8 ms·

How big oil will die

131 points by triplesec 9y ago

umanwizard 9y ago
First of all, over a quarter of oil is used for things other than transport; second, it's gonna take quite a bit longer than this article predicts for oil used in transport to ramp down.
- glibgil 9y ago
  > over a quarter of oil is used for things other than transport But doesn't transport have the biggest need for power density? Once renewable power density is solved for transport, I would expect the same applications will quickly be applied to the other places oil is used
  - sigstoat 9y ago
    it is used as a precursor in chemical synthesis, plastics and a variety of other products. you're not going to replace that with solar.
    - diafygi 9y ago
      Sure you will, but maybe later. Super cheap energy makes bio-plastics competitive. Massive solar farms passively making carbon chains when the sun is up. The reason no one is talking about it is that the transportation transition is lower hanging fruit.
      - Gibbon1 9y ago
        There is an interesting line of research into catalysts that use electricity to create stuff like methanol, acetic acid, etc from CO2 and water. Often when you see people comment on this they automatically assume synthetic methanol --> green washed automotive fuel --> yay and I can keep my F150 pickup. But more seriously, pure low weight hydrocarbons --> chemical feed stocks.
  - pilom 9y ago
    Plastic production requires oil and improving power density of batteries doesn't help that. Heating houses to a US standard requires astronomical amounts of energy that will be provided by fossil fuels because they are cheap per BTU. Sure we could design better houses and use more efficient heating technologies like heat pumps, but those are being adopted a couple orders of magnitude slower than electric cars are.
- monodeldiablo 9y ago
  The author isn't saying that all uses for oil would be eliminated. It doesn't need to be. It will take far less impact to ruin the oil industry. They've made huge investments in production -- with 25+ year timelines -- that they'd be unable to make payments on if their incomes fall a mere 20%. And if the market for refined oil shrinks by even 10%, the glut of excess supply will drive prices down enough to put a number of companies deep in the red. Oil is currently profitable because of its huge scale, high demand, and generous government subsidies. Upsetting any of those variables threatens the industry's already thin margins.
saagarjha 9y ago
I can see this playing out, but not as quickly as the author suggests. Cameras and cellphones last a couple years at the most, and are much easier to replace, than a car is. Sure, everyone wants a self driving car, but not everyone can switch just like that.
- model_s 9y ago
  Indeed. There are over one billion cars in the current fleet.
- function_seven 9y ago
  The argument that counters this is that hailed rides will be cheaper than driving what you already have. You don't need to make a new purchase to switch. Even if you have a recent model sitting in the driveway, you may choose to save money by hailing a car rather than driving your own. I don't know if it'll play out like that, but the article is pretty convincing.
  - throwaway91111 9y ago
    Hailed riding only works locally, and there's already public transit cheaper than ride hailing; if you leave your metro area at all i'd bet this assumption that ride hailing is cheaper quickly falls off. Hell, many US cities don't even have uber yet.
    - function_seven 9y ago
      Where public transport exists, sure. But that's only in metro areas, and even then it's on a timetable that's less convenient than hailing a car. It also requires a bicycle or a long walk to travel from origin to departure, and from arrival to destination. Everybody will still own their car, and use it just for long-haul trips. Daily commuting to work could be cheaper in a hailed (electric) car than driving your own (gas) car.
  - leereeves 9y ago
    Why would a car owned by someone else be cheaper than the same car owned by you? The obvious answer - dividing the cost of the car over more miles - doesn't seem right to me. Driving more miles doesn't generally increase the useful mileage lifespan of cars, it just wears them out more quickly.
jswizzy 9y ago
You think in 2025 we will be talking about children mining by hand in the Congo in horrible conditions to provide all those lithium batteries for that future? There is a price for everything.
- diafygi 9y ago
  Fun fact. Afghanistan has huge lithium resources. https://nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html https://nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Analemma_ 9y ago
    Oh, well never mind then: Afghanistan has much better labor protections than the Congo /s
    - princeb 9y ago
      it will when afghanistan becomes the USA's 51st state. (or maybe 52nd after NK)
  - andrewtbham 9y ago
    I assume he is referring to cobalt, not lithium. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/congo-cobalt-mining-for-lithium-ion-battery/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...
partycoder 9y ago
Not many people know the relationship between oil and the US dollar. The golden age of the US dollar was the Bretton Woods system, where every currency was backed in dollars and dollars were backed in gold. There was however no obligation for the Federal Reserve to accept audits of any kind to validate there was enough gold. Therefore the US could print money at will (and it did), until countries such as France started demanding the conversion of their dollars to gold. To avoid the equivalent of a bank run at the Federal Reserve level, Nixon moved away from the gold standard and since then the US dollar has been allowed to float. A less known fact, is how the US dollar has preserved its value in this current setup. The answer is: by having an exclusive deal with oil producers where oil is sold exclusively in US dollars. Since everyone needs oil, if you need dollars to buy oil, the dollar gains a relative value. Having said this, it is important to understand that as energy consumers move away from oil, the US will need to find another way to sustain its currency or it will inevitably crash, along with everything valued in dollars, such as savings, wages, etc.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  >the US will need to find another way to sustain its currency The threat of the US economy collapsing is plenty enough reason to strike new deals to sustain its currency.
  - partycoder 9y ago
    Since economies are deeply interconnected it is clear that it is in nobody's interest to allow the US economy to collapse. The problem of bimetallism (silver/gold) or just gold, is that they are scarce and not suitable to produce enough circulating currency for everyone, so a replacement seemed fair. But fossil fuels are an environmental liability. Maybe the future is in some crypto-like thing.
- leereeves 9y ago
  > by having an exclusive deal with oil producers where oil is sold exclusively in US dollars. I think you're overstating the role of oil here. Other currencies without that exclusive deal, and backed by less economic and military power, have also preserved their value.
diafygi 9y ago
Good. Bloomberg estimates the transition will be a $10 trillion upside for those upgrading and replacing fossils[1]. It remains to be seen who the winners will be. Incumbents (Excelon, Shell, SA, etc.) have market share, but will have to strand trillions of assets and reserves. Newcomers (Tesla, etc.) have to survive the energy boom-bust cycle that early fossil went through. My money is on the newcomers (my startup is one). The incumbents' shareholders simply won't let them strand assets short term to transition to new energy business models. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-16/investing-trillions-in-electricity-s-sunny-future https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-16/investing...
- forgotmysn 9y ago
  can you link to or provide a little more info on the "boom-bust cycle that early fossil went through"?
  - nsp 9y ago
