Diesel, paradoxically, is due for a new golden age- nanoparticle additions, promised by experiments in Oxford, will increase burning and efficiency by 8-10 per cent while removing foul exhaust fumes. Cars running on diesel already offer greater mileage without incurring the large outlays and battery renewal costs of hybrids.
Biofuels have everyone swooning in fresh anticipation (the love affair erupts every fifteen years, to coincide with the latest oil crisis) and the yield could be colossal. Ethanol is an American boondoggle. It is used as a way for politicians in Washington to appease farmers (as brutally enacted in the TV show The West Wing, during primaries in the presidential race). At worst, the fuel requires its equivalent in oil to produce. The best outcome involves using crop residues, so a double benefit is achieved. Dr Timothy Jones, at the University of Arizona at Tucson, has even discussed mining America ’s vast number of landfills, where concentrated organic matter could provide anything from methane to oils. He claims more than 20 per cent of his nation’s fossil fuels could be replaced in this way. Ron Oxburgh says this source could one day be enough to run America ’s entire fleet of cars and trucks.
Ron is a sheer delight as a friend. He’s as eminent as you can get without being embalmed. House of Lords, former head of Imperial College London, once head of Defence Procurement in the UK, a lively chairman of Shell Oil, this snowy-haired, bushy-browed geologist, with his lilting, almost-Welsh accent, is as close to being the best authority on energy anywhere. At our last meeting in Sydney, at the end of 2006, he was as outspoken as ever about climate change:
The evidence that emissions from fossil fuels are modifying the Earth’s climate is overwhelming. Unless we act fast to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there will be damaging and irreversible environmental change; and Australia looks like being very vulnerable. There will be costs, but doing nothing is even more expensive in the long run.
He was proved right almost immediately, when it was announced by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology early in 2007 that we are already suffering more than almost any other nation from the effects of climate change.
So what does Ron recommend? In terms of transport-linked sources, there are quite a few possibilities, but it is their adjuncts that will make the difference. He says that the intermittent-flow energy technologies-such as wind, solar and tidal power-will be transformed by redox flow batteries, which can store unlimited amounts of juice and make it available instantly. These energy cells, also known as vanadium redox batteries and patented by UNSW in 1986, are being harnessed to store wind power by the Irish, who expect to get half of their base-load electricity from this source in the near future.
Then there’s the jatropha tree. It grows in arid zones and in Australia is regarded as a weed. Its nut yields an oil that can be produced for about $US3.60 a gallon (about 60 cents more than ordinary diesel). The residue can be used to feed cattle, says Ron, and he has put some of his own money into schemes now flourishing in Mali, Tanzania, India, Thailand and South Africa. The key to success will be quality control in refining.
Lord Oxburgh, like Tim Jones, is keen on oil from corpses. Here is how Brad Lernley of Cosmos magazine reported this story:
It is the worst stuff in the world. Eighteen tonnes of turkey offal-rotting heads, gnarled feet, slimy intestines and lungs swollen with putrid gases-slides down a dump truck into a 24-metre-long hopper with a sickening glorp. The smell is worse than the sight: an assertive mélange of midsummer corpse with fried-liver overtones and a distinct faecal note.
But two hours later, sterile as you please, an oil truck pulls up behind this Thermal Conversion Process plant in the small American Midwest town of Carthage, Missouri, and the driver attaches a hose from a nearby stationary tank to the truck’s intake valve. One hundred and fifty barrels of oil (23,800 L), worth $US12,300, gushes into the truck’s tank, and off it goes to an oil company that will blend it with heavier fossil-fuel oil to upgrade the stock.
The real challenge, though, it seems to me, will be social. Stunning new machines exist for us to use as trains, planes or road vehicles, but in the main, we misuse them. Concorde has gone, super trains are exotic wonders, and Arnie’s Tesla car could legally use only one-tenth of its capacity on Australia ’s roads.
Imagine, instead, a transport system in which the approach of your bus would be signalled with a ping on your mobile phone and you could stroll to the bus stop knowing the wait would be barely a minute (this technology is ready). Imagine forsaking your car (converting the garage into a romper room or workshop) and having a vehicle-a carlet-only when you really needed it. As private cars already cost more than the taxi equivalent of trips taken, you would also save heaps. Imagine taking trains from the centre of town and moving at 300-350 kph to your destination, getting off just a five-minute walk from where you want to be. Imagine making a plane trip special again, instead of a long-distance endurance test.
Imagine biking or walking (running) to where you want to be, without playing dodgems with killer traffic. And imagine converting your rushed attendance at the gym into a health-giving routine, in which your legs don’t engage with a treadmill going nowhere but take you where you want to be. Imagine that your exercise in exasperation, in going shopping at the supermarket beyond the ring road with three apoplectic kids, is turned into an Internet search for bargains followed by delivery right to your door by an electric go-cart. Imagine travelling only when you really want to. All the time with a smug grin on your face from your appreciation that you’re not wrecking the neighbourhood.
And that future could be ours. Not in 2027, or 2037- but tomorrow!
The Hunches of Nostradamus
2008 Cost of petrol rises from a low point of $0.85 to a high of $2.35 in Australia. Some 56 per cent of people say they would rather die than not drive their cars. Some do.
2009 Singapore and London announce electronic pricing for all roads.
2010 Traffic jams in Beijing and Thailand last four days. Twenty-seven babies born in cars.
2011 Proportion of Sydney residents commuting by car goes up from 72 per cent to 79 per cent. Pedestrian arrested in Canberra.
2012 Petrol reaches $3.20 a litre. Twenty-four per cent of Saudi Arabians are billionaires.
2013 In Sydney and Melbourne 347 car drivers die of starvation.
2014 Japanese launch railway network with bullet trains travelling at 670 kph.
2015 Richard Branson offers trips to the moon for $3.5 million. The first to go find a Starbucks in the Sea of Tranquillity.
2016 Perth removes all cars from within city boundaries. Citizens discover legs.
2017 In Beijing pollution causes fall in life expectancy to 29 years.
2018 Oil Wars break out. Sydney executives no longer allowed free car as part of salary package. Most break down and cry.