The Future of Transportation by Shai Agassi

[kristopher]

The Future of Transportation by Shai Agassi (Founder and CEO of Better Place)
27 de agosto de 2009

Projecting the future of energy, transportation, and environment. The time is now, and the change is already in motion. In the words of Lee Iacoca “It’s time to lead, follow or get out of the way.”

The Future of Transportation by Shai Agassi (Founder and CEO of Better Place)
In 2005 the world entered the “post peak-oil” era, as predicted by many oil experts years before reaching this situation. The price of oil is dominated by two factors, new discoveries of oil fields and global demand for oil, falsely called production. As the R/P ratio (Reserves to Production) slides we begin to witness sharp price hikes in the futures market for oil immediately affecting the price of fuel at the pump. During the last 10 years, the price of oil shot up from $10 a barrel to well above $80 a barrel, with current predictions more certain of the price crossing $100 a barrel than ever coming back to $50.

The oil market is tightly intertwined with the car market, as both products complement one another to produce the “complete product” consumers desire - the freedom of personal commute. With this document we try to project the most probable set of changes in the energy markets and the transformational technologies that exist today and how they will come together to address this emerging oil shortage.

The paper will also try to illustrate the potential business, national and regional affects of such transformation to the energy and related industries. It is important to note that as these markets are so complex and inter-dependent; many other events may happen can accelerate or alter the course of events described here. The technologies that are described here are all present today, and no scientific breakthrough was assumed or needed.

Current State

The world depends on oil today as its fundamental transportation energy source. Half of oil production is used to drive consumer cars, commercial transportation (mostly trucks and boats) and air transportation. With the emergence of china as an outsourcing powerhouse, and the internet as the global e-shopping mall, we have significantly increased the distance our global materials and finished goods travel, requiring more transportation fuels.

Even more critical, with the emergence of a consuming middle class in China and India, we have a sharp rise in demand for cars. Those cars in emerging countries drive on congested roads and use cheaper older engine technologies - creating an immense demand for fuel and tremendous amounts of car emissions.

Various solutions have been proposed in recent years, with varying degree of success. Most prominently, Ethanol as a short term fossil fuel replacement and Hydrogen infrastructure as a long-term solution, were touted as energy source and distribution mechanisms for our transportation needs. It is the authors’ belief that while Ethanol has a very important role to play in the short term it is not a long term solution at scale for the needs of driving a billion cars, which is the scale of our market within a few decades.

Hydrogen on the the other hand, is a fundamentally flawed approach due to the negative energy equation underlying the generation, storage and consumption of Hydrogen in cars. To understand the energy flow of fuel we need to understand the following energy/time cycle. Fossil fuel is the result of solar energy mixed with water in plants as we discover it after millions of years.

Over the millions of years, the earth’s core energy and pressure concentrate the Carbon-Hydrogen bonds into high energy density molecules that humans extract, refine and burn (inefficiently) in small car engines. Unlike most descriptors used, we as humanity do not produce oil; we merely discover and surface it. To understand the cycle, let’s examine what happens to crude oil after we have it on the surface. Through the application of an energy intensive process...

Much more at: http://www.evwind.es/noticias.php?id_not=977