Petroleum's Long Good-bye

By Kevin Bullis

Credit: David Rosenberg/Getty Images

DATA SHOT 10.7 kilometers The depth of the well drilled by BP to reach a giant oil field beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Advances in extraction technology have continually pushed back the date at which petroleum reserves are expected to be depleted.

For the next few decades at least, liquid hydrocarbons--gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel--will continue to be the mainstays of transportation. They're cheap; refueling is fast; and their energy density, crucial to long-distance travel, is hard to beat.

"Advanced technology is going to happen slowly," says Daniel Sperling, the director of the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California at Davis and a member of the California Air Resources Board. "The focus needs to be on making conventional technology more efficient."

It should be possible to reduce the fuel consumption of a midsize sedan by up to 60 percent without sacrificing size or performance, using mostly existing technology. Lightweight materials will help. Advanced turbocharging and fuel-injection technology will extract more power from smaller engines that lose less energy to friction (see "Research to Watch"). Similarly, making airplanes lighter and their engines more efficient could cut their fuel consumption 30 to 50 percent by 2020.

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Biofuels should help curb petroleum consumption, although the contribution they make will depend on many factors, including the price of oil and the development of new technologies. The International Energy Agency has estimated that by 2050, ethanol and biodiesel could meet 13 percent of global demand for transport fuel. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that biofuel consumption in the United States will increase from 7.7 billion gallons per year in 2007 to 35 billion gallons by 2030 while consumption of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel combined holds steady at about 220 billion gallons per year.

At first, most biofuels will be ethanol made from corn or sugarcane. The amount of ethanol that can be produced from these sources, particularly corn, is constrained by the need for farmland. What's more, the greenhouse-gas reductions achieved are minimal, because producing corn ethanol takes a lot of fossil fuel. But cellulosic sources of ethanol, such as switchgrass and wood, can be grown on marginal lands, greatly increasing potential fuel production. And the process of making ethanol from these materials consumes less fossil fuel. Corn ethanol contains roughly 1.3 to 1.7 times the energy of the fossil fuels used to make it; for cellulosic ethanol, it's about 4.4 to 6.1 times as much. By 2030, a significant portion of biofuels will be synthesized from biomass using biological and thermochemical techniques to create gasoline and diesel fuels. Such biofuels could even eclipse cellulosic ethanol.