Preparing Transportation for Oil Depletion

This commentary is based on the authors’ Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil. Reprinted with permission.

Much of Transport Revolutions is taken up with reviewing previous revolutions in transportation and describing transportation today, its impacts and energy use. The energy analysis notes that 95 per cent of motorized travel and freight movement by land, sea, and air is fuelled by oil products, accounting worldwide for consumption of some 60% of crude oil. Just over 50% of oil-based transport fuels moves people, just under 50% moves freight.

Motorized movement of people grows by about 2% per year worldwide, totaling some 20 trillion person-miles; about a quarter of this comprises travel in, to, and from the U.S. Motorized movement of freight grows by about 4% per year, totaling some 40 trillion ton-miles; about a sixth of this comprises freight movement in, to, and from the U.S. Oil use for transportation grows more slowly than transport activity but more quickly than use for other purposes.

Overwhelmingly, motorized movement of people is by land, about 90% of total person-miles, and movement of freight is by water, about 75% of total ton-miles. More than a third of all freight activity is movement of oil and oil products.

Motorized transportation provides enormous benefits. It facilitates and even stimulates just about everything now regarded as progress. It also produces major costs, notably fatalities and injuries from road traffic crashes, and the adverse effects of emissions from the burning of oil products in vehicles’ internal combustion engines.

Modern societies require prodigious amounts of transportation for their functioning, now almost wholly fuelled by oil products. During the next decade major shortfalls are likely to emerge between ‘business-as-usual’ projections of oil consumption and oil production. The resulting scarcity and high oil prices will present what may be humankind’s greatest challenge, more than climate change, at least for the short and medium terms.

Our assessment of numerous alternatives to oil as a transport fuel concludes that, as oil depletion progresses, only electricity could reasonably power acceptable levels of land transportation. Oil products will be increasingly limited to fuelling marine transportation and aviation.

Movement over water can be highly fuel efficient if speeds are low; and oil use can be further reduced by exploiting wind energy. (Transport Revolutions’ cover portrays a ship deploying a towing kite.) There are no feasible alternatives to oil products for aviation, which could undergo the most radical changes over next few decades. It could be increasingly confined to large, fully occupied aircraft flying a small number of mostly intercontinental routes.

Electricity is an advantageous energy source for land transportation in every respect except one: it cannot be stored on board vehicles in acceptable quantities. This disadvantage can be overcome by delivering electricity to vehicles while in motion. Grid-connected electric vehicles have provided transportation for at least as long as vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. As electric trains, streetcars, and trolleybuses, they provide most public transit in most of the world’s major cities. We anticipate substantial expansion in the use of this kind of vehicle, with development and some deployment of unfamiliar systems including trolley trucks and personal grid-connected vehicles.

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