Over the course of his first weeks in office, President Trump has outlined an America-first energy policy that appears to mean essentially one thing: More U.S. oil production. His policies are decidedly aimed at boosting oil production: green-lighting more drilling on federal lands, building more oil pipelines, and rolling back rules that harm the oil industry. But America First doesn’t necessarily mean a focus on American oil.
From a different perspective, the Fuel Freedom Foundation aims to boost the American economy and cut its dependence on OPEC by expanding the fuels available for automobiles. Fuel Freedom, argues for “ending our oil addiction” and boosting the use of a wide variety of alternatives: EVs, methanol, ethanol, fuel cells, biodiesel and other liquid fuels. This would dampen the price of oil, give consumers a financial break and cut imports from the Middle East, Fuel Freedom argues.
Fuel Freedom has released a tool that forecasts light-duty vehicle growth and electric-vehicle penetration worldwide. The online tool allows users to plug in their own estimates and see how it affects the long-term forecasts, providing a realistic view of where the market is heading over the next 35 years.
The result? As with all changes to the fuel supply, there’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Who is going to pay to install methanol-blend pumps before there are methanol-blend vehicles? Also, members of the group have said EPA needs to allow for modifications of engines so that higher blends of methanol or ethanol could work efficiently.
Who knows whether this is a better “America First” approach. Change is hard, and it is easy to imagine automakers, oil producers and Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) defenders lining up to shoot this down. But the market and technology dictate that some kind of change is coming. Could it be this one?
None of the scenarios in this discussion paper will limit greenhouse gases from causing a 2 degree C increase. Many of the big cities in this world, especially in China and India, are already congested with large traffic problems and severe air pollution. This brings into question the assumption that there will be 3 billion cars by 2050. Electrified mass transportation offers some hope.
Thank you Herschel. The scenarios evaluated were not specifically chosen as pathways to the 2 degree warming goal, rather they were actual projections of electric vehicle sales and overall light-duty vehicle fleet growth from various sources. The one exception is EV sales by the IEA, where that scenario is actually a target, not a projection, the IEA developed for EV sales to help meet the 2 degree scenario. However, that scenario did not appear to look at the overall fleet composition based on those EV sales figures – that’s where this analysis stepped in.
While this analysis did not look at the resultant GHG emissions effects of the various scenarios, what can be inferred though is that should any of these scenarios come to fruition, any GHG reduction strategy would have to address the large (and in most cases growing) ICE fleet – perhaps with lower GHG liquid fuels.
The projection of 3 billion LDVs by 2050 (more specifically 2.9 billion) is based on historical growth projected outward and is echoed by recent remarks by Carlos Ghosn of Renault/Nissan, among others.
Of course, we will not be driving any vehicles in 2050. The vehicles will be driving themselves. This will dramatically lower the cost for using Uber-like services below the cost of owning a car, so the number of cars will drop dramatically.
By 2050, the destructive impacts of climate change will be well understood and well underway. When liquid fuels are required (e.g., air travel), there will be a requirement that an equivalent amount of CO2 be removed from the atmosphere. This will make liquid fuels (except those that are really net-zero on a field-to-wheels basis) more expensive than electric alternatives. Of course, energy storage (batteries) will be orders of magnitude better and cheaper in terms of energy density and electric vehicles are inherently twice as efficient as ICE vehicles (burning = heat loss = low efficiency). So EVs will rule the day (assuming civilization is functioning somewhat normally).
As the saying goes, people overestimate how much things will change in the short term and underestimate how much things will change in the long run.
My “Gallery of Clean Energy Inventions” exhibit profiles 44 generators, 20 advanced self-powered electric vehicle innovations, 26 radioactivity neutralization methods, 24 space travel innovations, 14 technical solutions to water shortages, and a torsion field school network. The exhibit also includes 63 Hubble Space Telescope images and 25 movie posters. The exhibit can be installed in conventions, festivals, and any suitable public buildings such as universities, city halls, museums, shopping malls, and libraries. The exhibit is linked at padrak.com/vesperman and commutefaster.com/vesperman.html. A shorter version without movie posters and exhibit setup details is linked at https://app.box.com/CLEANENERGYEXHIBIT.
