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Electric Transportation - 5/29/08

Hobert Pruitt
Beyond Fossil Fuel Columnist

With crude oil currently around $130 a barrel and predictions of $150 by the end of this year, plus the likely possibility of $200 in a few years, things in the transportation world will change.

As the supply and demand factors push oil higher the world will start to wean itself off of solely using petroleum based transportation. Oil could then fall back to $150 and go flat for a number of years.

I believe there will be an explosion of electric transportation in all forms. Cars, busses, trains and trams will all start using this cheap existing technology. At the beginning of the 20th century most cities had overhead electric lines that powered trains and busses till “Big Oil” came in and bought them out and dismantled these systems creating the demand for oil we see today.

Electric transportation is 80% efficient as compared to 40% for petroleum based automobiles. In the movie Who killed the Electric Car it shows how much lower maintenance there is to an electric car compared to a petroleum based car. No oil to change and very few moving parts compared to a regular car. It is projected the Chevy Volt will be available in 2011 when lithium battery technology advances enough to allow the car to run solely on electricity for the first 40 miles. Then the car switches over to gasoline to recharge the battery. Most people don’t drive over 40 miles in one day so this would be a perfect fit.

China and India will most likely lead in the electric transportation department since they are adding more cars per capita, per year than any other country. Not going electric will be a greater drag on their economies than for the western countries.

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