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Winning the Oil Endgame Innovation for Profits, Jobs, and Security Volume 18 Issue 4 November 11, 2004 Winning the Oil Endgame Innovation for Profits, Jobs, and Security by Amory Lovins, E. Kyle Datta, Odd-Even Bustnes, Jonathan Koomey & Nathan Glasgow Editor's Note: Overpopulation and global warming may represent the two most dangerous time bombs threatening the world today. Our reliance upon oil is quite different: it is a gun to the forehead of our civilization. It saps our private and govern- ment budgets, our health, our economy, our international standing, and even our collective values as a nation. The key to the next efficiency What if someone laid out a clear roadmap that could break breakthrough, our addiction to oil using only market-oriented techniques previously slight- and no taxes, relying on innovation instead of mandates, not depending on major (if any) national legislation, and ed, is ultralight supporting, not distorting, business logic? materials now entering the Academy Fellow Amory Lovins has laid out the plan. He market. might not win Nobel Prizes in Peace and Economics (though they'd be richly deserved), but a Pulitzer and the National Book Award for Non-Fiction would provide partial compensation. Weight causes His just-released book Winning the Oil Endgame is a tour de force. Published by two-thirds to the Rocky Mountain Institute which he co-founded, in 330 pages of meticulous three-fourths of research this volume lays out an authoritative and comprehensive four-point total fuel con- strategy for profitably breaking oil's stranglehold on our civilization by: sumption. • Using oil more efficiently; • Substituting bio-fuels and biomaterials oil; It’s more impor- • Using natural gas more efficiently and substituting the saved gas for oil; tant to make a car light and • Substituting hydrogen for oil. low-drag than to Remarkably, virtually all the requisite technologies already exist. They are scal- make its engine able and cost-effective today! Nothing Lovins proposes requires technological more efficient leaps of science or faith. Amidst the recent spate of petro-gloom books, this one or to change its stands out for its brilliance, its mastery of the subject, and above all its positive fuel. view of the future. RMI's policies "will save a net $70 billion a year, revitalize key industries and rural America, create a million jobs, and enhance security." This excerpt covers a topic about which Amory Lovins is especially passionate: the substitution of carbon composite materials for steel in auto construction. This one factor might save more oil than any other single change we could make. The following passage, while somewhat technical in its first page or two, nonethe- less represents the book's authoritativeness, clarity, and utility. We hope it excites you to purchase or download the volume in its entirety, read it cover to cover, and demand action from business and government. This portion is reprinted through kind permission of www.oilendgame.org About the author: Amory Lovins is a Fellow of the World Business Academy and is co-founder and CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute (www.rmi.org), a 22-year-old, approximately 50- person, independent, nonpartisan, entrepreneurial, market-oriented, nonprofit applied research center in Old Snowmass, Colorado. RMI fosters the efficient and restorative use of natural and human capital to create a secure, prosperous, and life-sustaining world. He also founded and chairs RMI's fourth for-profit spinoff, Hypercar, Inc. (www.hypercar.com), and cofounded its third, E SOURCE (www. Cheap oil, esource.com), which was sold to the Financial Times group in 1999. At E SOURCE the world’s and its in-house predecessor, he led perhaps the world's deepest examination of advanced techniques for the efficient use of electricity through integrative seemingly design—later expanded into a broad approach to making very large resource savings cost less than small or no savings. He also developed most of the meth- irreplaceable ods now in use for making markets in saved energy; codified the 207 "distributed benefits" that can typically increase the economic value of decentralized genera- addiction, is no tors by an order of magnitude; and shaped much of the electricity policy agenda longer the only from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. His 1976 Foreign Affairs paper "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?"