It is important to realize that in the US, 70% of the oil consumed is used in transportation so setting new automobile fuel economy standards could make a substantial cut in our oil dependence. While I agree with the previous poster on nuclear energy, it only marginally connected with oil. Nuclear power should be seen more as an alternative to coal which is used almost completely in electricity generation.

A few years ago I was a post-doc in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is very near Detroit. About once a month or so I would have dinner with a family friend, who often visited Detroit as a consultant to the “big three” auto makers. This person is a materials scientist. He would offer the auto makers his opinion on issues like the best material to use in the crumple zone in the front of the car, or which substance offered acceptable dent resistance without increasing the weight of the car too much.

We often talked about the issue of fuel eficiency standards, and what the real obstacles were. In his opinion, as a scientist who worked closely with the manufacturers on several aspects of design and production, there are no technological obstacles that would prevent the major US auto makers from increasing effiency by up to 4 mpg in the next year. That may not sound like much, but it would add up to significantly more than we would obtain from drilling in, say, ANWR.

The problem with implementing increased fuel efficiency in the short term has to do not with the technology, but with the production facilities. For the most part, the U.S. auto makers finished paying for them many years ago. This represents a huge investment, and they are unwilling to make a significant investment in more modern facilities until the old ones have to be abandoned.

A good deal of the design process, I was told, has to take into account the capabilities of these facilities, which are not equipped to really implement the existing technology that could bump up fuel efficiency. Now, that is not to say that all manufacturers rely on outdated facilities; everyone has seen ads where they talk about opening a new factory in some small town that could really use the jobs. But for the most part, he seemed to think that it was an unwillingness on the part of these companies to invest in any significant new production infrastructure that was keeping fuel efficiency so low.

This is not a problem that you encounter with, say, Japanese or Korean auto makers. Their companies operate with long term strategies in mind. They are more than willing to invest in new production facilities that will allow them to take advantage of new technology if it will improve their product. Sure, it might be expensive for them over the next few years, but their improved product will eventually address that. And if, three or four years from now, they come up with some fantastic new composite material that allows them to drop 200 pounds off of the weight of their car while maintaining safety standards, they are positioned to take advantage of that.

So, Bush could demand higher fuel efficiency. American auto manufacturers could provide it. It wouldn’t even take very long. If Bush was serious about it he could offer the companies a tax break designed to offset the cost of investing in production facilities capable of implementing the necessary technologies.

Does anyone know the breakdown of the “transportation” oil consumption?
What percentage of that 70% goes to trucking and airline industries vs.
individual passenger vehicles (cars, SUVs, etc.)?

I believe that Dubya has hung an absentee notice on the door of the oval office. But I can’t decide if it is Bushco’s plan for an an Iran invasion or if it is his Domestic Energy policy; it reads “Goin’ fission”

I’m not sure it is about infrastructure. If you look at the amount of work needed to retool a specific factory for a significant model change, I would think that would be a non-issue. One of the big three plants near me shut down for at least three weeks this summer for a retooling on the types of seats that would go in the vehicle.

Well, let me preface by re-emphasizing that I am basing much of what I say on the time-honored blog comment tradition of paraphrasing the opinion of a well informed friend. I also agree that the big three all have some newer facilities which probably are a lot more agile when it comes to accomodating new technology. But, as I had it presented to me by someone with a bit of inside info, who actively consults for these companies, one of the major impediments is an unwillingness to give up on enough of the infrastructure that is already paid for, so that they can build the new facilities that would allow them to deploy existing technology on a wide scale.

I also think there is probably a big difference between converting a production facility to use a different material for a seat, and converting a facility to build bodies and frames from a new class of materials.

Something that I didn’t mention is that there may be reasons for this that go beyond stodginess. Given the situation many of these companies are in with regards to pensions and retired employees, I don’t know if they have the kind of capital they would need for big infrastructure overhauls. I honestly don’t know how or if these things are related, I’m just trying to acknowledge the fact that these don’t seem like especially healthy times for these companies.

Anyway, my overall point was this: it’s not as if our fuel efficiency standards are low because the necessary technology doesn’t exist, or because some other country has a secret technique that we don’t have access to. It’s primarily because the parties involved aren’t willing to do what it takes. Without the proper facilities the car companies can’t build cars that get more mpg. Maybe it’s as simple as them making decisions based on minimizing cost in the short run, or maybe there is some complex set of relationships between the manufacturers, employees, and suppliers that keeps it from happening. I don’t know enough about how it all works to answer that. But it seems clear that, if it were really a priority, Washington and Detroit could make it happen.

