How Electric Cars Will Cause the Next Oil Crisis

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-ev-oil-crisis/

by panarky • 10 years ago

82 30 10 years ago

readams• 10 years ago

There are few routes more prone to vast error than extrapolating exponential growth far into the future. It may well be the case that electric cars will prove a vastly important technology, but I can't help but laugh at the graph extrapolating into 2040, with actual data just one point on the graph all way to the left.

lazaroclapp• 10 years ago

I sure hope that their estimates are wrong. Only 35% of new cars being electric by 2040 sounds depressingly little...

melling• 10 years ago

Wait until you find out that the electricity will come from coal. We haven't solved the clean electricity problem either. Even at only 35%, they're going to need a lot to of electricity.

"There’s another side to this EV equation: Where will all this electricity come from? By 2040, electric cars will draw 1,900 terawatt-hours of electricity, according to BNEF. That’s equivalent to 10 percent of humanity’s electricity produced last year."

ps4fanboy2• 10 years ago

If the world really does move away from oil in wholesale, this will be good for the environment but terrible for the middle east. It will likely trigger the biggest mass migration that the world has ever seen.

afarrell• 10 years ago

How hard would it be to convert their economies to plastics manufacturing as Dutch disease wanes?

ps4fanboy2• 10 years ago

I do not know, what I do know is their economies at this time rely heavily on oil exports and importing everything else. Places like Dubai only function because of tax free status propped up by oil. It would take a lot of plastic, and we are talking about multiple countries as well in the same situation.

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/151022160934-cheap...

If oil prices dont recover in the next 1 - 2 years we will likely see massive policy changes in the oil producing countries, which are likely to be very unpopular.

proee• 10 years ago

Where's all the power going to come from to power these EVs? The grid won't be able to support the growth of EV's without some major investments.

This would require more coal and gas plants, which is not helping the environment any.

jmesserly• 10 years ago

This is addressed in the article:

The good news is electricity is getting cleaner. Since 2013, the world has been adding more electricity-generating capacity from wind and solar than from coal, natural gas, and oil combined.

with a link to: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-14/fossil-fue...

sandworm1012• 10 years ago

Electric cars /= no more burning oil.

It's hard to find numbers, but the oil burnt to move passenger cars is nowhere near the entirety of oil consumption, even if looking only at transportation. Cars are not trucks. An electric replacement of the diesel semi-trailer remains a long way off. Cars are also not ships (big consumers) aircraft or trains (smaller consumers). Getting to the point that we are no longer burning oil for purposes of transportation is far harder than everyone getting a tesla.

Has anyone seen a practical attempt at an electric long-haul truck, container ship, or other large diesel engine?

Retric• 10 years ago

Big ships are often electric, granted they don't run on battery's. However, big ships are really efficient, we use significantly more fuel on trucks than ships.

EX: 28 feet/gallon sounds bad but * that by 14,770 containers and that's the equivalent of an 18 wheeler truck getting 78MPG. (Actual 18 wheeler get ~5-7 MPG which is not bad considering the load.)

http://www.instructables.com/community/Fuel-economy-of-the-w...

sandworm1012• 10 years ago

True. There are a great many diesel-electric drives out there (mining trucks). I'm more concerned with the energy density. The batteries needed to power a container ship crossing an ocean would be monumental.

Ships are very very fuel efficient, by far the most efficient means of moving goods over distance. But they are also a large percentage of oil consumers (20% ?). So even though they are very efficient, they need to be addressed and their emissions somehow reduced.

Animats2• 10 years ago

Some newer military ships are turbo-electric, but most large freighters are powered by big, slow Diesels connected directly to the propeller. Some ships, especially passenger carriers, have electric "Azipods", which are steerable propeller modules. This provides good maneuverability when docking.

Even where the propulsion is electric, the power source is a combustion engine, except for the few nuclear ships.

ZeroGravitas2• 10 years ago

I'm always intrigued by how progress in many fields is measured by what people complain about.

Like, linux desktop complaints go from "no-one without a degree in CS can install or boot this" to "there's only 2000 games in the Steam catalogue that work on Linux", yet rarely do the people complaining realise that their complaints are actually wild praise from the perspective of yesterday.

Similarly, the acceptance that electric is both inevitable and better for commuter cars, taxis, delivery vehicles, motorbikes, scooters, buses, trains etc. can be stated as "planes, boats, long haul trucks still need liquid fuel".

Note the article at no point claims that electric cars equals no more burning oil. They suggest that it could lead to a softening of demand, roughly the same size as the overproduction that's got people so worked up recently.

sremani• 10 years ago

The autonomous angle is also the wild-card along with the vehicle ownership notions. If our norms of vehicle ownership change, we can actually end up with significantly more BEVs and PHEVs. Remember GM highlighted Lyft when they were show casing Bolt EV. The S curve is not that far off, even with cheap oil.

jakozaur• 10 years ago

Autonomous and shared vehicles works more in favor of electrical than combustion engine:

1. Autocharging is a trivial feature to implement. Charging times and range matter less.

2. In Uber/Lyft you don't chose car, but your provider does. Assuming electrical cars will have better economy there is less legacy/nostalgia barriers.

icebraining• 10 years ago

Auto-refueling has already been implemented, though: http://fuelmatics.com/

azernik2• 10 years ago

Additionally, as the proportion of time utilized goes up (as it usually does for shared vehicles like taxis and Uber/Lyft), the cost of fuel and maintenance becomes more important relative to the initial price of the car, making the economics even better for electrics.

mattedwards984• 10 years ago

Can't wait for electric cars to takeover the entire automobile market.

basicplus22• 10 years ago

the oil not used in petrol cars will be used to make electricity for the electric cars... so demand for oil will go up..

azernik2• 10 years ago

a) according to the IEA as cited by Wikipedia, oil only accounts for 5.5% of global electricity generation. The proportion is even smaller in most developed countries listed, where I would expect new car technologies to take off first.

b) even that electricity is generated more efficiently than energy in a car engine - power plants generally don't have to make compromises in order to reduce weight.

basicplus22• 10 years ago

a) part a) is before.. so irrelevant a) part b) is guess.. so no better than anything I have said

b) incorrect.. as burning a fuel to directly produce mechanical energy that is used as mechanical energy is more efficient than.. burning fuel to produce mechanical energy to drive a generator to make electricity, to store it, to retrieve it, and then drive an electrical motor, to produce mechanical energy to use.

albertoloddo• 10 years ago

Hopefully all the growth won't come from a few players like the combustion engine automotive industry. Just putting a battery on a car won't help the environment, we need to rethink mobility as a circular economy. We need to use existing facilities, we need to fight planned obsolescence with standard components and modular design to foster a distributed manufacturing ecosystem. More players, more competition, more innovation, lower prices, less pollution. http://www.investmentbank.barclays.com/our-insights/disrupti...

paulwitte253• 10 years ago

I am pro electric cars as I am to have a Tesla one day. Never liked cars until electric cars came around the block.

How Electric Cars Will Cause the Next Oil Crisis

Related Stories