Since 1990, the domestic transport sector has accounted for the largest share of total final energy consumption, more than 30%, in the 24 OECD countries.
Within the sector, road transport dominates energy consumption, at 90% in 2011, as shown in this chart above based on the IEA energy efficiency indicators database.
Further disaggregated data by segment and vehicle type indicate that consumption by passenger cars is a key driver (64%) for road transport, and thus for global energy consumption trends.
Each year, the International Energy Agency produces a report in which it considers trends in energy use and makes projections for the future. Usually, these reports simply take recent trends and project them forward, but this year’s is somewhat different: its author uses a mixture of current trends and the projected impact of countries’ pledges for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and subsidies for fossil fuels. This results in some eye-popping figures. Globally, we’re subsidizing fossil fuel use to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, at a rate of over five times the subsidies going to renewable energy. And our inaction on climate goals has tacked $1 trillion onto the cost of reaching them—in 2009 alone.
We’ll start with the subsidies. In 2009, the total subsidies were $312 billion, which may seem high until you hear the 2008 figure: $558 billion, boosted by countries’ responses to the high fossil fuel prices that year. Most of the subsidies went to help cut the costs of using oil and natural gas products; another substantial chunk went to electricity use.
TheIEA factsheet also forecasts a steep rises in the primary energy demand (increases by 36% between 2008 and 2035, or 1.2% per year on average) oil prices. The cost of getting on track to meet the climate goal for 2030 has risen by about $1 trillioncompared with the estimated cost in last year’s Outlook. This is because much stronger efforts,costing considerably more, will be needed after 2020. In the 450 Scenario in this year’s Outlook, theadditional spending on low‑carbon energy technologies (business investment and consumerspending) amounts to nearly $18 trillion (in year- 2009 dollars) more than in the Current PoliciesScenario, in which no new policies are assumed, in the period 2010‑2035. It is around $13.5 trillionmore than in the New Policies Scenario.
Note: Recommendations to remove the fuel subsidies will have huge implications for people living in developing and under-developed countries of the world. The consequences has life-altering impacts for many people living below the poverty line, even in booming economies like China and India. Many in these parts of the world earn so little that it won’t even make their ends meet and how would they pay for burning their kerosene stoves or ride their little 50cc mopeds to work. Why do I find this huge divide between the educated class (i.e., Armani wearing executives sitting in board rooms of IEA and sipping lattes in Davos chatting over prices of fuel in some distant future) and the poor working class (the one who toil in hard work on the factory floors and make a meager living that pays for one meal a day)? Governments in these developing economic countries have a huge problem dealing with the pressures of providing the basic necessities and if the subsidies were lifted, many would find it hard to survive. Unless the global community comes up with a quick, clean energy solution(s) that is affordable and accessible to all, I think many nations will not buy into these meaningless recommendations. Already many countries are struggling to find money to sustain their existing support programs for the poor and where would they go to find more money for wide-spread deployment of Clean & sustainable energy solutions such as Solar, electric, etc.
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the cartel of oil producers, celebrates its 50th anniversary on September 14th. The organisation was founded in 1960 with the explicit purpose of manipulating oil prices by controlling supplies. It has generally proved successful. Here are some interesting nuggets for you to chew while you dig deeper in your pockets to pay for that gallon of gasoline/diesel at your neighborhood gas station:
1. OPEC controls around 80% of the world’s proven reserves
2. Over 40% of the worlds production among its 12 member states.
2. Price of oil in the market these days is $75, which the Saudi’s rave as the “ideal price”.
It begs the question who says what’s the ideal price of oil? Speculative investors in the markets around the world are not helping the cause either. It makes you think why are we so hesitant to move away from the fossil fuels and into some other non-petro fuel to power our lives! This group of oil selling, Armani wearing, kingdom-ruling thugs are no different than the Drug cartels who organize and manipulate the market for a different kind of commodity.
An interesting post on Askmen.com goes into great details about the organization. One of the most shocking that I learned from this article is discussed in the next few paragraphs: “Cartels are illegal in many countries. In the U.S., for example, OPEC is in direct violation of antitrust laws, such as the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 — the same act that broke up Standard Oil, American Tobacco and Ma Bell. Antitrust laws don’t criminalize monopolies per se, only if the monopoly is used to eliminate its competition through methods of production or price-fixing.
Ordinarily, U.S. antitrust laws explicitly prohibit dealing with cartels. What makes OPEC so special? Simple: Congress grants OPEC diplomatic immunity from prosecution and in essence treats it as though it were a sovereign nation, even though this is not remotely the case. This status was tested in 1978, when the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), a non-profit labor organization in the U.S., filed suit against OPEC under the Sherman Act. In 1981, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the case, claiming OPEC was protected by its sovereign immunity status.
In 2007, a pair of controversial bills were introduced in Congress designed to amend antitrust laws to include OPEC. If the measures are approved in both houses and the president doesn’t veto it, individuals harmed by OPEC in the U.S. can begin to sue the organization. If this were to happen, few expect OPEC to continue doing business with the U.S.”
Now, would you agree with me that many of the Congressmen and women seem to be in bed with the OPEC?