    This is probably more than you want to read, but The Prize by Daniel Yergin is a stellar history of the oil industry from 1800s-1990s https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123 https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/14391...
    - forgotmysn 9y ago
      Oh perfect, thank you. I've read Sinclair's Oil, but that's about it.
  - diafygi 9y ago
    Here's a recent example with the shale boom-bust: http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2015/11/04/boom-to-bust-5-stages-of-the-oil-industry/ http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2015/11/04/boom-to-bust-5... This is extremely typical in the history of energy (wood, coal, oil, solar, nuclear, wind, and on and on) because of the speed at which things move. First, you come up with a new innovation, pump capital into building tons of it (the boom). Then, someone else comes up with an innovation, which busts you. It's fundamentally impossible to defend an advantage/monopoly long term in energy (except with governments, e.g. utilities). Coincidentally, this is why we don't see much VC participation in energy, and when they do participate, they usually lose their shirt. The competitive fundamentals of energy aren't compatible with monopoly seeking.
nnfy 9y ago
OP does not understand that he is far more enthusiastic about his Prius than the rest of the world. Too much of this article is based on unsubstantiated, overly optimistic predictions, and the reasoning is regularly fallacious. Two examples: 1. OP lists expensive repairs for combustion vehicles, then suggests that because said parts do not exist in EVs, that EVs are cheaper to maintain. This is nonsense, first of all most of the parts listed almost never require repairs (how often do you spend >$1000 to replace a catalytic converter?) and secondly, it is (deliberately?) misleading to ignore that EVs have specialized parts of their own to repair. The fact that there are fewer parts is not enough data to suggest that an EV is cheaper automatically to maintain, or more reliable. Further, there is a risk that some people will spend more money on EV repair because they may require specialized equipment to maintain. 2. His "current estimates" sources are based on extrapolation of current tesla battery performance, which is an uncertain predictor of future performance given how little time the tested batteries have spent in use. 3. When OP leaps to self driving cars as another reason for the emergence of EVs, he also conveniently misses that there is utility and sentimental value in owning your own car. tl;dr: Will EVs eventually supersede ICVs? Sure. But putting out an article which says with certainty, and a straight face, that no one will want oil in 8 years is just unnecessarily smug.
- pm24601 9y ago
  1. Electric motors are cheaper to maintain. Railroads worldwide know this. ( random article: http://www.american-rails.com/support-files/locomotive_operating_costs_comparison.pdf http://www.american-rails.com/support-files/locomotive_opera... ) 2. Not correct - OP is pointing to current Priuses that have exceptionally long lived batteries "Current estimates for the lifetime today’s electric vehicles are over 500,000 miles." and "But today there are anecdotal stories of Prius’s logging over 600,000 miles on a single battery." 3a. Maybe there is sentimental value to a Mustang... but that crappy car with headliner coming down? .. no.. 3b. Utility as in always available, possibly. However consider just the case of a family going from 2-3 cars to a single car. (Which is what my family has done) That alone could halve the number of cars purchased. Not smug -- futurist is predicting future.
  - nnfy 9y ago
oisino 9y ago
Talking to people behind self driving car companies the issue is not the self driving technology or laws it's more infrastructure around extremely low latency internet to make self driving cars work in the general wild. This article assumes mass adoption really quickly but who knows how quickly our general infrastructure will be updated to enable this especially in third world countries that are ramping up in traditional cars consumption but are notorious for bad mass scale infrastructure (Brazil/ India).
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  Why would the internet be involved in anything a self-driving car computes with a sub-five-second deadline?
stablemap 9y ago
Discussion from a month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715405
- Aloha 9y ago
  I was seeming to recall I saw this come up before.
- dang 9y ago
  Nice catch!
- diafygi 9y ago
  Seems this was post was buried. Was the repost the reason? Or the flaming? Energy discussion not interesting to YC?
- undersuit 9y ago
  Well now this article is marked as a dupe and has been removed from the front page. :(
Animats 9y ago
That's from May 2017. It costs less to make an IC engine than to make an electric drivetrain. Replacement cost for a Tesla drivetrain is about $6000 - $15000. Replacement for an volume-product automotive engine is about $2,250 to $4,000. Detroit put a lot of effort over the years into making engine manufacture cheap.
- mhmiles 9y ago
  Pretty sure you’re not finding a new engine for a BMW 5 series for $4000 and that’s a cheaper car than Tesla S/X
- sndean 9y ago
  Interestingly, replacing the Nissan Leaf's worn out battery will cost ~$6000. Looking up the price of a Nissan Leaf I could buy from the closest car max: it'd cost ~$8000. I wonder if vehicle manufacture (not necessarily battery) is going to be cheap enough to simply throw out your car whenever the battery dies?
chrissnell 9y ago
This article makes a number of flawed assumptions: - It neglects the environmental impact of battery production. - Diesel motors can be significantly less expensive to maintain and operate, even more so as the reliability of emissions-reducing technology is improved. - Battery charging is nowhere near as fast or convenient as a gas station. - Electricity must come from somewhere. Few places have steady wind and none have 24-hour solar energy. The world will switch to electric vehicles when they offer sufficient cost-savings, convenience, and appeal. Until we solve all of those things (and not with massive government subsidies), they will continue to play second-fiddle to gas- and diesel-powered vehicles.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  1. Battery production, like any production, has an environmental impact - but the motivation for battery-electric vehicles is to eliminate local environmental impact (e.g. urban centres). If all of the pollution happens at a single source then it's easier to contain, reduce, and eventually eliminate. 2. Diesel fuels are still very dirty - and the reliability of petrol engines is not a big-enough problem to justify switching to diesel engines - and ICE cars have far more moving parts compared to BEVs than just the engine. 3. Tesla did look into fast battery-swap stations that can swap a battery in less time than it takes to fill a gas tank - they stopped further development due to a lack of consumer interest: users are perfectly happy to charge at home overnight, when the car's aren't being driven anyway, and when electricity is often cheaper at night. As more use-cases switch to electric there will be an impetus to adopt battery-swapping, but it remains an option. 4. 24-hour solar is possible with energy-storage, which is what Tesla is looking into, but again, the point of BEVs is to first eliminate local pollution, then make it easier to eliminate energy source pollution thanks to the fungibility of electricity and centralisation of pollution sources.
  - sverige 9y ago
    You skipped the part about massive government subsidies.
    - deleted 9y ago
pilom 9y ago
Every time I see someone make the argument that "all cars will be electric by 20XX" I feel like they are incredibly sheltered from rural life. The US is HUGE! Sure the majority of commuting could be replaced by electric cars but I've seen no evidence of them being able to replace ICEs for the "I want to go skiing/kayaking/hiking (pick an activity where your car sits on the side of the road all day) 2 hours away and return on the same day" situation. There are so many changes to infrastructure that need to be made to get there. Sure ski resorts and malls and park and rides might put in 1000s of chargers in their parking lots eventually, but it certainly won't happen by 2023 or whatever this article predicts. Sure the cars might exist, but the charging infrastructure won't by then.
