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Greene 1 (1:38)
Topic(s): Biofuels / Electric & Hybrid / Future
Transport
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Video Transcript
I think the first is that our transportation system is almost
entirely fueled by petroleum, more than 95%, and it's been
that way for the past half century. We're now facing a
situation where we're approaching a time when oil production
outside of the OPEC countries is likely to reach a plateau or
peak, some people think. And when that happens, we will have a
growing gap between what the world can supply itself in oil
and what the growing mobility demand will be, not just in the
United States and in Europe and South America, but also in
Asia, China, India, very rapidly increasing demand for
mobility.
And we will have to find sources of energy for transportation
other than conventional petroleum. We're already beginning to
do that in places like Alberta, Canada, where we're tapping
into oil sands, which a couple of decades ago were not
considered to be suitable sources of petroleum for
transportation systems. But now we're producing more than a
million barrels a day of oil from oil sands. And those other
sources are there (things like oil shale, things like
coal-to-liquid fuels), but they're much more damaging to the
environment, and especially to the climate. If we were to
produce gasoline from coal, for example, without trying to
capture the carbon emissions, there would be about twice as
much greenhouse gas produced per vehicle mile as we produce
now, using gasoline.
So on the one hand we're facing a situation where petroleum is
going to become increasingly scarce. We're going to have to
find other sources of energy. And the most convenient, most
easily usable sources of energy are the ones most damaging to
the global climate.