The international airline industry is committed to achieving carbon-neutral growth by 2020, said Giovanni Bisignani, IATA’s Director General and CEO in his State of the Industry address at the 65th IATA Annual General Meeting and World Air Transport Summit in Kuala Lumpur.
Two years ago we set a vision to achieve carbon-neutral growth on the way to a carbon-free future. Today we have taken a major step forward by committing to a global cap on our emissions in 2020. After this date, aviation’s emissions will not grow even as demand increases. Airlines are the first global industry to make such a bold commitment.
—Giovanni Bisignani
The commitment to carbon-neutral growth completes a set of three sequential goals for air transport: (1) a 1.5% average annual improvement in fuel efficiency from 2009 to 2020; (2) carbon-neutral growth from 2020 and (3) a 50% absolute reduction in carbon emissions by 2050.
To achieve these goals, the air transport industry is focusing on a cross-industry four-pillar strategy on climate change consisting of improved technology; effective operations; efficient infrastructure; and positive economic measures.
In 2009 the carbon footprint of air transport is expected to shrink by 7%. Of this, 5% is due to the recession and 2% is directly related to efficiency gains.
Bisignani said a cross industry four-pillar strategy on climate change focused on improved technology, effective operations, efficient infrastructure and positive economic measures was delivering results noting that in 2009 the carbon footprint of air transport was expected to shrink by 7 per cent.
Bisignani attributed 5 per cent to the recession and 2 per cent to efficiency gains from IATA’s four-pillar strategy.
“No other industry is as united and no other industry can point to such good results and progress,” Bisignani claimed. He noted that the airlines’ commitment needed to be matched by governments. “We are ambitious, but our success will be contingent on governments acting effectively.”
“International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) must set binding carbon emissions standards on manufacturers for new aircraft. A legal and fiscal framework to support the availability of sustainable biofuels must be established.
“Governments must work with air navigation service providers to push forward major infrastructure projects such as a Single European Sky, NextGen in the US or fixing the Pearl River Delta in China,” Bisignani added.
Raising crops to produce electricity, which will in turn power cars, is more efficient, a new study says, than raising crops to create ethanol to use as fuel in cars.
According to a study by three California researchers, an acre planted with corn for ethanol will provide far fewer miles of transportation fuel as the same acre growing trees or switchgrass, which are then burned in power plants that provide the power to charge the batteries of electric cars.
In fact, even ethanol made from cellulose, a technology that does not now exist in commercial form, is not as efficient a use of biomass as burning it in a power plant would be, the researchers found.
In a paper published in the current issue of Science magazine, Chris Field, a professor of biology at Stanford and director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution, Elliott Campbell of the University of California, Merced, and David Lobell of Stanford’s Program on Food Security and the Environment, write that the size of the advantage would depend on many factors.
These include the number of miles per gallon any particular vehicle will go on ethanol, and what a battery weighs per kilowatt-hour of energy stored. As batteries get lighter, for example, it takes less energy to move them.
But the researchers estimated that a small battery-powered S.U.V. would go nearly 14,000 miles on the highway on the energy from an acre of switchgrass burned to make electricity, compared to about 9,000 miles on ethanol.
If one grows a tree or annual crop, for example, which pulls carbon dioxide out of the air, burns it in a power plant that captures and stores escaping CO2, and then replaces it with another crop, which pulls yet more carbon dioxide out of the air, the process becomes carbon negative.
The “miles per acre” question, and the amount of farmland diverted for use in producing transportation fuel is a sensitive political question, with American use of corn for ethanol blamed in part for last year’s run-up in global grain prices.
Forget about the hybrid auto — Shai Agassi says it’s electric cars or bust if we want to impact emissions. His company, Better Place, has a radical plan to take entire countries oil-free by 2020.
Just over a year ago, BusinessWeek ran a great piece aboutShai Agassi and his audacious plans to produce a mass market electric vehicle and thereby revolutionize the auto industry. So it was great to get an update from the former software entrepreneur turned zero emission transport guru on the main TED stage earlier today.
TransportGooru is a big fan of TED and of Mr. Agassi. For those who have not heard about Mr. Agassi, here is a brief bio of from the TED website.
Business Week’s report on Mr. Agassi’s TED presentation offers this: “Much of what Agassi had to say was familiar, but it was fascinating to hear how the Better Place project is scaling to places such as Australia and Hawaii (it started life in Israel, with the support of politician Shimon Peres.) The emergence of Car 2.0, as Agassi described it, entails an entirely new business model for car ownership, whereby drivers will pay for miles as they currently pay for minutes on a phone. And Agassi, who cut an imposing and definitive figure on stage, professed to be interested in only two figures: Zero, as in zero emissions; and infinity, as in this model should be available for every driver, worldwide.”
The quote from Wired Magainze nicely captures Mr. Agassi’s personality – Charismatic & convincing.
“Shai Agassi has only one car, no charging stations, and not a single customer—yet everyone who meets him already believes he can see the future.” – Wired
The fastest way to reduce America’s dependence on oil imports is to convert petroleum-driven miles to electric ones by retrofitting the SUVs and pick-ups now on the road with rechargeable batteries. Here’s how.
