Profitably Kicking the Oil Habit

Two-fifths of the CO₂ emissions that threaten our way of life come from burning oil. Yet by the 2040s, the U.S. could eliminate oil use at one-fourth its current cost. Here's the gist of my team's Pentagon-cosponsored roadmap, Winning the Oil Endgame.

Transportation uses two-thirds of U.S. oil, so the key is uncompromised but tripled-efficiency trucks, cars, and planes, repaying their respective extra costs in 1, 2, and 4-5 years.

Every day, your car burns gasoline formed from 100 times its own weight in ancient plants-yet only 0.3% of that gasoline moves the driver! Your car's weight causes three-fourths of the energy needed to move it, and each gallon saved at the wheels saves another seven gallons we needn't waste getting it there, so making the car radically lighter leverages huge fuel savings.

Henry Ford said you don't need weight for strength: if you did, your bicycle helmet would be made from steel, not carbon fiber. Such ultralight but superstrong materials can halve the car's weight and fuel use, boost safety (by absorbing up to 12 times the crash energy of steel per pound), yet cost the same to manufacture: radically simpler automaking and a two-thirds-smaller propulsion system offset the costlier materials.

That's like finding a new Saudi Arabia under Detroit. Customers, car dealers, and autoworkers are helping persuade automakers to try it. Add your voice! A million jobs, and our security, depend on whether we keep on importing efficient cars to displace oil-or make efficient cars and import neither cars nor oil.

Such advanced materials, aerodynamics, and propulsion gave Boeing's market-leading new 787 Dreamliner one-fifth lower fuel use at no extra cost. The executive who drove that efficiency leapfrog is now Ford's CEO.

Wal-Mart's demand for doubled-efficiency heavy trucks will save billions of dollars and, once everyone buys those trucks, 6% of all U.S. oil.

Now add lucrative further improvements to planes and trucks, and routine oil savings in other vehicles, buildings, and industry. Result: redoubled oil-using efficiency (already doubled since 1975) at an average cost of $12 per saved barrel-one-fifth today's world oil price.

Finally, displace the other half of the oil with saved natural gas and advanced biofuels-chiefly ethanol made from woody, weedy stuff like switchgrass and crop and logging wastes-for $18 per average barrel.

This profit-driven off-oil strategy needs no new energy taxes, subsidies, mandates, or federal laws-just paying attention. The last time America did that, in 1977-85, oil imports plummeted 50% and Persian Gulf imports 87%, breaking OPEC's pricing power for a decade, while the economy grew 27% and oil use fell 17%.

Today's far more powerful technologies let us rerun that play even better. Keep rolling to the off-oil goal line, and we'll get trillions of saved dollars, millions of jobs, and a richer, fairer, safer, cooler world.

We are the people we've been waiting for.

Stay tuned for more solutions!


Amory B. Lovins, Chairman and Chief Scientist, Rocky Mountain Institute (www.rmi.org)

Winning the Oil Endgame offers a strategy for ending US oil dependence.  Download it for free or buy a copy today: http://www.oilendgame.com/