When I was a new driver, “muscle cars” were all the rage. We drove for effect, not economy–that was especially true, as these cars only got eight miles per gallon. But the world has changed since the 1960s, and our expectations of cars have evolved with it. Today, as fuel prices surge above $3 per gallon, we would love to see cars with four times the efficiency of the big iron of the 1960s and a fuel that is half as expensive.
As the president of Battelle Energy Technology, I’d love to tell you that those sorts of vehicles are looming on the near horizon. But the realities of this huge technological change are daunting, so let me tell you a more likely path to realizing this ambition.
In an age when the price-per-barrel has reached an all-time high and our country (as well as the world) is concerned about the effect of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, there is little doubt that we should reduce our use of oil. Increasingly, we will be competing for petroleum with the developing economies of China and India at a net cost of over $750 million dollars a day for imported oil.
Some people will suggest we need to develop hydrogen as a source of transportation fuel. While I consider the future of this element to be bright, I don’t think it shines with the same radiance as electricity in the near-to-mid run.
Certainly, hydrogen power is alluring–it burns cleanly and its waste product is water. In reality, hydrogen is a long-term option. For fully hydrogen-powered cars to be sitting on the showroom floors of dealers by, say, 2015, major technological breakthroughs would have to occur, not to mention immense capital investments and the construction of a new pipeline infrastructure. It represents an investment equal to the one made over the last six decades in natural gas transport and distribution.
Moreover, hydrogen is a challenge to economically produce and transport at the scales required to fuel fleets of fuel-cell vehicles, much more so than electricity, where we already have the grid in place to wheel power across distances and into our homes and workplaces. For fuel cells to become the power plant of choice, costs and durability need to improve dramatically for long-term, everyday use. Again, it’s a promising solution we should pursue, but one that hasn’t yet made the leap from laboratory to the marketplace.
If we consider electricity as a transportation “fuel,” we can take advantage of the momentum that we are seeing for gas-hybrid and diesel-hybrid drives and build toward a future that represents the ultimate in fuel-switching–electricity.
Correctly managed, U.S. utilities produce almost enough electric energy right now to power electric cars and light trucks if all of them in America switched from oil to electric. Off-peak electricity production (made late at night or early in the morning) and transmission capacity could fuel 84% of America’s 198 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is managed by Battelle, recently evaluated the impact of plug-in hybrids on foreign oil imports, the environment, electric utilities and the consumer.
They found current batteries for these cars can easily store the energy for driving the national average commute–about 33 miles round trip a day, so the study presumes that drivers would charge up overnight when demand for electricity is much lower. What’s more, advances in battery technology promise substantially greater range within the next decade.
Since 73% of our imported oil is converted to gasoline, the trade balance and national security benefits of switching to electricity as a transportation fuel are intriguing. It allows us to tap into low-carbon sources of electricity, from renewables to nuclear. And utilities could transition to accommodate the growth of hybrid vehicles without building new plants or stretching new wires by managing off-peak power flows to recharge vehicles, making better use of the capital already deployed.
In the long run, the steady demand for electricity is likely to result in investments in much cleaner power plants, even if coal remains the dominant fuel for our electricity production. And it’s far easier and less expensive to catch carbon dioxide from a smokestack than a car’s tailpipe, so greenhouse emissions could go down.
Certainly plug-in hybrids are expected to cost about $6,000 to $10,000 more than existing vehicles. But depending on the price of gas and the cost of electricity, estimates range that the consumer will break even in five to eight years–about the current lifespan of a battery.
Following this path would begin a migration from our current imported oil domination to a system of progressively more efficient vehicles that make use of the full range of fuels available to us, including electricity. Conservatively, these approaches could reduce oil imports for transportation by as much as 50% over the next few decades with minimal impact on our economy and lifestyles.
Who knows? Maybe plug-in hybrids will be as cool to our grandchildren as muscle cars were to all of us “boomers” in the 1960s–and the sound systems will be so much better than eight-track tapes.
Don McConnell is president of Battelle Energy Technology and has been in the energy industry for more than 30 years.