Maybe I’m wrong and they have the capacity. That seems even more disheartening than the present situation.

What is happening to the ethanol solution? What does it say about the US if Brazil can make it work and we can’t?

Principally, that they use a lot less energy than we do. Brazil is a major petroleum producer, which is the main reason they’re (currently) energy independent. Ethanol accounts for about 17% of their motor vehicle energy usage.

With a population of about 190M, Brazil used about 660M barrels of oil last year. The US has a population of about 300M, and used about 7.5B barrels of oil. So while the US uses about 25 barrels of oil per person per year, Brazil only uses about 3.6. If we really want energy independence in the US, this, not the ethanol production, is the way we need to emulate Brazil.

Brazil, a tropical country, has much more land suitable for growing sugarcane than the US does. Currently, the US uses about 360,000,000 gallons of gasoline each day, and an additional 160,000,000 gallons of diesel fuel. Exercise for the reader: for each potential crop, how much land would be needed to grow crops to replace this with Ethanol?

Ethanol also offers an exercise in thermodynamics. First, the corn is fermented to produce a beer-like mixture of roughly 10% ethanol and the balance water. This has to be distilled to produce 96% ethanol and 4% water, and this distillation takes a whole lot of energy. You might remember the uproar a few months back when a new midwestern ethanol plant decided to use a coal-fired distillery instead of natural gas. Another exercise for the reader: what fraction of the total energy in the end-product ethanol is the energy required for distillation?

Of course, 96%/4% water ethanol is not good enough for transportation fuel. (E85 means 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline). Remember, the reason that ethanol can’t be sent via pipeline is because it’s too hygroscopic and would take on too much water. So the remaining water must be filtered out, and that has an energy cost as well.

What about vegetable oil? A diesel engine runs on sunflower or rapeseed oil almost just as well, and if you run the extraction plants on this fuel you might become completely carbon neutral. Incidentally, some people in Wales (in the UK) use sunflower oil in their cars, because a litre of sunflower oil costs less than a litre of diesel.

In the 70′s ‘energy crisis’, most of the gains came from conservation.

Bring back the double nickles. Driving at 55 MPH saves 10% to 20%.

Instantly.

I know a professional truck driver who claims the use of vegetable oils invalidates the warranty on his truck.
Bob.

The issues are huge, and getting more so by the day. The longer we “postpone” actually doing something about it as a nation, society, citizenry, the more costly and detrimental it becomes. Most of the remaining petroleum reserves (including the “wow, look what we just found” Chevron off-shore gulf fields) are comprised of heavy to super-heavy crude stock. These cost considerably more in energy, and oil, to refine, while producing more toxic residues, etc. The need for fuel to produce and transport food also becomes highly counterproductive for our economy and for our lives. Natural gas, a majority of which is converted to fertilizers, has risen dramatically, exponentially in price in the last three years. Coal, though plentiful, is also of more inferior quality and thus requires more and more investment in protecting air and water quality to extract and convert to energy.

It is becoming quite clear that a crisis of some magnitude will develop forcing change upon us whether we like it or not. Those, who follow some of the suggestions above, will suffer less than those who are content for the time being in living in costly convenience. This lack of action will lead to a US that looks much like Eastern Europe and China in the next thirty to forty years; massive clouds of hazardous pollution (from coal burning), national sacrifice zones for the depositing of nuclear and other toxic energy by-products, vastly expensive food and other essentially necessary commodities, and so forth. Science isn’t going to be able to come up with sufficient and timely technologies to offset these processes. We need to act, and act now, in our own best interests if we care at all about the future. And, though it need not be said, nothing above even begins to talk about reacting to global climate change.

Damn, it sure would be nice to be super wealthy rich, so i could build my own little bio-dome, nuclear-powered, private yacht, and protect it with private security forces well fed and stocked with the best equipment. Then i could have my Alfred E Newman moment.

Better to raise the tax on gasoline than to raise fuel economy standards. Raise the price of gasoline and then let the market decide which sector of the economy that can cut its consumption of oil the cheapest.

Fuel economy standards will raise the cost for consumers just like a tax so you might as well have a tax.