A World Without Oil

Almost every week in recent months, crude oil price had been jumping to a record high. This is crazy. There is no other industry like oil that had caused so many economic and political troubles around the world. It is now more and more urgent to find alternative energy resources to ease off our dependency on oil, in order to drive the car. In this talk, I’ll share with you some of my thoughts about the current situation of alternative energy resources. I’ll focus on four of them: hydrogen, electricity, biofuel, and nuclear fusion.

First, hydrogen: Hydrogen is a very clean fuel. The emission is pure water.  However, its disadvantage is hard to overcome: liquid hydrogen must be kept at -250 C, which is a huge problem. Because of this, I don’t think hydrogen cars may ever become practical in that direction.

The second choice is electricity. Today many auto makers are producing hybrid cars that use both gas and electricity. The good thing about hybrid cars is they save gas. For example, if we compare Toyota’s hybrid model Prius with regular Camry, it could save you $1000 on gas per year, based on $1/liter and 20K KM mileage.

The limitations of hybrid cars are that they can not be driven on highway by using electricity alone, the price is also more expensive. However, this is a very good trend. And we can expect more and more good news from the auto industry.

The third option is biofuel. The word bio means bi-organic, which refers to the two sources from which the fuel is made from: animal and plant. Two typical examples are: biodiesel and ethanol. Biodiesel is made from animal fat or plants that produce oil. Vegetable oil is an example. I once heard some Calgarians regularly collected waste cooking oil from restaurants and used it to drive their trucks.

The second example ethanol is the most popular biofuel today. It is another type of alcohol and is made by the similar procedure like whisky. You grow sugar cane or corn, which we often hear about in the news, then use yeast fermentation to produce ethanol.

The biggest advantage of biofuel is that they can be used with current engines. Ethanol can be mixed with the regular gas. However, biofuel has a few issues: growing plants involves all the typical environment problems. And in terms of efficiency, if you add up all the energy consumption in producing ethanol, and compare it with the fuel energy output, the gain is very little. More importantly, it is not enough. In USA, biofuel only accounts for 7% of the total oil supply.

This brings us to the last solution: nuclear fusion. Today we don't hear about it in the news. However, almost 20 years ago, there was a very close call. Two chemists, Fleischmann and Pons, from the University of Utah announced that they had achieved hydrogen nuclear fusion in a jug of water. This is big.

Because we know that fusion can only happen at extremely high temperatures, millions of degrees Celsius. Now, suddenly, no more high temperatures, you can get "cold" fusion in the kitchen! That was why the news immediately shocked the world.

Unfortunately, cold fusion was proved as a false event, and it was quickly forgotten, in a matter of eight months. However, as I was preparing for this talk, I found that research in this field never stopped. It is still active. Cold fusion is a very beautiful dream. Imagine one day, you pour a bottle of water into your car, and you can drive it for a whole year without ever refueling! How is that? --- beautiful. But like all beautiful dreams, it might be very difficult to achieve. However, there is physics there.

In conclusion, do we need to worry about running out of oil? No. There are solutions as I had shown you above. And in my opinion, a world without oil could only be better, cleaner, and above all, more peaceful.