Meaningful discussions of energy sources and transportation choices should include insights that can be gleaned from serious examination of clean energy inventions that have been purposely ignored by universities and governments so as to protect huge profits earned by large fossil fuel and nuclear power companies which benefit from multi-billion-dollar subsidies from the federal government.
EVs will rule the day in spite of some oil company predictions. ….
Exxon predicts less than10% of cars will be EVs in 2040 … BNEF predicts “35% will have a plug”
Shell Oil says that oil demand will likely peak within the next five years followed by precipitous declines as electric vehicles come on-line en masse.
In Nov 2015 Goldman predicted a 37% annual growth rate through 2025 with battery costs falling another 60%.
Tesla and Chevy plan to sell cost competitive EVs by 2018, eliminating the high up front cost barrier to sales growth
BNEF predicts 1million EV SALES mark will be met THIS YEAR
Big factor in growth …the launch of high-power chargers which can deliver 100 miles of driving in ten minutes; and announcements by the German auto majors that they intend to cooperate to build rapid-charging networks.
EVs are the best way to reduce GHGs…
From BNEF … February 2, 2017 – “The growth of battery-powered cars could be as disruptive to the oil market as the OPEC market-share war that triggered the price crash of 2014, potentially wiping hundreds of billions of dollars off the value from fossil fuel producers in the next decade. About 2 million barrels a day of oil demand could be displaced […] “
Indeed, EV sales are rising and there is definitely potential for that to have a meaningful impact on petroleum demand. This study however took many of the predictions you cited, including that prediction by Goldman Sachs, and put it into a larger global fleet model to account for overall light-duty vehicle demand and vehicle retirements to see what that impact would be on the fleet. In the case of that Goldman Sachs prediction, when we put it into the global vehicle model, we saw that only about 27% of all light-duty cars on the road in 2050 will be EVs (this was in our low vehicle demand scenario – meaning with higher LDV demand that market share could be lower). Surely, 27% is a significant number, but is it enough to meet many of the ambitious goals and promises of EVs?
I invite you to download the tool and accompanying white paper explaining how the tool works, what sources were used, and detailing the nine scenarios we evaluated and their findings. I think you may find that the challenge is indeed very large.
I would challenge your market saturation figures.
“In early years of the adoption of any disruptive technology, growth rates are likely to be high. For example, in 2010, the first year mainstream EVs went on sale, 7,000 were sold. Then in 2011, 45,000 were sold. That’s a growth rate of 543%, even though 38,000 EVs is only a drop in the bucket of a larger car market that sells tens of millions of vehicles each year. As more vehicles come online each year, achieving huge growth rate increases becomes more difficult. What’s more, as more EVs are sold and the technology becomes more diffused into the mainstream, there will be fewer new customers, meaning less demand. It’s an effect known as market saturation.”
Bloomberg predicts 35 % of vehicles will be EVs in 2040. Your assumptions show less than ½ of that in 2040.
RMI has a good white paper on the issues that have held back EV sales so far … issues that will no longer apply as the price and distance of batteries is overcome and gasoline prices rebound … and which is beginning to happen.
Adoption rates will increase beyond 2025 as Shell expects. A saturation rate based on the specifics of the EV situation will be different than the one you used.
Thank you. As I’m reading it, and to clarify, BNEF’s report shows that 35% of new vehicle sales will be EVs by 2040; this does not mean that 35% of the vehicles on the road will be EV by 2040. Are you seeing that 35% as the total of vehicles on the road in the report? If so could you point me to where that is?
If situations that affect projections of sales and market saturation change, I would be happy to run those new scenarios in the model. As is, I used projections and targets available to us to model what the overall fleet will look like (beyond just new vehicle sales).
