Gasoline, diesel will be around for long time
I spend a lot of time these days reading, listening and discussing the use of electricity to propel automobiles compared to conventional gasoline and other alternatives, such as hydrogen.
It comes with the job. The ground is shifting, and it’s better to be on top of what’s happening than running to catch up.
So, I’ve been reading about how Big Oil will react when everybody starts running out to buy electric cars. And how the end of internal-combustion will be just like the end of film for cameras — it will (seemingly) come out of nowhere and be so sudden that everybody will wake up one day and wonder what happened. And that some European countries will ban the sale of gasoline and dieselpowered cars as of such-and-such a date.
And the province of Quebec will soon start fining automakers that don’t sell enough EVs.
And then there are the questions I’ve been asking in discussions, for which I don’t hear too many answers.
We, apparently, produce scads of excess power. This is produced overnight when people aren’t using it. We — or so the story goes — have to “dump” it (sell it for much less than it’s worth). If this is so, why do we have an electricity crisis in Ontario, where people can’t afford to pay their electrical bills and it’s sufficiently serious that the provincial government is paying for advertising saying not to worry, it has a plan.
Every summer, people are asked to either turn down or turn off their air conditioners so that we don’t risk brownouts or, worse, blackouts. What will happen on those days when a million electric cars are plugged into the system?
If everybody runs out and purchases an electric car, how long will the provincial subsidies last?
If more people buy EVs instead of internal-combustion vehicles, how will governments make up the tax shortfall? Right now, about 40 per cent of what you pay per litre for fuel at the pump goes to governments. How long, then, before there is a two-tier price for electricity (those who own EVs will pay more for electricity delivered to their houses than those who don’t. Presumably.)
Finally, if governments are promoting the shift to electricity, what are those same governments doing to prepare the population for the social change that’s coming? Thousands of people are employed in the automotive service industry, and those jobs, for the most part, will disappear if EVs take over. What then?
As we know, governments of all political stripes are often driven more by ideology than by common sense. Yes, unless you’ve been living under a rock, climate change is a reality. We all must accept that. But how best to fight it? Or to adapt to it?
OK, fossil fuels have been a problem, although they are far from the problem they once were. But in the rush to eliminate them in favour of electrification, governments are ignoring — or appear to be ignoring — evidence of contamination in the manufacturing of batteries or the production of power to charge those batteries that is every bit as damaging. The Star, for instance, published stories in recent months about the pollution created by the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries and the health problems suffered by people employed in that industry.
Then there was a recent Swedish study, which suggested that pollution created by the manufacturing of one Tesla car battery was the equivalent of eight years of driving around in an internal-combustion vehicle. (There have been howls from the anti-car crowd about that one, but since Sweden is everybody’s ideal society and they do everything perfectly there, you’d have to take that almost-Pavlovian opposition with a grain of salt.)
Regardless, if governments these days decide electric cars are the way to go, then electric cars we shall have. It’s much like a snowball on the top of a mountain that gets bigger and bigger as it rolls down. At a certain point, it becomes unstoppable. I don’t think this is a good thing. Included in my research on this subject this summer was my participation in the Automobile Journal- ists Association of Canada’s annual EcoRun, in which a number of different types of cars were driven (electric, hybrid, fuel cell, internalcombustion) and the results compared as to fuel economies.
The cars included the Chevrolet Bolt, Ford Focus EV, Mazda CX-5, Nissan Versa Note 5MT, Porsche Cayenne S E-Hybrid, Subaru Forester, Toyota Prius Prime and the Volkswagen e-Golf, among others.
Now, it took two days to go from Ottawa to Quebec City (via St-Jovite, Sainte-Adele, Montreal, Jo- liette, Trois-Rivieres, Deschambault) and the frequent stops for lunch, snacks, presentations and so on were primarily because the EVs needed recharging.
Which got me wondering: the positives of EVs aside, how come there isn’t more attention being given to the amazing advances being made to create clean — or cleaner — fossil fuels?
For instance — and the meandering along side roads aside, which were needed to conduct the tests in order to determine the fuel mileage for each vehicle — the journey between Ottawa and Quebec City in a regular car would have taken a little more than four hours.
One of the people who sat in the passenger seat during one of my stints was Erin Brophy, who’s the communications manager for the Canadian Fuels Association. I wanted to know why gasoline and Diesel are seldom included in any conversation about the future of transportation.
“It’s because of a reluctance to include something from the past in something that’s going to happen in the future,” she said. “There’s a reluctance to include the potential of the current technology.”
Brophy said fuels are cleaner across the board in 2017, and the development of renewable resource fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel bodes well for the future.
“So, these things are making fuels cleaner to burn but also the engines in the cars themselves are making the cars more fuel-efficient than they ever used to be. So, it’s the technology of the engines and the fuels working together that’s the future for the internal-combustion engine.”
Brophy also noted that it took 125 years to build a network of gasoline and diesel outlets that enable Canadians to drive from coast-to-coast and from the U.S. border north to the Arctic Circle. She wondered how long, if we started today, it would take to create and service an alternative fuel source infrastructure to rival gas and oil.
“It took generations to build the network that we have today,” she said.
“For something else, it would maybe take 25 or 30 years, starting now from the urban cores outward. It’s really in the large urban centres where you can quite happily go from A to B, plugging in along the way, but all of Canada doesn’t live in large, urban centres.”
She said that, for the foreseeable future, gasoline and Diesel will continue to be part of a mix.
“We’re not giving up,” she said. “Gasoline and diesel are still dominant and will continue to be so for some time. While there’s a reluctance to suggest that there might be a future for fossil-based fuels, all you have to do is look at aviation and freight.
“Big planes and trucks are both going to be around for a long time to come.”