- thebooktocome 9y ago
  I've seen no evidence for ICEs replacing the horse's role in fox hunting, rodeos, and polo.... Which is to say, ICEs will never go away. But at some point you'll have to be rich enough to own and supply your own gas station to operate one.
- jaggederest 9y ago
  Two hours of driving is half a Tesla's capacity, so that scenario is already solved. It's not going to get any less solved over time. People will own cars individually for the same reason that people own horses now - they enable a specific kind of activity, or a native appreciation for the object in itself. Certainly motorsport is not going to die any time soon. What percentage of automobiles are used for touring and racing? I'd guess it's around 3% looking at my state's DMV figures, but form your own opinions I suppose. (A good proxy: Motorcycles are owned largely by the kind of people I'd expect would continue to own cars - 140k out of 4.2 million registrations in my state) There's about 1 non-passenger-vehicle for every 4 people. I'd guess we see vehicle ownership and registration by private citizens drop to about that number - so 50% reduction total.
  - pilom 9y ago
    A Tesla model 3 has a listed range of 220 miles and it declines in winter and with hills. Therefore I doubt one could actually go from downtown Denver to Vail (~95 miles) for a day of skiing and back in a day without charging at the resort. It certainly couldn't make it from Denver to Salida, CO (~140 miles) for a day of white water rafting without charging during the day. Sure businesses could install chargers in their parking lots but we have a LONG way to go for that and that doesn't help someone going to climb the tallest mountain in Colorado (115 miles) who will park at the trailhead. There are some answers here but personal vehicle ownership isn't going away for large portions of America any time soon.
chao- 9y ago
I want fewer fossil fuels as much as the next guy, and while the core argument about ICEs is beyond my expertise, the data the author presents seems to support it so that's pretty neat. However, I take issue with the article's casual conflating of oil with all fossil fuels, and fossil fuels used for transportation with all uses of fossil fuels. It signals a lack of awareness when the author writes things such as: >The pipeline was built at a cost of about $7 billion ... Keystone XL will go down as the world’s last great fossil fuels infrastructure project. Without even straining my memory, I recall that Cheniere Energy's Sabine Pass Terminal opened in the last year. It cost about as much to build as the $7 billion quoted here, and they are planning another now at a higher projected cost [0]. Overall I agree with the author's proposed trajectory and order of events involving self-driving cars, fewer used car sales, and so on, but differ on the time scale. I figure things will progress at one-half to three-quarters that speed, at fastest. I don't think the "simple" argument of "people will select the cheaper option" is as simple when it comes to automobiles. A combination of inertia, identity and utility are going to make it slow going. Not only am I "not a car guy", I actively dislike the task of driving. So it took a long time for me to really get why people identify with their vehicles, but now that I do, I can see how limited my eco-progressive perspective of "Everyone would prefer to live a car free life just like me!" was. I still arrogantly think everyone else will come around, but it's going to take longer than the author, or younger me, thought it would. Definitely the generation born after the self-driving car is widespread will be the ones to complete the job. I don't think that timeline plays as cleanly into the oil (or fossil fuel) narrative that this article sets up, though. [0] http://wgno.com/2016/12/21/8-5-billion-natural-gas-plant-and-terminal-planned-for-plaquemines-parish/ http://wgno.com/2016/12/21/8-5-billion-natural-gas-plant-and...
- bmelton 9y ago
  And of course there's people like myself -- I love cars, but I actively hate commuting. Not because I mind the driving, or the traffic, but because it's time I'm getting nothing done. If I lived in or near a bigger city, some of that would be offset by mass transit, but even mass transit comes with a lot of wasted time -- walking to the platform, waiting for the train, driving/walking to the station, what have you. But a self-driving car, or a car I can call on-demand solves all of that. I can walk out of my house, get into a car, and read, catch up on email, or get work done during my commute. I'll probably still have a car for leisure. I currently have a Jeep that I use for wilderness / beach / outdoor trips, and I can't see that changing any time soon even though I have a gas-electric hybrid for commuting, but if my daily transit needs can be met by a self-driving, plug-in electric, it's a massive ecological benefit while actively increasing my daily productivity and quality of life. I agree with you that the 100% coverage the author imagines is a LONG, long way off, and I imagine that even of people who feel more like you do, the idea that they're going to start replacing perfectly good cars with expensive replacements is unlikely outside of the top 10-20% of earners, but if enough people like me switch over a significant portion of our driving patterns to those described in the article, it'll be a huge win.
alliao 9y ago
And this is how car manufacturers going to make up the revenue loss of the new much more reliable electric drive train. AI + Autonomous driving. Both of these requires sensors, and silicon. Both hates abuse from vibration and heat/cold cycle, in short, they will fail. So instead of paying for things that would break in the old car, why not pay for things that only exists in the new car. It's not hard...
- hyperbovine 9y ago
  Cars have been shipping with sensors and computers since the 80s. When was the last time you heard of somebody's ECU failing? What's that, you've never heard of an ECU before? :-)
  - alliao 9y ago
    ECU is pretty basic though and they do fail, I guess they all have a designed lifetime. The thing is the more complex these things become the higher probability they fail. A machine made of 10parts each with 1% of failure rate per annum doesn't just add up to 10%...
  - esterly 9y ago
    Agreed. The sensors which fail commonly fail [1] on high milage ICE cars are in the hot places, exhaust and coolant. Battery cooling and electric motors run at a much lower temperature around 40C [2]. 1. https://www.gsfcarparts.com/blog/when-car-sensors-go-bad-symptons-for-5-common-sensors https://www.gsfcarparts.com/blog/when-car-sensors-go-bad-sym... 2. https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/questions-about-battery-cooling.95620/#post-2237439 https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/questions-about-batt...
emmanuelindex 9y ago
Why self driving cars should only be electric vehicules? And if the price of oil is going down due to electric vehicules it will make people even more happier to use their already amortized vehicules. And don't forget that a large part of electricity comes from oil in the US.
- Gibbon1 9y ago
  The flip side is if if and when electric cars become cheap enough it's possible that they will beat ICE on a cost per mile basis _even if gasoline were free_. Justification: For a car that gets 30MPG the fuel cost per mile is only 6-7 cents per mile. Total cost per mile is around 50 cents per mile. So only 10-20% of the cost is fuel.
- danans 9y ago
  > And don't forget that a large part of electricity comes from oil in the US. Unless you live in Hawaii this is false. Coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar are collectively and individually larger contributors than oil. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
khn1 9y ago