From M.Leibreich Keynote …
“A year ago, we were bullish on electric vehicles but significantly under-called the market, estimating 550,000 sales globally in 2016. Instead, sales came in around 700,000 units, an eye-watering 56 percent annual growth from around 450,000 in 2015. At the start of 2017, our advanced transport team’s central estimate is for a further jump to 900,000 EV sales this year, but Angus and I are going to throw prudence to the winds, run our hands through our grey sea-captain hair, and bet it breaks the million mark.”
Numbers show 2016 global sales, yes sales, not cars on the road, at 773,600, a 42% increase over 2015. Continuing that growth rate would mean 8 out of 10 cars sold in 2030 would be plug ins.
http://www.ev-volumes.com/country/total-world-plug-in-vehicle-volumes/
Your drop off growth rate to single digits, given the improved sales climate, seems further out of line than the 8-10 above.
Continued growth rates of 42% into perpetuity seems overly ambitious. Is a 42% growth rate feasible when EV sales are at, say, 5 million a year? That would mean the following year more than 2 million more EVs would need to be sold. Indeed, this does not align with an “s-curve” pattern for new technologies, and would instead be more of a hyperbola. The article you reference only talks about recent sales, with no informed projections to the future. This article does however mention that they believe we are entering the s-curve, meaning that at some point in the future, we will see sales increases slow.
Who said anything about “growth rates of 42% into perpetuity”? I certainly didn’t.
AND “Continuing that growth rate would mean 8 out of 10 cars sold in 2030 would be plug ins”, does indeed mean a predicted rate increase into 2030.
I am, I think, trying to make a valid point about when and how you applied your s-curve. That is all.
I’m sorry, I must’ve misread what you meant when you wrote “Continuing that growth rate would mean 8 out of 10 cars sold in 2030 would be plug ins.” The s-curves I found were all based on projections from BNEF, Goldman Sachs and targets established by the International Energy Agency. I did not derive the projections myself.
I would appreciate knowing where you got your Bloomberg numbers. The ones I have look very different.
https://data.bloomberglp.com/bnef/sites/4/2016/02/BNEF_EV-Forecast_2016_FINAL.pdf
“This projected change between now and 2040 will have implications beyond the car market. The research estimates that the growth of EVs will mean they represent a quarter of the cars on the road by that date,”
Jane, yes, that is the Bloomberg report that I used. I cross referenced that growth in EV sales with three other projections of overall LDV growth. In all cases, of course EV sales remained at 41 million in the year 2040 because that is what BNEF predicted. However, since I cross referenced with 3 other scenarios for overall LDV growth, that 41 million in EV sales did not always represent 35% of new vehicle sales. Either way, even in the scenario where it did have the largest sales penetration, it was still only 20% of the overall LDV fleet (vehicles on the road, old and new). This is mainly due to the longevity of vehicles on the road.
The Bloomberg report says that in 2040 EVs will represent 25% of the cars on the road. Your Bloomberg figures in your interactive chart shows no where near that 25% of EVs on the road in 2040. I understood those figures to be separate for each source.
Jane, yes, the interactive version shows a lower rate as it based on one of the scenarios that predicts a higher growth rate for the overall LDV fleet. However, in our report, in our lower fleet growth scenario, we get a similar number to the Bloomberg finding (still a bit different, most likely because our data for the current size of the fleet is different).
Your interactive chart shows 2040 Bloomberg number of EVs at about 1/2 the number that the Bloomberg report expects. I can only conclude I am looking at numbers skewed to your bias … which brings me back to my original comment that you need to review the EV market and revise your percentage declines accordingly.
The interactive model shows a “medium LDV growth” scenario. Other scenarios we ran had LDV fleet growth higher and lower. All scenarios were based on research and projections by top-tier research organizations. The medium growth scenario was chosen for the interactive model because it was indeed a middle of the line prediction, backed by sources, and was most in-line with historical and recent growth. We hide nothing, all of our data is available for download for free and we did our best to be transparent and show all of our findings.
