Peak oil already here

Thomas Brachmann is Honda's jovial guru of electric vehicle propulsion systems, including hybrids and fuel cell cars. He describes himself in a self-deprecating way as a Senior Engineer -- on the basis of his age, not his expertise -- for Advanced Technology Research at Honda R&D Europe.

For all his amiability Brachmann is a man with a disturbing message. During his presentation of the FCX Clarity to Australian journalists last week, he drew upon data supplied by the IEA (International Energy Agency) confirming that the world's demand for fossil fuel outstripped supply two years ago -- and there's not enough new oil fields being found and developed to reverse that situation.

"Now, we are running into trouble, because demand is higher than we can actually deliver from the existing [oil] fields," he said during his presentation. With reduced supply, prices will rise and extracting oil from unconventional sources becomes economical.

"We have to also look for other sources, like unconventional oil or crude oil in the form of oil sands, like in Canada. There's lots of layers of sand... containing tar. You utilise natural gas and water and you can wash off this tar 100 per cent and then you have a kind of oil. It's very energy-intensive and very expensive, but with rising prices for crude oil, it becomes economically feasible."

Brachmann says that the latest information from the IEA is more dependable than previous information supplied by the oil industry, which tended to be optimistic, if anything.

So supply of the cheap and easily located fossil fuels that have powered the vast majority of the world's motor vehicles is on the wane. And that supply is waning as global motor vehicle usage grows like never before. In the booming economies of China and India -- both countries with populations of a billion plus but only a small fraction of those representing car ownership -- citizens are demanding the same fruits of hard work that their western counterparts enjoy. That will ultimately result in many more cars on the road than is the case today. This is why Brachmann predicts that the world's energy needs will likely double by 2030.

"We have an energy demand increase that's not only true for power generation, but for many other sectors... [and] will increase by almost a factor of two..."

It's a three-way collision of events also, because with reduced fossil-fuel resource and increased energy demand, comes a requirement to limit climate change to no more than a two-degree increase in temperature by 2050.

"Looking... at the greenhouse gas emissions, in order to avoid the two-degree or more than two-degree heat-up on the global scale, we have to reduce CO2...

"The expected 2050 levels have to be half of the 2005 CO2 emission levels, otherwise we cannot avoid the two-degree C [increase in global temperature]."

At least there's one encouraging thought: Brachmann believes that the automotive industry can contribute its share of greenhouse gas reduction through new technology. Up to 52 per cent of the reduction could come through efficiency gains in conventional internal combustion engines, 17 per cent through use of biofuels, 17 per cent for battery-electric vehicles and 14 per cent for fuel cell vehicles.

While car companies predict that the majority of vehicles sold in 2020 will still be powered by internal-combustion engines, Brachmann suggests that two thirds of cars sold by 2050 will be either battery-electric vehicles or fuel cell vehicles.