There is a major blind spot that the author fails to address: All vehicles (ICE or EV) have a heavy dependence on petroleum products such as plastics, lubricants, and synthetic rubber. While I believe that EV's are the future, I do not think their success implies the fall of Big Oil.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  Those are minor uses, though.
- diafygi 9y ago
  A whopping 5% of oil isn't burned[1]. Take away burning oil, and your industry is 20x smaller. Not so big anymore. [1]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm/index.cfm?page=oil_use https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm/index.cfm?page...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wmf 9y ago
  ~60% of oil is used for transportation fuel, so there will be a big impact if that goes away. Oil reserves will also last much longer once oil isn't needed for transportation.
- dbaupp 9y ago
  The amounts differ by an order of magnitude, or maybe even two. E.g. the EIA says 9.3k barrels/day is consumed as motor gasoline (more than half of all consumption of finished products, and the next largest categories are also burn-the-oil, possibly including 3.6k barrels/day of diesel fuel) whereas only 323 barrels/day go to petrochemical feedstocks. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbblpd_a.htm https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbblpd_a.h...
- mark-r 9y ago
  The author acknowledges this, and says oil usage will decline but not go away. Oil is used for a lot more than gasoline. But the contraction of the market will put a lot of companies in a world of hurt.
andy_ppp 9y ago
I did some quick maths and at 16 cents per mile this looks like it would make around 500bn in revenue per year if all journeys in America were converted to electric self driving uber over night! Maybe Uber will succeed after all!
mikestew 9y ago
Pardon my coarseness, but the author has his head so far up his own ass as he can’t tell whether the sun is up or down. I say this as a person who ordered a Nissan Leaf the first day they were available, has way too many shares of TSLA in their portfolio, and would love nothing more than watch Exxon Mobile go out of business. But they won’t be dismantling the Keystone pipeline any time soon, let alone in eight years. Sure, ICEs are complex. But it is a known complexity. So well known that our 80K Scion xB has never had the valve cover off (IOW, nothing internal to the engine has broken). In fact, we’ve done nothing to it but tires and oil. Having never done it, from the shop manual I’d guess I could have the engine of our 200K mile VW camper van on the ground in about 30 minutes, have it rebuild over a weekend, and it’s good for another 100K miles. Complicated though they might be, ordinary humans can figure them out. Hell, the inner workings of an Intel CPU surpassed my understanding years ago, but they still sell millions of them, and my ignorance doesn’t stop me from writing software for them. Look at the list of common repairs in the article. Almost all of them have one thing in common: the repairs are dictated by emissions testing, not because they’ll leave you at the side of the road. O2 sensor? The car is likely to still run, just poorly. The driver might not even notice. Catalytic converter? Unless it’s plugged from flooding the engine (raw gas will plug a cat), the car will still run. And yada yada for the rest. Of the items on the list, only an ignition coil is going to leave you at the side of the road. Let me put another way: I like our old VW because it gives an opportunity to still work on cars once in a while. The rest of our vehicles, modern cars and motorcycles all, are fucking appliances that don’t need the tender care of an old mechanic. So let’s discard the “ICE cars are complex and unreliable” argument, shall we? And there’s more to the ICE world than passenger cars, as you won’t be plowing a field with an electric tractor anytime soon. Using a Prius as an argument for EVs is just dumb, because you know what else a Prius has under the hood beside an electric motor? So the more one makes the case with the longevity of a Prius, the more one argues that ICEs are pretty reliable. By the time I got to the self-driving car portion, I checked out. In six years, new car sales will drop to near zero? That’s not an argument worth having, because you’re arguing with a kook.
technicalbard 9y ago
There are a few problems yet to be solved. First, the battery system in a Tesla Model S has a carbon footprint from manufacturing that equals driving a midsized gasoline powered car for 8 years. If that doesn't change, then there is no net carbon reductions Second, battery energy density needs to get dramatically better. Current Li-Ion batteries are about 6 times the energy density of a lead-acid battery of 40 years ago. They need to get 20 times better to equal a hydrocarbon fuel. Third, the increase in electricity demand has to come from somewhere. It isn't viable to replace all electricity generation with wind/solar, without MASSIVE storage investment. Hydroelectric and nuclear will be needed at large scale to cover this demand if coal and gas are not used. While everyone talks about these technologies getting better at the same rate computers did, they haven't thus far. They might, but the laws of thermodynamics are a steep slope.
nateburke 9y ago
The OP is operating in a peacetime mentality. Oil's killer app is war: Can a fleet of fighter planes run on electricity, currently? No. Has the Army committed to having 100% of their fleet of tanks running on electricity by 2025? No. Can you run a supply chain to the front lines of a ground war with electricity? Technically yes, but it's only a matter of time until your wire infra gets cut/bombed. So I completely agree with the OP, assuming a general absence of armed, land-based conflict in the next 20 years. That said, think about why the US even _has_ a highway system and domestic airlines. There are two main weaknesses of building transportation infrastructure on rail, from a central-planning perspective: 1. You can shut down an entire country's economy by bombing the rail infrastructure (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman%27s_March_to_the_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman%27s_March_to_the_Sea, viewing the seceded South as a "country" here...), less so with airfields and asphalt highways. 2. There is no consistent demand for continued production of railroad infrastructure, once it is built, which makes mobilizing production in times of great need (e.g. war) slow and difficult. How this relates to the OP's argument re: electric cars: 1. While battery technology will continue to improve, the main means of transporting electricity is still the power plant + electric lines, which is relatively fragile compared to oil barges/tanks on trucks + highways. You would need to destroy every oil tanker and truck in America to shut down the energy distribution system -- a much harder task than bombing every power plant -- power plants can't move. 2. With gas-powered cars (and planes, though to a lesser extent), you can keep the production running all the time making civilian vehicles. Turning all those Ford F150s and 737s into tanks and bombers is difficult, but it is way easier to do so if you don't have to build the factories FIRST.
- FrozenVoid 9y ago
  >Can a fleet of fighter planes run on electricity, currently? No. >Can you run a supply chain to the front lines of a ground war with electricity? Yes, with cheap solar power and favorable weather condition(alternatively recharge locations which would recharge or repair drones.) Solar powered drones would be more cost-effective than oil-based armies. Air/ground units greatest cost is protection of humans inside, making them expensive and energy hungry. Once the human factor is out, there is no point on being dependent on dense energy sources such as oil or static infrastructure such as rails and roads. The ideal fighting unit is cheap and self-sufficient: something like solar-powered aerial drone armed with particle beam weapon(e.g.ion beam) or area-denial beam weapon powered by wind/solar/hydro. Renewable energy is the future of warfare, like it or not.

