One great misunderstanding out there is what oil is used for and the lack of understanding of the different components of oil. People automatically associate oil with gasoline, but gasoline production is just a little under 50% of what oil is utilized for. There is about another 25% of it for fuels such as diesel, kerosene, fuel oil, and similar fuels. The other 25% is used for materials production such as plastics, chemicals, and lubricants as a general group.
If we could completely replace cars it would be a great step in averting the crisis, maybe to the next generation, but would be far from a solution. There still needs to be a solution for the myriad of chemicals derived from oil, finding adequate replacements for kerosene, diesel, heating oil, fuel oil, jet fuel, and the slew of other oil products.
The additional problem with this is finding the source of energy for the production of these replacement fuels and chemicals. This is the part where many people gloss over, as understanding the modeling of energy can be tricky. Oil is energy pre-encapsulated. The energy is captured chemically in oil from pressure over millions of years, the heat from the earth in the process, and the original biological the oil was created out of. When creating a fuel from scratch we need to find an energy source for the process.
Let’s use hydrogen as an example of an alternative fuel. It is one of the core building blocks of the universe and found anywhere usually chemically bonded in some fashion. The main source for us to recover hydrogen would be water. To fee hydrogen of its chemical bond we need to use a large amount of energy to free it into its elemental form where its properties make it an energy source (It simply wants to return that energy used to free it by rebonding).
We measure this process of energy cost in creating a fuel as the measure of EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested). Oil right now has a ratio if 20 to 1, twenty units of energy returned for every one used in the recovery of the resource. Our friend hydrogen however is very close to a 1:1 or even lower. Hydrogen is not technically an energy source as oil is; it is an energy carrier in this form. The process must be powered by some other form of energy creation.
This leaves us with the need to add to our existing energy and power production process. Getting back to our original point if we were to replace every car in the world with an electric car, there wouldn’t be the energy to charge these cars for use. Right now the estimate in the united states is that we would need to quadruple our electrical energy to even come close to covering the energy we receive from oil in its ready to use forms.
