By Amory B. Lovins
Chief Executive Officer, Rocky Mountain Institute
Transportation drives global oil trade and is a key environmental challenge, especially in cities. Most cities are designed around cars, not people -- changing cars from a convenient accessory of life into its central organizing principle, according to environmental author Alan Thein Durning. It need not be so. Moreover, new car technologies already exist, and others are under development, with potential to transform the paradigms of global development and energy security. These technologies, if pursued, will be good for business throughout the world, provide safe and affordable mobility, be environmentally friendly, and create competitive advantage. They are not the stuff of science fiction, but realities we can expect to see emerge even within this decade.
The world cannot go on turning nearly five trillion liters of oil per year, half of it for transport, into the roughly 42 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions reported by the U.S. Department of Energy in its 2005 World Energy Outlook. Oil™s direct and hidden costs -- climate change, insecurity, geopolitical rivalry, price volatility, and degradation of economic and social development -- make it unsupportable.
The most fundamental solutions are the simplest. More sensible land use strengthens neighborhoods and lets people be already where they want to be. Smart policies let all means of getting around”from walking and biking to ultralight trains and advanced buses -- compete fairly at honest prices. From Singapore to Curitiba, Brazil, cities that treat cars without favoritism have no car problem, yet they achieve excellent mobility for all. In time, so could even the car-centric United States and other industrialized countries if they stopped incentivizing sprawl and cars through their tax systems and zoning laws.
Lighter weight formerly meant costly metals such as aluminum and magnesium. Now, ultralight steels can double a car™s efficiency without extra cost or decreased safety. With clever design, even conventional steels can yield surprising results. A German startup firm™s 2+2-seat 450- to 470-kilogram diesel roadster (
www.loremo.com) combines 160- to 220-kilometer-per-hour (100- to 137-mile-per-hour) top speeds with a fuel economy from 1.5 to 2.7 liters per 100 kilometers (87 to 157 miles per U.S. gallon), and will sell in 2009 for 11,000 euros to 15,000 euros.
Advanced polymer composites are even stronger and lighter. They can halve a car™s weight and fuel use, yet increase safety, because carbon-fiber composites can absorb up to 12 times as much crash energy per kilogram as steel.
Alternative Automotive Fuels Many cars already on the road can burn advanced biofuels -- say, 15 percent gasoline and 85 percent ethanol, ideally cellulosic ethanol made with new processes from woody plants such as switchgrass or crop wastes. An ultralight hybrid car burning such E85 fuel could cut its oil use by another three-fourths, to just 7 percent of the current level. Brazil has already eliminated its oil imports, two-fifths via sugar-cane ethanol that now competes without subsidy. Three-fourths of Brazil™s new cars can burn anything from pure ethanol to pure gasoline, although all of its gasoline is at least 20 percent ethanol. Sweden plans to be oil-independent by 2020, chiefly via ethanol made from forest wastes, and its top-selling 60 percent of filling stations must offer renewable fuel by 2009.
In the longer run, one can make a robust business case for tripled-efficiency, ultralight-hybrid cars to use compressed hydrogen gas as fuel and turn it into electricity in a fuel cell. A heavy, inefficient car would need an excessively bulky tank and a big, costly fuel cell. But an ultralight, aerodynamic car would need two-thirds less propulsive energy and smaller tanks. And just 3 percent as much cumulative production volume would be needed to make the three-fold smaller fuel cell cost effective -- thus it could become cost effective many, many years earlier. Such cars when parked (which is 96 percent of the time) could even become profitable power plants on wheels, selling electricity back to the grid when and where it™s most valuable. In a parking structure, there would be a pipe to get hydrogen into the car and wires to get electricity out. At times of peak power demand, you could turn the fuel cell on and the car could run as a power plant, crediting the owner™s account