131 points by triplesec 9y ago

First of all, over a quarter of oil is used for things other than transport; second, it's gonna take quite a bit longer than this article predicts for oil used in transport to ramp down.

glibgil 9y ago
> over a quarter of oil is used for things other than transport But doesn't transport have the biggest need for power density? Once renewable power density is solved for transport, I would expect the same applications will quickly be applied to the other places oil is used
- sigstoat 9y ago
  it is used as a precursor in chemical synthesis, plastics and a variety of other products. you're not going to replace that with solar.
  - diafygi 9y ago
    Sure you will, but maybe later. Super cheap energy makes bio-plastics competitive. Massive solar farms passively making carbon chains when the sun is up. The reason no one is talking about it is that the transportation transition is lower hanging fruit.
    - Gibbon1 9y ago
      There is an interesting line of research into catalysts that use electricity to create stuff like methanol, acetic acid, etc from CO2 and water. Often when you see people comment on this they automatically assume synthetic methanol --> green washed automotive fuel --> yay and I can keep my F150 pickup. But more seriously, pure low weight hydrocarbons --> chemical feed stocks.
- pilom 9y ago
  Plastic production requires oil and improving power density of batteries doesn't help that. Heating houses to a US standard requires astronomical amounts of energy that will be provided by fossil fuels because they are cheap per BTU. Sure we could design better houses and use more efficient heating technologies like heat pumps, but those are being adopted a couple orders of magnitude slower than electric cars are.
monodeldiablo 9y ago
The author isn't saying that all uses for oil would be eliminated. It doesn't need to be. It will take far less impact to ruin the oil industry. They've made huge investments in production -- with 25+ year timelines -- that they'd be unable to make payments on if their incomes fall a mere 20%. And if the market for refined oil shrinks by even 10%, the glut of excess supply will drive prices down enough to put a number of companies deep in the red. Oil is currently profitable because of its huge scale, high demand, and generous government subsidies. Upsetting any of those variables threatens the industry's already thin margins.

saagarjha 9y ago

I can see this playing out, but not as quickly as the author suggests. Cameras and cellphones last a couple years at the most, and are much easier to replace, than a car is. Sure, everyone wants a self driving car, but not everyone can switch just like that.

model_s 9y ago
Indeed. There are over one billion cars in the current fleet.
function_seven 9y ago
The argument that counters this is that hailed rides will be cheaper than driving what you already have. You don't need to make a new purchase to switch. Even if you have a recent model sitting in the driveway, you may choose to save money by hailing a car rather than driving your own. I don't know if it'll play out like that, but the article is pretty convincing.
- throwaway91111 9y ago
  Hailed riding only works locally, and there's already public transit cheaper than ride hailing; if you leave your metro area at all i'd bet this assumption that ride hailing is cheaper quickly falls off. Hell, many US cities don't even have uber yet.
  - function_seven 9y ago
    Where public transport exists, sure. But that's only in metro areas, and even then it's on a timetable that's less convenient than hailing a car. It also requires a bicycle or a long walk to travel from origin to departure, and from arrival to destination. Everybody will still own their car, and use it just for long-haul trips. Daily commuting to work could be cheaper in a hailed (electric) car than driving your own (gas) car.
- leereeves 9y ago
  Why would a car owned by someone else be cheaper than the same car owned by you? The obvious answer - dividing the cost of the car over more miles - doesn't seem right to me. Driving more miles doesn't generally increase the useful mileage lifespan of cars, it just wears them out more quickly.

jswizzy 9y ago

You think in 2025 we will be talking about children mining by hand in the Congo in horrible conditions to provide all those lithium batteries for that future? There is a price for everything.

diafygi 9y ago
Fun fact. Afghanistan has huge lithium resources. https://nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html https://nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  Oh, well never mind then: Afghanistan has much better labor protections than the Congo /s
  - princeb 9y ago
    it will when afghanistan becomes the USA's 51st state. (or maybe 52nd after NK)
- andrewtbham 9y ago
  I assume he is referring to cobalt, not lithium. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/congo-cobalt-mining-for-lithium-ion-battery/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...

partycoder 9y ago

Not many people know the relationship between oil and the US dollar. The golden age of the US dollar was the Bretton Woods system, where every currency was backed in dollars and dollars were backed in gold. There was however no obligation for the Federal Reserve to accept audits of any kind to validate there was enough gold. Therefore the US could print money at will (and it did), until countries such as France started demanding the conversion of their dollars to gold. To avoid the equivalent of a bank run at the Federal Reserve level, Nixon moved away from the gold standard and since then the US dollar has been allowed to float. A less known fact, is how the US dollar has preserved its value in this current setup. The answer is: by having an exclusive deal with oil producers where oil is sold exclusively in US dollars. Since everyone needs oil, if you need dollars to buy oil, the dollar gains a relative value. Having said this, it is important to understand that as energy consumers move away from oil, the US will need to find another way to sustain its currency or it will inevitably crash, along with everything valued in dollars, such as savings, wages, etc.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
>the US will need to find another way to sustain its currency The threat of the US economy collapsing is plenty enough reason to strike new deals to sustain its currency.
- partycoder 9y ago
  Since economies are deeply interconnected it is clear that it is in nobody's interest to allow the US economy to collapse. The problem of bimetallism (silver/gold) or just gold, is that they are scarce and not suitable to produce enough circulating currency for everyone, so a replacement seemed fair. But fossil fuels are an environmental liability. Maybe the future is in some crypto-like thing.
leereeves 9y ago
> by having an exclusive deal with oil producers where oil is sold exclusively in US dollars. I think you're overstating the role of oil here. Other currencies without that exclusive deal, and backed by less economic and military power, have also preserved their value.

diafygi 9y ago

Good. Bloomberg estimates the transition will be a $10 trillion upside for those upgrading and replacing fossils[1]. It remains to be seen who the winners will be. Incumbents (Excelon, Shell, SA, etc.) have market share, but will have to strand trillions of assets and reserves. Newcomers (Tesla, etc.) have to survive the energy boom-bust cycle that early fossil went through. My money is on the newcomers (my startup is one). The incumbents' shareholders simply won't let them strand assets short term to transition to new energy business models. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-16/investing-trillions-in-electricity-s-sunny-future https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-16/investing...

