Lets Talk Alternatives

When we think about what we use oil for we need a little context. You can see from this image that we dont use oil for electricity generation in the US - at least not in any meaningful amount.

Since its not being used to generate electricity most of the 20 million barrels per day habit in the US goes towards transportation. Gasoline, Diesel and Jet fuel specifically. Heating oil is another important use for oil. Heating oil, similar to Kerosene (a middle distillate) is most commonly used in the North East of the United States, but is falling out of favor as a heating energy source.

To break the oil habit we need to use "alternatives".

When we select alternatives we need to understand that there are 3 principle sources of energy in the world.

1) Fossil fuels. Conventional wisdom holds that oil, coal, gas peat etc... are comprised of decomposed organic matter. The decomposition process takes an extremly long time (thousands or millions of years), and also requires precisley the right conditions, the right rocks, the right porosity, permeability, temperature, surrounding rocks etc... For the purposes of this discussion, its non-renewable. Once you use it - its gone.

2) Sunlight. Not just solar power. Sunlight powers the atmosphere, so Hydroelectric, wind and solar. Sunlight powers photosynthesis so even biofuels fall into this category. It could be argued that the energy in fossil fuels came from the sun originally but that since the process is so slow it gets its own category.

3) Geothermal and Nuclear. energy from "within" the earth. Both of these forms are limited to various degrees. Some parts of the world are able to exploit Georthermal energy easily. Iceland is a country that enjoys such a relationship. Nuclear energy is derived from large volumes of Uranium that must be enriched and concentrated. Once the fuel is spent it must be disposed of.

If we choose to switch from oil to some other energy source for transportation we need to consider what that alternatives long term availability looks like.

At the moment half of our electricity comes from coal, so if we switch to transportation powered by the electricity grid instead of oil, we're going to be putting that load on Coal, and Nuclear - at least at first.

How much load? Well we use 20 million barrels a day mostly for trasnportation. Assume we switch away 10 million of those to the grid. 1 ton of coal = approx 12 barrels of oil. A switch like that means burning 800,000 extra tons of coal. Thats about 1/3rd of our current coal consumption level (which supplies half our needs for electrcity) So if we switch to "green" electric vehicles on a massive scale the grid will need some massive upgrades.

Cars that use hydrogen, batteries or compressed air, they all get their energy from the grid. Even if they are more efficient than oil burning engines you can see we will need to add a great deal of generating and transmission capacity.

Its possible also to imagine that what is happening now with oil could happen next with coal.