Exploring a future in which mostly renewably-produced electricity will increasingly replace oil as transport fuel, the book delineates broad contours of transport revolutions it assumes will occur by 2025. Today, 95 per cent of transport is fuelled by petroleum derivatives and the sector accounts for about 58 per cent of all end-uses of oil products. Termed “the core of the book”, chapter 5 analyses how far the US and China’s high levels of transport activity can be maintained while substantially reducing oil use. The whole new transport paradigm with the underlying precepts advocated in the book deserves to be an integral part of urban planning and economic development worldwide.
After world oil production is slated to peak in around 2012, an era of high prices of oil could unleash four kinds of transport revolution: (i) transport now propelled by internal combustion engines will in future be propelled increasingly by electric motors powered by renewable energy resources; (ii) much land transport in future will be in grid-connected electric vehicles, powered while in motion from wire or rail, etc.; (iii) marine transport now propelled by diesel engines will continue but with assistance from wind via sails and kites; and (iv) air travel and air freight movement will soon begin to decline, to continue mostly in large, fuel efficient aircraft.
The book sets great store by the reinvention of the passenger train that began with the high- speed Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen in 1964 and Paris-Lyon TGV by 1982, marking a decisive tilt in favour of railways for trips between 200 and 1,000 km.
The authors believe the US transport system in 2025 could provide very different mobility experiences from those of today: air travel and, to a lesser extent, travel by personal vehicle will be viewed as luxury transport options, priced accordingly, and used more sparingly. Electric trains and buses will replace much inter-city driving and most flights under 1,000 km. Domestic aviation would have contracted substantially and international aviation expanded a little. Rail freight activity would increase; pipeline would decline; and ocean freight would likewise fall. Domestic freight movement by short sea shipping and by river and canal could increase substantially.
The 200 billion passenger-kilometres (pkm) of annual rail travel of the anticipated total of 500 billion pkm will be accomplished over dedicated high-speed lines. The infrastructure and rolling stock cost for 25,000 km of HSP tracks could be $1 trillion over a 30-year period, while lower speed electrified infrastructure for the remaining 300 billion pkm could cost an additional $1 trillion. Electrification of existing freight lines could require a similar order of investment.
The US with less than 5 per cent of the world's population is responsible for 25 per cent of total oil consumption. The annual oil consumption and imports of the US are close to 7.5 and 5 billion barrels respectively — against China’s 2.8 and 1.4 billion barrels. The US and China use about the same total amount of energy for moving freight but the US uses almost ten times more energy for moving people. In 2007, China used only 20 per cent of transport energy for moving people; the US share was 72 per cent.
Typical of several developing countries, China is seeing a shift from rural to urban settlement. There were less than a million cars on the road in 1985; more than 17 million in 2004. Taxes on transport fuel are low by world standards. Vehicle purchases support less than 50 per cent of road building costs, providing a major stimulus to motorisation. A four-fold increase is predicted in personal vehicle use in China by 2025, most of it to come, as the authors hold, from a substantial growth in electric vehicles; local public transport as well as inter-city rail will be entirely electrified; domestic and international aviation will be at or below 2007 levels. China will see a more than three-fold increase in road freight traffic but with less than a third of it in trucks and vans, the reminder in battery-electric or grid-connected vehicles. Rail freight movement will more than double — with much stronger focus on electrification.
Like higher gasoline prices in the US, the authors make a case for higher taxes on motor fuels and vehicles as an important element of launching China’s transport revolutions. Stirred by the inevitability of transport revolutions in the world’s leading economy, the authors refer to the shared sacrifice that was the core value behind former President Carter’s proposed transformation of the American energy paradigm. They underscore the need for moving human civilisation away from using so much oil, a challenge, no doubt, enormous, but unavoidable.
More From This Section
TRANSPORT REVOLUTIONS
Moving People and Freight Without Oil
Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl
Earthscan, London
351 pages