forgotmysn 9y ago
can you link to or provide a little more info on the "boom-bust cycle that early fossil went through"?
- nsp 9y ago
  This is probably more than you want to read, but The Prize by Daniel Yergin is a stellar history of the oil industry from 1800s-1990s https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123 https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/14391...
  - forgotmysn 9y ago
    Oh perfect, thank you. I've read Sinclair's Oil, but that's about it.
- diafygi 9y ago
  Here's a recent example with the shale boom-bust: http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2015/11/04/boom-to-bust-5-stages-of-the-oil-industry/ http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2015/11/04/boom-to-bust-5... This is extremely typical in the history of energy (wood, coal, oil, solar, nuclear, wind, and on and on) because of the speed at which things move. First, you come up with a new innovation, pump capital into building tons of it (the boom). Then, someone else comes up with an innovation, which busts you. It's fundamentally impossible to defend an advantage/monopoly long term in energy (except with governments, e.g. utilities). Coincidentally, this is why we don't see much VC participation in energy, and when they do participate, they usually lose their shirt. The competitive fundamentals of energy aren't compatible with monopoly seeking.

nnfy 9y ago

OP does not understand that he is far more enthusiastic about his Prius than the rest of the world. Too much of this article is based on unsubstantiated, overly optimistic predictions, and the reasoning is regularly fallacious. Two examples: 1. OP lists expensive repairs for combustion vehicles, then suggests that because said parts do not exist in EVs, that EVs are cheaper to maintain. This is nonsense, first of all most of the parts listed almost never require repairs (how often do you spend >$1000 to replace a catalytic converter?) and secondly, it is (deliberately?) misleading to ignore that EVs have specialized parts of their own to repair. The fact that there are fewer parts is not enough data to suggest that an EV is cheaper automatically to maintain, or more reliable. Further, there is a risk that some people will spend more money on EV repair because they may require specialized equipment to maintain. 2. His "current estimates" sources are based on extrapolation of current tesla battery performance, which is an uncertain predictor of future performance given how little time the tested batteries have spent in use. 3. When OP leaps to self driving cars as another reason for the emergence of EVs, he also conveniently misses that there is utility and sentimental value in owning your own car. tl;dr: Will EVs eventually supersede ICVs? Sure. But putting out an article which says with certainty, and a straight face, that no one will want oil in 8 years is just unnecessarily smug.

pm24601 9y ago
1. Electric motors are cheaper to maintain. Railroads worldwide know this. ( random article: http://www.american-rails.com/support-files/locomotive_operating_costs_comparison.pdf http://www.american-rails.com/support-files/locomotive_opera... ) 2. Not correct - OP is pointing to current Priuses that have exceptionally long lived batteries "Current estimates for the lifetime today’s electric vehicles are over 500,000 miles." and "But today there are anecdotal stories of Prius’s logging over 600,000 miles on a single battery." 3a. Maybe there is sentimental value to a Mustang... but that crappy car with headliner coming down? .. no.. 3b. Utility as in always available, possibly. However consider just the case of a family going from 2-3 cars to a single car. (Which is what my family has done) That alone could halve the number of cars purchased. Not smug -- futurist is predicting future.
- nnfy 9y ago

oisino 9y ago

Talking to people behind self driving car companies the issue is not the self driving technology or laws it's more infrastructure around extremely low latency internet to make self driving cars work in the general wild. This article assumes mass adoption really quickly but who knows how quickly our general infrastructure will be updated to enable this especially in third world countries that are ramping up in traditional cars consumption but are notorious for bad mass scale infrastructure (Brazil/ India).

Dylan16807 9y ago
Why would the internet be involved in anything a self-driving car computes with a sub-five-second deadline?

stablemap 9y ago

Discussion from a month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715405

Aloha 9y ago
I was seeming to recall I saw this come up before.
dang 9y ago
Nice catch!
diafygi 9y ago
Seems this was post was buried. Was the repost the reason? Or the flaming? Energy discussion not interesting to YC?
undersuit 9y ago
Well now this article is marked as a dupe and has been removed from the front page. :(

Animats 9y ago

That's from May 2017. It costs less to make an IC engine than to make an electric drivetrain. Replacement cost for a Tesla drivetrain is about $6000 - $15000. Replacement for an volume-product automotive engine is about $2,250 to $4,000. Detroit put a lot of effort over the years into making engine manufacture cheap.

mhmiles 9y ago
Pretty sure you’re not finding a new engine for a BMW 5 series for $4000 and that’s a cheaper car than Tesla S/X
sndean 9y ago
Interestingly, replacing the Nissan Leaf's worn out battery will cost ~$6000. Looking up the price of a Nissan Leaf I could buy from the closest car max: it'd cost ~$8000. I wonder if vehicle manufacture (not necessarily battery) is going to be cheap enough to simply throw out your car whenever the battery dies?

chrissnell 9y ago

This article makes a number of flawed assumptions: - It neglects the environmental impact of battery production. - Diesel motors can be significantly less expensive to maintain and operate, even more so as the reliability of emissions-reducing technology is improved. - Battery charging is nowhere near as fast or convenient as a gas station. - Electricity must come from somewhere. Few places have steady wind and none have 24-hour solar energy. The world will switch to electric vehicles when they offer sufficient cost-savings, convenience, and appeal. Until we solve all of those things (and not with massive government subsidies), they will continue to play second-fiddle to gas- and diesel-powered vehicles.

DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
1. Battery production, like any production, has an environmental impact - but the motivation for battery-electric vehicles is to eliminate local environmental impact (e.g. urban centres). If all of the pollution happens at a single source then it's easier to contain, reduce, and eventually eliminate. 2. Diesel fuels are still very dirty - and the reliability of petrol engines is not a big-enough problem to justify switching to diesel engines - and ICE cars have far more moving parts compared to BEVs than just the engine. 3. Tesla did look into fast battery-swap stations that can swap a battery in less time than it takes to fill a gas tank - they stopped further development due to a lack of consumer interest: users are perfectly happy to charge at home overnight, when the car's aren't being driven anyway, and when electricity is often cheaper at night. As more use-cases switch to electric there will be an impetus to adopt battery-swapping, but it remains an option. 4. 24-hour solar is possible with energy-storage, which is what Tesla is looking into, but again, the point of BEVs is to first eliminate local pollution, then make it easier to eliminate energy source pollution thanks to the fungibility of electricity and centralisation of pollution sources.
- sverige 9y ago
  You skipped the part about massive government subsidies.
  - deleted 9y ago

pilom 9y ago

Every time I see someone make the argument that "all cars will be electric by 20XX" I feel like they are incredibly sheltered from rural life. The US is HUGE! Sure the majority of commuting could be replaced by electric cars but I've seen no evidence of them being able to replace ICEs for the "I want to go skiing/kayaking/hiking (pick an activity where your car sits on the side of the road all day) 2 hours away and return on the same day" situation. There are so many changes to infrastructure that need to be made to get there. Sure ski resorts and malls and park and rides might put in 1000s of chargers in their parking lots eventually, but it certainly won't happen by 2023 or whatever this article predicts. Sure the cars might exist, but the charging infrastructure won't by then.