Anyone who suggests that they know what the makeup of the fleet will be in 2050 is working more from advocacy than analysis. With that said, I do believe that the government should stay out of it except to enable consumers to make their own choices. It is most likely that by 2050, only 30-some years from now, we’ll still see both ICE and alternative fueled vehicles (AFV). Among the AFV alternatives, EVs clearly have a head start. But, unless there is a fundamental improvement in battery chemistries, EVs will still be limited by range and recharge times. Yes, they’re getting cheaper, but they are not getting fundamentally better.
In question 2, you inquire about subsidies for methanol blends. I’m not sure why you suggest this as a long term alternative buecause I don’t see that happening. But, yes, the PTC/ITC need to go away. In many cases wind and solar have become least-cost resources on the grid and no longer need the subsidy. So too for ethanol and the Renewable Fuel Standard which has been an unmitigated disaster. Improvements in engine efficiency have had a bigger impact than the RFS has which is why the blend wall for the RFS became so problematic.
I am surprised that the oil industry appears to be surrendering the market to EVs though perhaps I shouldn’t be as oil companies are not especially known for long term strategy. But, if it were me, I would be doing everything possible to foster the adoption of fuel cell vehicles (FCV). Because the hydrogen for FCVs comes primarily from petroleum, they represent one way for the oil industry to remain a player. Approximately 72% of petroleum is used for transportation. If they’re not fueling vehicles, there is no need for oil.
From a market perspective, I am also not sanguine about allowing the electric utility industry to extend its hegemony into the transportation sector. At least the price of gasoline is subject to supply and demand and competition. I am less thrilled about having my ability to get to work being subject to monopoly utilities and their regulators.
Monopoly utilities? Those too, hopefully, are becoming a thing of the past … see NY REV and CA, but the path to a new utility structure is being developed in lots of places
Richard: A few points:
1. The government should not stay out of energy decisions. It has stayed out of regulating carbon emissions so far and that is leading to enormous costs and impacts to society. When your individual choices lead to negative consequences for all future generations, government should intervene.
2. There are fundamental improvements in batteries on the way. Not only are batteries getting less expensive, but companies are working on greatly increasing the energy density of batteries so that reasonably priced cars with 400 mile range will be possible in less than a decade (already high-end Tesla’s can go over 300 miles and the mid-priced Bolt can go 200 miles). Charging times will also improve. You can now charge about 300 miles in one hour at a Tesla Supercharger and that could drop to 5~10 minutes in the next few years. However, home chargers will be limited to 50~100 amps which means about 50 miles/hour of charge. That’s no problem since you can charge overnight and you car is full every morning.
3. Fueling cars with hydrogen from fossil fuels isn’t the answer because it still results in the emissions of greenhouse gases. Joe Rohm did a series of articles on why hydrogen-fuels cars result in far higher carbon emissions that EVs.
4. Fueling cars with electricity is far cheaper than fueling them with gasoline. And if you don’t like your utility’s electricity prices, you can get solar panels and power your car at a low fixed rate for 25 years.
5. Scientists tell us we need to get to zero CO2 emissions by around mid-century and that is difficult if everyone is driving fossil-fueled vehicles. The good news is that EVs are better than ICE vehicles in every way except initial price and range… and both of those issues are improving rapidly.
Dan, you bring up some really interesting points about EVs and other vehicles and their potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, as this research shows, even aggressive EV growth rates will still mean many ICE vehicles on the road in 2050 (due in large part to demand from the developing world, where EV adoption will be more difficult). With that said, and notwithstanding the many benefits of EVs, should we not look to address GHG emissions from the billion or more ICEs that will remain on the road for decades to come no matter how aggressively the EV market expands?
Gal: You are correct that we will need to address the emissions from all the vehicles that are and will be on the road in the future (as well as all other emissions sources). Climate scientists tell us the only way to stay below dangerous +2ºC warming is to dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions to zero around mid- century and then have negative emissions of about 10 gigatons/year thereafter. The only way to do that at large scale is Direct Air Capture of CO2 with sequestration (though land use changes can help with the process). This means for every vehicle that emits CO2, there will need to be an additional amount of CO2 captured from the air and sequestered. This adds to the cost of using fossil fuels and, therefore, zero emissions solutions will probably be cheaper except in certain cases like air travel.
