Once again, though, if gasoline was
$25 a gallon, people would suffer not being able to make
jackrabbit starts off the light.
> Current technology doesn't really offer much in the way of a
> *workable* solution right now, or in the 10-year near future.
> While there are possibilities (fuel cells are looking good for 5-10+
> years out), none are workable for the immediate future.
>
> Whatever replaces the internal combustion, gas-fueled car, it will be
> much more expensive than we're currently using.
>
There's a tradeoff you missing here, and that is convenience.
The reason the personal automobile is so popular right now is
that the cost of running it is pretty low and it is enormously
convenient. As the oil runs out and
the cost of running it starts to rise, people will be stuck with
a choice between paying a lot of money for the convenience of
running a personal car and paying less money and being more
inconvenienced by using subway/light rail/walking/busses
Ultimately what is going to come out of this is a society where
if people want to keep their cars they are just not going to be
able to put 10,000 miles a year on them, or they are going to
have to give them up and waste more hours of their life sitting
around waiting for busses/rail/etc. My guess knowing the
population of the United States, that people are going to hold
on to their cars as long as possible, so your going to see a
lot more people selling homes and moving close by when they
take a new job, or they are going to be demanding their
employers supply telecommuting options for jobs (clerical
etc.) that can do it.
Ted