thebooktocome 9y ago
I've seen no evidence for ICEs replacing the horse's role in fox hunting, rodeos, and polo.... Which is to say, ICEs will never go away. But at some point you'll have to be rich enough to own and supply your own gas station to operate one.
jaggederest 9y ago
Two hours of driving is half a Tesla's capacity, so that scenario is already solved. It's not going to get any less solved over time. People will own cars individually for the same reason that people own horses now - they enable a specific kind of activity, or a native appreciation for the object in itself. Certainly motorsport is not going to die any time soon. What percentage of automobiles are used for touring and racing? I'd guess it's around 3% looking at my state's DMV figures, but form your own opinions I suppose. (A good proxy: Motorcycles are owned largely by the kind of people I'd expect would continue to own cars - 140k out of 4.2 million registrations in my state) There's about 1 non-passenger-vehicle for every 4 people. I'd guess we see vehicle ownership and registration by private citizens drop to about that number - so 50% reduction total.
- pilom 9y ago
  A Tesla model 3 has a listed range of 220 miles and it declines in winter and with hills. Therefore I doubt one could actually go from downtown Denver to Vail (~95 miles) for a day of skiing and back in a day without charging at the resort. It certainly couldn't make it from Denver to Salida, CO (~140 miles) for a day of white water rafting without charging during the day. Sure businesses could install chargers in their parking lots but we have a LONG way to go for that and that doesn't help someone going to climb the tallest mountain in Colorado (115 miles) who will park at the trailhead. There are some answers here but personal vehicle ownership isn't going away for large portions of America any time soon.

chao- 9y ago

I want fewer fossil fuels as much as the next guy, and while the core argument about ICEs is beyond my expertise, the data the author presents seems to support it so that's pretty neat. However, I take issue with the article's casual conflating of oil with all fossil fuels, and fossil fuels used for transportation with all uses of fossil fuels. It signals a lack of awareness when the author writes things such as: >The pipeline was built at a cost of about $7 billion ... Keystone XL will go down as the world’s last great fossil fuels infrastructure project. Without even straining my memory, I recall that Cheniere Energy's Sabine Pass Terminal opened in the last year. It cost about as much to build as the $7 billion quoted here, and they are planning another now at a higher projected cost [0]. Overall I agree with the author's proposed trajectory and order of events involving self-driving cars, fewer used car sales, and so on, but differ on the time scale. I figure things will progress at one-half to three-quarters that speed, at fastest. I don't think the "simple" argument of "people will select the cheaper option" is as simple when it comes to automobiles. A combination of inertia, identity and utility are going to make it slow going. Not only am I "not a car guy", I actively dislike the task of driving. So it took a long time for me to really get why people identify with their vehicles, but now that I do, I can see how limited my eco-progressive perspective of "Everyone would prefer to live a car free life just like me!" was. I still arrogantly think everyone else will come around, but it's going to take longer than the author, or younger me, thought it would. Definitely the generation born after the self-driving car is widespread will be the ones to complete the job. I don't think that timeline plays as cleanly into the oil (or fossil fuel) narrative that this article sets up, though. [0] http://wgno.com/2016/12/21/8-5-billion-natural-gas-plant-and-terminal-planned-for-plaquemines-parish/ http://wgno.com/2016/12/21/8-5-billion-natural-gas-plant-and...

bmelton 9y ago
And of course there's people like myself -- I love cars, but I actively hate commuting. Not because I mind the driving, or the traffic, but because it's time I'm getting nothing done. If I lived in or near a bigger city, some of that would be offset by mass transit, but even mass transit comes with a lot of wasted time -- walking to the platform, waiting for the train, driving/walking to the station, what have you. But a self-driving car, or a car I can call on-demand solves all of that. I can walk out of my house, get into a car, and read, catch up on email, or get work done during my commute. I'll probably still have a car for leisure. I currently have a Jeep that I use for wilderness / beach / outdoor trips, and I can't see that changing any time soon even though I have a gas-electric hybrid for commuting, but if my daily transit needs can be met by a self-driving, plug-in electric, it's a massive ecological benefit while actively increasing my daily productivity and quality of life. I agree with you that the 100% coverage the author imagines is a LONG, long way off, and I imagine that even of people who feel more like you do, the idea that they're going to start replacing perfectly good cars with expensive replacements is unlikely outside of the top 10-20% of earners, but if enough people like me switch over a significant portion of our driving patterns to those described in the article, it'll be a huge win.

alliao 9y ago

And this is how car manufacturers going to make up the revenue loss of the new much more reliable electric drive train. AI + Autonomous driving. Both of these requires sensors, and silicon. Both hates abuse from vibration and heat/cold cycle, in short, they will fail. So instead of paying for things that would break in the old car, why not pay for things that only exists in the new car. It's not hard...

hyperbovine 9y ago
Cars have been shipping with sensors and computers since the 80s. When was the last time you heard of somebody's ECU failing? What's that, you've never heard of an ECU before? :-)
- alliao 9y ago
  ECU is pretty basic though and they do fail, I guess they all have a designed lifetime. The thing is the more complex these things become the higher probability they fail. A machine made of 10parts each with 1% of failure rate per annum doesn't just add up to 10%...
- esterly 9y ago
  Agreed. The sensors which fail commonly fail [1] on high milage ICE cars are in the hot places, exhaust and coolant. Battery cooling and electric motors run at a much lower temperature around 40C [2]. 1. https://www.gsfcarparts.com/blog/when-car-sensors-go-bad-symptons-for-5-common-sensors https://www.gsfcarparts.com/blog/when-car-sensors-go-bad-sym... 2. https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/questions-about-battery-cooling.95620/#post-2237439 https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/questions-about-batt...

emmanuelindex 9y ago

Why self driving cars should only be electric vehicules? And if the price of oil is going down due to electric vehicules it will make people even more happier to use their already amortized vehicules. And don't forget that a large part of electricity comes from oil in the US.

