Ex-oil insider touts electric car
Winnipeg Free Press April 2
OTTAWA — Gasoline-powered cars are driving humanity to the end of the oil age, leaving electric vehicles as the best weapon against global warming.
This is the major conclusion in a dramatic international report written by a former Exxon insider and released Tuesday to Canwest News Service.
“Sometime during the year 2008, humanity will probably pass the point at which it collectively consumes 1,000 barrels of crude oil every second of every day. More than half of it — and the share continues to rise — is dedicated to the movement of goods, services and people,” said the analysis by physical chemist Dr. Gary Kendall, titled Plugged in: The End of the Oil Age. “We are, without a doubt, entering the twilight of the Oil Age.”
Kendall, 34, is now a senior energy business and policy analyst at the World Wildlife Fund’s office in Brussels, following a nine-year career in the oil industry. His analysis also warns that some alternatives, such as hydrogen or biofuels, including ethanol from agricultural crops, could do as much environmental damage as crude oil from conventional wells.
“It should be self-evident that the scale of the task is enormous, but the resulting benefits will be even greater, and that is surely the very definition of transformational change,” said Kendall in the 200-page report.
His report analyzes other alternatives to crude oil, such as converting coal to liquid diesel. But countries that are exploring these options today are demonstrating that the planet is facing a crisis since these alternatives were previously used in extreme cases of oil shortages such as Nazi Germany and South Africa’s Apartheid regime from nearly 50 years ago, he said.
So, in 2006, when he heard coal-to-liquids being touted as the answer to the world’s petroleum shortages, it made him think “we’re now entering a kind of global emergency with respect to energy.”
His report says that government and industry should instead focus on new technologies that reduce dependence on oil such as the G-Wiz, a battery-powered electric vehicle now on British roads that retails for about $17,000 and offers a 75-kilometre range with top speeds of about 80 km/h. London commuters who drive the G-Wiz already enjoy several benefits, including an exemption from the daily congestion charge, free parking in designated bays and even free electricity from adjacent charging posts, the report said.
An increase in electric vehicles would be expected to put more demands on electric utilities and power grids, but Kendall noted that a recent impact assessment of plug-in hybrid vehicles in the U.S. concluded that power companies already had enough energy to charge 84 per cent of cars in the country, driving an average of 53 kilometres per day.
In Canada, a Toronto-based manufacturer is trying to market low-speed Zero Emissions No Noise (ZENN) cars built in a plant in St-Jerome, Que., but the ZENN Motor Co. has faced bureaucratic obstacles to selling its electric car on the Canadian market.
Kendall’s analysis also questions the energy-intensive extraction of oil from Alberta’s tarsands, as well as the use of biofuels, since he says they do little to shift vehicles away from the internal combustion engine. The report blames industry behaviour for blocking progress; six of the largest corporations in the world operate in the oil industry and three operate in the automotive industry.
“If politicians, business leaders, and civil society are able to summon the courage necessary to pro-actively transform our energy system, there will undoubtedly be winners and losers,” said the report. “If they do not, it is extremely difficult to envision any winners at all.”
– Canwest News Service
Comment by thomas C Gray, writing from United States on April 2nd, 2008 at 10:48 am:
Electric propulsion as a solution to carbon levels makes not a lot of sense - there are far easier and
cheaper ways to reduce large amounts of carbon. Unfortunately, those environmentalists years ago poisoned the public’s mind about nuclear pwoer, and have been responsible for the carbon mess we are in today. Now for five years they have been browbeating ignorant pols and the public into throwing money down the drain on deadend primitive technologies like wind power and photovotaic, although neither can produce power when it’s needed (meaning their actual costs are doubled - for each windmill, you need a controllable power generator for peak demand periods). Denmark can’t even use half of its wind power, and must sell what it
can’t use to neighbors - at big losses - and then buy back power from them when Denmark needs it the next day. So now, after five years of frantic building of windmills and solar roofs, the two cannot account for ANY peak demand supply, and a mere 1% otherwise, during times when it’s not really needed.
Comment by Stan Wellaway, writing from on April 2nd, 2008 at 2:07 pm:
Getting back to the transport issue - I do see the all-electric vehicle as the most immediately available option in the many areas where its current limitations (on range and charging time) pose no problem.
In the commercial vehicles field, adoption of EVs is proceeding apace. For depot-based delivery fleets (of which there are tens of thousands) the stop-start nature of the task, and the relatively short route circuits, is ideally suitable for EVs. Two UK makers of EVs - Smith EV http://www.smithelectricvehicles.com and Modec - http://www.modec.co.uk - already have several hundred all-electric trucks and vans - from 3.5tons to 12tons in service with supermarkets and parcel delivery companies. Smith EV (part of the stockmarket listed Tanfield Group) are building additional new factories in the USA and UK while ramping up production to 10,000 vehicles a year by 2010. Last month they started their first US-based production line at Fresno, California, where they expect roll out 1000 twelve-ton trucks this year.
On the car front, the UK and Europe will see a choice of highway capable electric cars earlier than the US.