Note that fueling an EV is much cheaper than fueling an ICE vehicle and the developing world will care about that too. Also, in a decade, EVs should be as cheap or cheaper than equivalent ICE vehicles as battery technology improves.
Do you know if fueling EVs is still cheaper in the developing world where electricity is generally more expensive and infrastructure is lacking (and perhaps even in some developed countries that may have especially high electricity rates)? I have tried to determine the answer to that myself and have yet to find a reliable answer.
I do hope that EVs indeed become more cost competitive with ICEs, but am a bit hesitant in agreeing that that will be the case even for light-duty trucks (say like the F-150) within 10 years, and if so, if charging times and infrastructure constraints are also overcome by then. Also, if so, it’s yet to be seen if that will be the case worldwide or just in say California and Scandinavia?
Gal: We are discussing the world a few decades from now. Renewable energy (wind and solar) is at par or cheaper than centralized fossil fuel electricity generation now, and renewables costs continue to drop. I think there is little doubt that renewable electricity (centralized and distributed) will become the energy of choice for developing countries in the decades ahead.
Throw in the issue that fossil fuels contribute to climate change (which will be getting much worse in the decades ahead and climate induced drought is contributing famine in Africa today), and the choice of renewables over fossil fuels for developing countries becomes a no-brainer.
I agree – certainly decreasing costs will only make the case for renewables grow stronger and this is most likely an inevitability. I just caution, given the findings presented here, how fast that transition can take place in the LDV sector given the longevity of vehicles and the already existing fueling infrastructure. I think that shows that GHG reduction strategies need to address that large portion LDVs that may remain ICEs for decades still to come. Also, I caution that it may be hard for consumers in developing markets to take the indirect costs of fossil fuel use (i.e. climate impacts) into account when they are on a much tighter budget and may therefor be more inclined to focus on immediate, out-of-pocket costs.
While developing countries have an excuse for ignoring the external cost of fossil fuels when they are focused on day-to-day survival, we (the developed world) have no such excuse. We are sacrificing our children’ future to save a few dollars today.
Dan: I’m not advocating that government should stay completely out of energy decisions. But, I also don’t believe that providing subsidies that favor one technology at the expense of another is the way to go either. Rather, I suppose I favor the (admittedly unpopular) command and control approach. If the externality (emissions or otherwise) is bad, tell us what the allowable limit should be and let the market find the most efficient way to meet it.
On a wheel-to-wheels basis, the emissions debt from going to a fuel cell still compares favorably with an EV, especially when that electricity comes from a coal fired power plant — which will still be with us in 2050 like it or not. And please don’t tell me about putting solar on my roof as an alternative to buying power from the utility. That is simply not a practical solution for all but a small segment of the market.
As for creating hydrogen from petroleum, I’m not necessarily advocating that. I’m simply saying that I find it remarkable that the oil industry is not more aggressively pursuing that as a long term survival strategy. That said, there are ways to capture the CO2 or generate the H2 by electrolysis of water (of course depending on the source of the electricity to do that). What I’m saying here is that there are so many alternatives and subalternatives that trying to predict or, worse, create the future 35 years from now is a fools errand. I prefer to see work on all of these fronts rather than simply declare battery EVs the winner at this point.
With regard to batteries, I stand by my earlier comment that, while they are getting cheaper, they are not getting fundamentally better. Yes, Tesla is reducing the charging times. But it is a problem of physics. The faster you charge a Li-ion battery, the more you degrade its life expectancy in terms of recharge cycles and its ultimate energy storage capability. We really need to find a different chemistry and, though some have been proposed, none have worked out — yet.