— widely credited with having redefined the en- or even the ergy problem in end-use/least-cost terms — suggested a level of year-2000 U.S. cheapest way energy consumption that is within 2% of its actual value. to do its vital A consultant experimental physicist educated at Harvard and Oxford, he has received an Oxford MA (by virtue of being a don), nine honorary doctorates, a and ubiquitous MacArthur Fellowship, the Heinz, Lindbergh, World Technology, and Hero for the tasks. Planet Awards, the Happold Medal, and the Nissan, Mitchell, "Alternative Nobel," Shingo, and Onassis Prizes; held visiting academic chairs; briefed 18 heads of state; published 29 books and several hundred papers; and consulted for scores of industries and governments worldwide, including many major electricity, oil, gas, and car companies. The Wall Street Journal's Centennial Issue named him among 39 people in the world most likely to change the course of business in the 1990s; Newsweek, "one of the western world's most influential energy thinkers"; Dr. Alvin Weinberg, for- 2 mer Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, "surely the most articulate writer on energy in the whole world today"; and Car magazine, the 22nd-most-powerful person in the global automotive industry. Dr. John Ahearne, then Vice President of Resources for the Future, remarked that "Amory Lovins has done more to as- semble and advance understanding of [energy] efficiency opportunities than any other single person." His technical work focuses on transforming the car, real-es- tate, electricity, water, semiconductor, oil, chemical, and several other sectors of the economy toward advanced resource productivity. His latest books are Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (with Paul Hawken and L. Hunter Lovins, 1999, www.natcap.org ) and Small Is Profitable: The Hidden Eco- nomic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size (RMI, 2002). He can be reached at Rocky Mountain Institute, 1739 Snowmass Creek Road, Ultrastrong Snowmass, CO 81654-9199, USA, 970 927 3129, fax –4178, [email protected]. carbonfiber composite auto- To catch up with and extend modern technology requires a deeper and wider view of what's possible, not just with hybrid and other advanced propulsion bodies can save options, but especially in reducing light vehicles' weight and drag. Because a typical car consumes about 7–8 units of fuel to deliver one unit of power oil and lives at to the wheels, every unit of tractive load saved by reducing weight and drag the same time, will save 7–8 units of fuel (or ~3–5 units in a hybrid). Automakers traditionally consider compounding losses as energy flows from tank to wheels, but it's and by greatly more fruitful to start at the wheels, save energy there, and turn those losses around backwards into compounding savings at the fuel tank. This requires simplifying systematic reductions in drag, rolling resistance, and especially weight, which manufacturing, is causally related to two-thirds to three-fourths of the total fuel consumption of a typical midsize sedan.263 Contrary to folklore, it's more important to make can give auto- a car light and low-drag than to make its engine more efficient or change its fuel. Yet this platform-physics emphasis has had less systematic attention makers a deci- than it deserves: weight reductions especially have been incremental, not yet sive competitive radical. Drag and rolling resistance Low aerodynamic drag needn't sacrifice styl- advantage. ing: even a brutish pickup truck can do it. The most important step is making the underside of the vehicle (which causes about one-fourth of the air drag) as smooth as the top, since the air doesn't know which side it's on. Low drag coefficients [Cd] need careful design and construction but don't cost much,264 and may even cut total vehicle cost by downsizing the powertrain. Fleetwide Cd has thus fallen 2.5%/y for two decades.265 It was ~0.55 for new American cars (0.6–0.7 for station wagons) and ~0.45 for new European cars in 1975, when a distinguished group of physicists concluded that "about 0.3–0.5 is probably near the minimum for a practical automobile…."266 Today, most production cars get ~0.3; the 2004 Toyota Prius, Mercedes C180, and Opel Calibra, 0.26; the Opel A2 1.2 TDI, Lexus LS/AVS, and Honda Insight, 0.25. GM's 1999 battery-electric EV1 got 0.19. GM's 2000 Precept concept sedan (Fig. 10a) cut Cd to 0.163, approaching Ford's mid-1980s laboratory records (Probe IV, 0.152, and Probe V, 0.137).267 Most light trucks today are still ~0.4–0.5, due largely to inattention and have a huge frontal area—around 2.5–3.5 m2, vs. 3 ~2.0 for U.S. passenger cars accommodating the same people.268 Tiremakers have also developed much-lower-drag versions without compro- mising safety or handling. Compared to the mid-1970s r0 norm of 0.015 or the 2001 norm of ~0.009269 (~0.010–0.011 for SUVs), 0.006 is "not uncommon" 270 The best tires, for the best car tires even today, and 0.005, tiremakers said a decade ago, "could be a realistic goal for a 'normal' [average] tire in 2015," with some developed for therefore even lower, at a marginal price around $130 per car.271 Test proce- dures and labeling requirements emerging in California will soon let buy- battery-elec- ers discover how efficient their tires are (previously a secret).
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