Gibbon1 9y ago
The flip side is if if and when electric cars become cheap enough it's possible that they will beat ICE on a cost per mile basis _even if gasoline were free_. Justification: For a car that gets 30MPG the fuel cost per mile is only 6-7 cents per mile. Total cost per mile is around 50 cents per mile. So only 10-20% of the cost is fuel.
danans 9y ago
> And don't forget that a large part of electricity comes from oil in the US. Unless you live in Hawaii this is false. Coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar are collectively and individually larger contributors than oil. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

khn1 9y ago

There is a major blind spot that the author fails to address: All vehicles (ICE or EV) have a heavy dependence on petroleum products such as plastics, lubricants, and synthetic rubber. While I believe that EV's are the future, I do not think their success implies the fall of Big Oil.

saagarjha 9y ago
Those are minor uses, though.
diafygi 9y ago
A whopping 5% of oil isn't burned[1]. Take away burning oil, and your industry is 20x smaller. Not so big anymore. [1]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm/index.cfm?page=oil_use https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm/index.cfm?page...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wmf 9y ago
~60% of oil is used for transportation fuel, so there will be a big impact if that goes away. Oil reserves will also last much longer once oil isn't needed for transportation.
dbaupp 9y ago
The amounts differ by an order of magnitude, or maybe even two. E.g. the EIA says 9.3k barrels/day is consumed as motor gasoline (more than half of all consumption of finished products, and the next largest categories are also burn-the-oil, possibly including 3.6k barrels/day of diesel fuel) whereas only 323 barrels/day go to petrochemical feedstocks. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbblpd_a.htm https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbblpd_a.h...
mark-r 9y ago
The author acknowledges this, and says oil usage will decline but not go away. Oil is used for a lot more than gasoline. But the contraction of the market will put a lot of companies in a world of hurt.

andy_ppp 9y ago

I did some quick maths and at 16 cents per mile this looks like it would make around 500bn in revenue per year if all journeys in America were converted to electric self driving uber over night! Maybe Uber will succeed after all!

mikestew 9y ago

Pardon my coarseness, but the author has his head so far up his own ass as he can’t tell whether the sun is up or down. I say this as a person who ordered a Nissan Leaf the first day they were available, has way too many shares of TSLA in their portfolio, and would love nothing more than watch Exxon Mobile go out of business. But they won’t be dismantling the Keystone pipeline any time soon, let alone in eight years. Sure, ICEs are complex. But it is a known complexity. So well known that our 80K Scion xB has never had the valve cover off (IOW, nothing internal to the engine has broken). In fact, we’ve done nothing to it but tires and oil. Having never done it, from the shop manual I’d guess I could have the engine of our 200K mile VW camper van on the ground in about 30 minutes, have it rebuild over a weekend, and it’s good for another 100K miles. Complicated though they might be, ordinary humans can figure them out. Hell, the inner workings of an Intel CPU surpassed my understanding years ago, but they still sell millions of them, and my ignorance doesn’t stop me from writing software for them. Look at the list of common repairs in the article. Almost all of them have one thing in common: the repairs are dictated by emissions testing, not because they’ll leave you at the side of the road. O2 sensor? The car is likely to still run, just poorly. The driver might not even notice. Catalytic converter? Unless it’s plugged from flooding the engine (raw gas will plug a cat), the car will still run. And yada yada for the rest. Of the items on the list, only an ignition coil is going to leave you at the side of the road. Let me put another way: I like our old VW because it gives an opportunity to still work on cars once in a while. The rest of our vehicles, modern cars and motorcycles all, are fucking appliances that don’t need the tender care of an old mechanic. So let’s discard the “ICE cars are complex and unreliable” argument, shall we? And there’s more to the ICE world than passenger cars, as you won’t be plowing a field with an electric tractor anytime soon. Using a Prius as an argument for EVs is just dumb, because you know what else a Prius has under the hood beside an electric motor? So the more one makes the case with the longevity of a Prius, the more one argues that ICEs are pretty reliable. By the time I got to the self-driving car portion, I checked out. In six years, new car sales will drop to near zero? That’s not an argument worth having, because you’re arguing with a kook.

technicalbard 9y ago

There are a few problems yet to be solved. First, the battery system in a Tesla Model S has a carbon footprint from manufacturing that equals driving a midsized gasoline powered car for 8 years. If that doesn't change, then there is no net carbon reductions Second, battery energy density needs to get dramatically better. Current Li-Ion batteries are about 6 times the energy density of a lead-acid battery of 40 years ago. They need to get 20 times better to equal a hydrocarbon fuel. Third, the increase in electricity demand has to come from somewhere. It isn't viable to replace all electricity generation with wind/solar, without MASSIVE storage investment. Hydroelectric and nuclear will be needed at large scale to cover this demand if coal and gas are not used. While everyone talks about these technologies getting better at the same rate computers did, they haven't thus far. They might, but the laws of thermodynamics are a steep slope.

nateburke 9y ago

The OP is operating in a peacetime mentality. Oil's killer app is war: Can a fleet of fighter planes run on electricity, currently? No. Has the Army committed to having 100% of their fleet of tanks running on electricity by 2025? No. Can you run a supply chain to the front lines of a ground war with electricity? Technically yes, but it's only a matter of time until your wire infra gets cut/bombed. So I completely agree with the OP, assuming a general absence of armed, land-based conflict in the next 20 years. That said, think about why the US even _has_ a highway system and domestic airlines. There are two main weaknesses of building transportation infrastructure on rail, from a central-planning perspective: 1. You can shut down an entire country's economy by bombing the rail infrastructure (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman%27s_March_to_the_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman%27s_March_to_the_Sea, viewing the seceded South as a "country" here...), less so with airfields and asphalt highways. 2. There is no consistent demand for continued production of railroad infrastructure, once it is built, which makes mobilizing production in times of great need (e.g. war) slow and difficult. How this relates to the OP's argument re: electric cars: 1. While battery technology will continue to improve, the main means of transporting electricity is still the power plant + electric lines, which is relatively fragile compared to oil barges/tanks on trucks + highways. You would need to destroy every oil tanker and truck in America to shut down the energy distribution system -- a much harder task than bombing every power plant -- power plants can't move. 2. With gas-powered cars (and planes, though to a lesser extent), you can keep the production running all the time making civilian vehicles. Turning all those Ford F150s and 737s into tanks and bombers is difficult, but it is way easier to do so if you don't have to build the factories FIRST.

FrozenVoid 9y ago
>Can a fleet of fighter planes run on electricity, currently? No. >Can you run a supply chain to the front lines of a ground war with electricity? Yes, with cheap solar power and favorable weather condition(alternatively recharge locations which would recharge or repair drones.) Solar powered drones would be more cost-effective than oil-based armies. Air/ground units greatest cost is protection of humans inside, making them expensive and energy hungry. Once the human factor is out, there is no point on being dependent on dense energy sources such as oil or static infrastructure such as rails and roads. The ideal fighting unit is cheap and self-sufficient: something like solar-powered aerial drone armed with particle beam weapon(e.g.ion beam) or area-denial beam weapon powered by wind/solar/hydro. Renewable energy is the future of warfare, like it or not.