“We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.” ~Albert Einstein
Love of Driving
We Americans love to drive our cars. All told, we own more than 242 million road vehicles—nearly one vehicle for every person in the country—and we travel 12,000 miles per vehicle each year. Virtually all of these vehicles are powered by petroleum-based fuel.
Driving is part of the American way of life. While we represent 5 percent of the world's population, Americans use more than 33 percent of all oil consumed for road transportation. And as other countries adopt our lifestyle of freedom and mobility, the demand for oil is increasing.
In the early 70's, over half of the globe essentially didn't use any oil. Today, everyone is hooked on trying to create a society that looks like us.
Other people want to live like us: they want cars and a nice house, air conditioning and refrigeration. Any whey shouldn't they??
The U.S. light-duty vehicle fleet (automobiles, pickup trucks, SUVs, vans and small trucks) currently consumes 150 billion gallons (550 billion liters) of gasoline a year, or 1.3 gallons of gasoline per person a day. If other nations burned gasoline at the same rate, world consumption would rise by a factor of almost 10.
The number of vehicles worldwide, now 750 million, is expected to triple by 2050, thanks largely to the expanding buying power of customers in China, India and other rapidly developing countries.
Daily use of petroleum worldwide:
- 53 million barrels a day for transportation overall
- 29 million barrels a day for land transport for people
- 19 million barrels a day for land transport for freight
- 5 million barrels a day for air transport for people and freight
- One barrel of oil is needed to produce 42 gallons of gasoline.
- 97 percent of transportation fuel currently comes from crude oil.
In order to continue at today's pace, we'll have to increase our world supply from 80 million barrels a day to 120 million barrels a day by 2030.
If Saudi Arabia has now exceeded their sustainable peak supply, then the world has now exceeded its sustainable peak supply. So what will happen when the world runs out of oil? We're told that we've got about another 50 years before this happens, but there are many reasons to believe otherwise. There's a lot of speculation and disagreement on the topic “peak oil”, but one fact is not debatable: oil has a very finite supply.
The United States was the biggest producer of oil for over 100 years and no one thought we'd ever peak.
- The US has only 2% of the known reserves of oil.
- The US uses 25% of the world's oil supply.
- Iran peaked at 6 million barrels a day back in 1978.
- OPEC exaggerates how much oil it's got left for all sorts of political reasons
"In 1985, Kuwait added 50% overnight to its reserves. At that time, OPEC had constraints on what you could produce: the more you reported (reserves), the more you could produce. Two years later, Venezuela doubled its reserves overnight. That caused other countries, and finally Saudi Arabia, to announce enormous increases overnight simply to protect their production quota. These numbers have stayed the same since, and it is absolutely implausible to imagine that the numbers should stay the same when they're all the time producing."—Colin Campbell
You produce 8 or 9 million barrels a day and at the end of the year, your reserves are the same as they were in the beginning—as they were ten years ago. They say, “Well, that's our plan. We raise our reserves to match what we've produced, so the reserves are the same as they were the year before.”
Julie and I watched a special on Abu Dhabi earlier this year. They're the largest of the seven United Arab Emirates, situated in the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula on the Persian Gulf, bordering Oman and Saudi Arabia.
- They're building at a massive scale— 1/4 of the world's construction cranes are currently in Abu Dhabi. Their reason: they say that they'll be out of oil in 8 years and then they'll have to depend on tourism.
- From 1970 to 2000, more than 40% of the increase in world energy supply came from within industrialized regions such as the United States, Europe and Australia. However, over the next 25 years, experts project that more than 90 percent of new oil supplies will come from more unstable regions including the Middle East, West Africa and the former Soviet Union.
- During the past two decades, the United States oil policy has been to rely on our allies in the Persian Gulf such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman, as well as major exporters like Venezuela and Nigeria, to provide the oil we need.
Until now: by replacing our deterioration highway infrastructure and crumbling power grid with the Solar Roadways™, we'd create a system that will support the recharging of all-electric vehicles. Using all-electric vehicles will eliminate the need for internal combustion engines. The removal of internal combustion engines eliminates our need for oil.
Electric cars have actually been around for a long time. They've just never been very practical, do to the fact that they have to be recharged and there has never been an infrastructure for that. The Solar Roadways™ allow electric cars to recharge at any rest stop or business that has a parking lot made up of Solar Road Panel™s. Drivers can recharge their vehicles while eating at a restaurant or shopping at a mall.
Summary
We can't wait any longer to find a replacement for oil, which is rapidly disappearing. Our dependency on oil has long been a matter of national security and we don't want to wait until it's gone (or we're cut off) to decide what to do next. The scenario if frightening. We have the technology to solve this problem in a relatively short period of time, which may be all we have left.