Richard: While command and control might be a possible solution, it is not politically viable now and may not be until things start to break down (think martial law). There is already too much CO2 in the atmosphere so how do you set the limit? (The last time CO2 was its current value, 400 ppm, sea levels were 75 feet higher than today.) A rising carbon tax with 100% of the money collected distributed back to every legal resident will dramatically lower emissions while increasing jobs and the GDP, so it’s a much better way to go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k2-SzlDGko
I don’t believe that hydrogen can compete with batteries. See these analyses by Joe Rohm:
https://thinkprogress.org/tesla-trumps-toyota-why-hydrogen-cars-cant-compete-with-pure-electric-cars-326468e3dbc2#.ib42l4eua
https://thinkprogress.org/elon-musk-is-right-hydrogen-is-an-incredibly-dumb-car-fuel-d0f37a4c9bee#.4k42mxlp2
Batteries are getting better. We have a company working on a breakthrough battery that will be available in a year, though it is not targeted at EVs. Others are working on 4X energy density for L-ion batteries for EVs and that is on the way. Normal supercharging does not hurt batteries. I have 88,000 miles on my Tesla and it has experienced many superchargings and the battery has degraded about 2% since I bought it. Remember, most charging will be relatively slowly overnight.
First Word Energy is locked in the past and driven by belief that CO2 is a serious problem. Before getting to the government’s role in mobility, the empirical evidence clearly shows the temperatures and CO2 emissions do not move in lock step. The reason is that water vapor is the predominant greenhouse gas and its atmospheric concentrations have not been increasing. Hence, no enhanced feedback.
Since the 1970s, the government has meddled in the vehicle fuel market forcing auto manufacturers to make small cars that people don’t want and making larger cars more expensive because of the need to subsidize the smaller ones. Instead of growing more dependent on OPEC, we have had a resurgence in domestic production. Claiming that there is an “addiction” reveals the author’s real philosophy. People choose gasoline because it is cheaper and more energy dense than the alternatives and its externalities are addressed by various regulations.
We have experimented with widespread use of ethanol and the results were bad. Ground water contaminated by it could not be easily cleaned up and it’s a poison. The asserted benefits of ethanol have been shown to be non existent. Government should set tailpipe emissions standards that are scientifically and economically grounded in reality and let auto and fuel manufacturers meet them without mandates.
EVs have a market because they are heavily subsidized by a Government that believes in picking winners. It’s track record is not encouraging unless you are Elon Musk who gets richer as a result of California’s zero emission rule and the sale of Tesla which only survives because tax payers are forced through those subsidies to make these symbols of environmental awareness cheaper for elites.
Billions of dollars are being poured into advancing battery technology. If the cost and recharging frequency can be reduced significantly, EVs may have a market. Let them compete without crony capitalism getting in the way.
Bill: It’s astonishing that you claim that CO2 is not a serious problem. You are going against every major scientific academy in the world. But as CEO of the George C. Marshall Institute, it was your job to sow doubt about the scientific consensus about global warming.
http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt
Let’s look at a few of your comments:
“the empirical evidence clearly shows the temperatures and CO2 emissions do not move in lock step”… Well, no one says that they move in “lock step”, but they are highly correlated and the recent (last 50 years) dramatic rise in global temperatures is directly attributable to man’s burning of fossil fuels (and land use changes). There aren’t any other valid explanations. The Sun’s output is at a minimum for the century. What do you think has caused us to warm more than +1ºC since the industrial revolution?
https://skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect-advanced.htm
“water vapor is the predominant greenhouse gas and its atmospheric concentrations have not been increasing”… While water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas, it is short lived and varies day to day and hour to hour. CO2 is long lived (excess emissions last for hundreds to thousands of years) so it acts like a thermostat in controlling the average amount of water vapor. And contrary to what you said, water vapor is increasing, on average, as global temperatures rise.
https://skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas-intermediate.htm
“EVs have a market because they are heavily subsidized”… While EVs are subsidized, fossil fuels are subsidized far more (How about that $1+ trillion oil war in Iraq?) and, while you try to confuse people on the issue, there are tremendous external costs of using fossil fuels (health issues, climate change, damaged environments) that are not included in the cost of the fuel and that subsidy is probably bigger than any other. So if you want to EVs to compete on a level playing field, you should advocate for a carbon tax that accounts for all those externalities.