Every president since Richard Nixon has vowed to reduce the United States’ dependence on foreign oil. None has succeeded. Imports—and thus America’s vulnerability to disruptions—have increased to where now they supply two-thirds of consumption. As former Secretary of State George Schultz asked: “How many more times must we be hit on the head by a two-by-four before we do something decisive about this acute problem?”
Our aim should not be total independence from foreign sources of petroleum. That is neither practical nor necessary in a world of interdependent economies. Instead, the objective should be developing a sufficient degree of resilience against disruptions in imports. Think of resilience as the ability to absorb a significant disruption, bigger than what could be managed by drawing down the strategic oil reserve.
Our resilience can be strengthened by increasing diversity in the sources of our energy. Commercial, industrial, and home users of oil can already use other sources of energy. By contrast, transportation is totally dependent on petroleum. This is the root cause of our vulnerability.Our goal should be to increase the diversity of energy sources in transportation. The best alternative to oil? Electricity. The means? Convert petroleum-driven miles to electric ones.
Electric miles do not necessarily mean relying on all-electric cars, which would require building an extensive and expensive infrastructure. They can be achieved by so-called plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). (Since many plug-in cars are modified hybrid automobiles, they are sometimes called PHEVs.) PEVs have both a gasoline-fueled engine and an electric motor. They first rely on the electricity stored onboard in a battery. When the battery is depleted, the vehicle continues to run on petroleum. The battery then can be charged when the vehicle is not in service.
The engineering and organizational issues involved in retrofitting on a large scale are far from trivial. The biggest problem, however, is the availability of batteries. The most suitable battery technology, which offers both a sufficient range and enough power to provide the acceleration required by today’s drivers, is the lithium-ion battery system. Current battery-manufacturing capacity is limited, and nearly all of it is dedicated to supplying batteries for the nearly 200 million laptop computers and other handheld electronic devices built each year. Making the batteries required for one million vehicles would mean doubling current manufacturing output.
Click here to read the entire article (Register for Free to read and hear the entire discussion).
NOTE:
TransportGooru is proud to share Andy Grove’s keynote address on the critical importance; and business opportunity and viability; of moving transportation from oil to electricity.
Fears about energy security, and last year’s oil price spike, have sparked a serious push for renewable energy in the United States, the world’s largest oil consumer.
The trend is apparently making the world’s largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, nervous.
Speaking at a major energy conference earlier this month, Ali Al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, offered an impassioned defense of oil, which he called “an enabler of progress and prosperity.” He cautioned that the current economic crisis — and the uncertainties over future oil consumption — could force producers to trim their supplies, and hence could cause a new price shock.
Mr. Naimi also offered his strongest public criticism against the drive for alternative fuels — which he referred to as “supplemental” energy — and the inconsistent policies of consuming countries. Although he never once mentioned either the United States or President Obama by name, these were clearly his targets.
But as I listened to the speech carefully again this week, it also struck me as one of the most important discourses on the economics of petroleum made by a senior oil official in recent times.
A video of the session is available here — though it takes a while to get through other speakers. (The relevant parts start around the ninth minute and last about 20 minutes.)
Mr. Al-Naimi, without doubt the most influential spokesman for the petroleum industry, began his address by praising the virtues of oil, the mainstay of the Saudi economy for 60 years.
“Oil is expected to retain its leading position as the world’s largest single source of energy,” Mr Al-Naimi said.
An article on AutoBlogGreen says: “Court disaster.” “Catastrophic.” “In their infancy.” These are logical statements for someone who represents the Saudi oil industry, but it sure sounds like someone is working hard to dial down expectations for anything that threatens the dominance of oil.
Thanks to AutoBlogGreen for pointing to a video on OPEC’s website featuring Mr. Naimi’s speech (starting at minute 9 in the video).
One of the great criticisms of electric vehicles is the power they rely on often comes from fossil fuels, leading critics to question how “green” they are. A British firm has a solution for that — a carport topped with photovoltaic cells that can charge an EV.
Specialty glass and plastic manufacturer Romag says the PowerPark is just the thing for parking lots where electric vehicles may one day compete for spots to plug in. The first PowerPark was installed at the company’s headquarters, and Romag says additional installations are planned around the United Kingdom.
So far, the cost of installation and materials varies based on volume and location, but Webster said that the canopies could be purchased singly or in groups. Pricing “should be competitive with other forms of BIPV.” That’s Building Integrated Photovoltaics, for those of you who are really off the grid.
Each PowerPark canopy is rated at 1.5 kilowatt peak, a measure of a photovoltaic system’s peak output. Even in misty, foggy Northern England, the company estimates each parking space could generate about 1,100 kilowatt hours of electricity annually. The canopies are linked to the electric grid so energy “can be generated for use in the associated buildings when cars are not being charged,” Webster said. “No electricity is wasted.”
It’s got a distinctive shape that advertises itself and just might end up the most attractive piece of engineering in a Walmart parking lot. It could even help to drive sales, as customers might linger a little longer in the store waiting for their Tesla to charge.
