Winning the Oil Endgame

Amory Lovins and his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute have just published a new roadmap for getting the United States "completely, attractively, and profitably off oil." And if Lovins’ track record of getting new ideas into the marketplace are any indication, this book is one that will be talked about.

The tome, titled Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profits, Jobs, and Security, proffers four technological ways to displace oil:

• Double the efficiency of using oil. The U.S. today wrings twice as much work from each barrel of oil as it did in 1975; with the latest proven efficiency technologies, it can double oil efficiency all over again, says Lovins. The most important enabling technology is ultralight vehicle design. (Note: Lovins is founder of Hypercar, Inc., which specializes in lightweighting vehicles.) The vehicle’s total extra cost is repaid from fuel savings in about three years; the ultralighting "is approximately free," say the authors. Through emerging manufacturing techniques, such vehicles are becoming practical and profitable; the factories to produce them will also be cheaper and smaller.

• Apply creative business models and public policies to speed the profitable adoption of superefficent light vehicles, heavy trucks, and airplanes. Combined with more efficient buildings and factories, these efficient vehicles can cut the official forecast of oil use by 29% in 2025 and another 23% soon thereafter -- 52% in all.

• Provide another one-fourth of U.S. oil needs by a major domestic biofuels industry. Recent advances in biotechnology and cellulose-to-ethanol conversion can double previous techniques’ yield, yet cost less in both capital and energy, the authors maintain, adding: "Replacing fossil-fuel hydrocarbons with plant-derived carbohydrates will strengthen rural America, boost net farm income by tens of billions of dollars a year, and create more than 750,000 new jobs. Convergence between the energy, chemical, and agricultural value chains will also let versatile new classes of biomaterials replace petrochemicals."

• Use well-established, highly profitable efficiency techniques to save half the projected 2025 use of natural gas, making it again abundant and affordable, then substitute part of the saved gas for oil. If desired, the leftover saved natural gas could be used even more profitably and effectively by converting it to hydrogen, displacing most of the remaining oil use -- "and all of the oil use if modestly augmented by competitive renewable energy," say Lovins & Co.

The authors maintain that it will require $180 billion over the next decade to eliminate oil dependence and revitalize strategic industries, though the savings could be $130 billion gross, or $70 billion net, annually by 2025. “This saving, equivalent to a large tax cut, can replace today’s $10-billion-a-month oil imports with reinvestments in ourselves: $40 billion would pay farmers for biofuels, while the rest could return to our communities, businesses, and children,” say the authors.