Fuel for the car

Staying mobile

If we want to maintain the same level of mobile flexibility we currently enjoy, we need to make smart use of our energy resources. Use an app to find interesting people who have the same travel plan as you. Buy a car that gets the most out of each drop of oil by hybrid technology or better drive electric. At AVportable we evaluate energy consumption and sustainability in general as critical success factor for each project.

Expensive Oil

Oil is getting more expensive and that hurts. All easy (cheap) oil is almost used, we're moving towards expensive oil (fracking, bio-ethanol, deep-sea oil, tar sands, etc.).

Oil as an energy source needs to be replaced relative soon (are we already past peak Oil?), while the Oil price moves towards infinity in 52 years when its expected to be depleted with current consumption patterns. Oil scarcity is limiting economic growth. Which means we can buy less stuff. As a bigger and bigger chunck of our productive capacity is needed to supply our energy there is less productive capacity left for fun stuff.

Oil Facts

Our projected total world oil reserve is around 1.5 Trillion barrels of oil. Oil production has reached a peak during the last 5 years around 80 Million barrels per day. This means at the current consumption rate within 52 years all oil is consumed. And probably faster as the more difficult oil costs significant more oil to produce (energy lost on energy production).

Ok, how about one of the top oil producing countries, Saoudi Arabia? There oil consumption is increasing steadily by around 4,8% while their oil production has been stable around the last 20 years. If that trend continous, Saoudi Arabia will become an oil importer by 2038. So within 26 years from now.

Lithium Ion battery powered cars are a transition solution

Let's move within 10 years everybody to hybrid cars to reduce full consumption. There are more than 1 Billion cars active world wide. If we get 30% of them to replace their car with a hybrid or range extended car using Lithium Ion batteries all currently estimated worldwide available Lithium will be used. Assuming a car uses 80KG of Lithium to have some range and the world wide Lithium reserves are 23Million tonnes. That doesnt scale up either..

FuelCells

Platinum is one of a handful of metals known by men that are denser than gold, found in the crust in about the same abundance of the latter. But it is much harder to find and mine, thus its annual production is about 10% of that of gold, in the order of 200 tones. Every year close to 60 million cars are produced in the world, if all of them required the usage of platinum, those 200 tones would translate into little over 3 grams (about 0.15 cm3) per car; fuels cells require in the order of 0.5 grams of platinum per W of power output. Any massification of fuel cells shall require totally platinum free technology.

Whats next?

There is no complete answer yet for our mass transportation sustainability, its our desire to contribute on solutions to build towards this answer.

References:

Total world oil reserves: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2178rank.html

Daily word oil production: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2173rank.html http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5395

Saoudi Arabia Oil Consumption: http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?country=sa&product=oil&graph=consumption

Saoudi Arabia Oil Production: http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?country=sa&product=oil&graph=production

World Wide Lithium reserves, and energy storage in a car setup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium