Out of Fuel: Why Hasn't Innovation Provided a Reliable Alternative to Oil?

I think the question is wrong. It assumes that the problem is to find a "replacement" for oil, in other words, that all we need to do is replace the oil and everything else will work "the same."<p>For whatever reason, Americans are locked in to thinking that cities should be designed for cars and that every errand should involve driving somewhere (with the expectation that your destination should furnish your car with a free place to park).<p>It doesn't have to be that way, although I can understand why a country that burns up 20% of global output of petroleum commuting to work everyday might feel that we need to "replace" oil and that will "solve" the looming crisis.<p>There are OTHER ways of thinking about a solution that does not involve simply replacing oil. These would include:<p>* Go back to human-scale cities by increasing density and diversity of housing, businesses and facilities.<p>* Invest in public transit infrastructure, alternative transportation modes. Mandate walkable metro-centers.<p>Of course, people won't change unless there's a reason to do so. What I am saying is that "market forces" will push us towards those kinds of solutions INSTEAD of towards an oil replacement. People will be better off if they can adapt to this reality rather than hang on until the bitter end to the idea that the future will involve "happy motoring" forever.

The answer to the why we have not found an alternative is simply that we value volumetric and mass energy density, and this graph on Wikipedia: <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Energy_density.svg" rel="nofollow">http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Energy_de...</a><p>shows that gasoline has both of these, along with good resistance to premature ignition, and other favourable ignition characteristics. The solution will not be in finding something new, which is superior in every aspect to oil, but instead to be willing to sacrifice in some areas, (maybe volumetric energy density and total thermal efficiency,) in order to find an achievable solution. Using a plentiful energy source (nuclear?) to perform hydrolysis, and distributing the hydrogen as a fuel seems like the most likely endgame to me, but the material properties of hydrogen are not favourable to storage and small scale use.

Easy. Oil is an awesome fuel for energy generation, especially distributed generation. In the 19th century, it was awesome enough for people to go to sea for months at a time slaughtering whales and rendering their fat to provide light to homes.<p>As someone who grew up in the country and got to spend lots of my childhood quality time splitting logs and hauling wood around, I have to tell you that the day the oil-fired boiler was installed in my house was a happy day.<p>That said, I think people take advantage of a good thing. I work in a downtown city center and live about 5 miles away. $5/gallon gas means about $60/month to me in direct costs. My co-workers live an average of 20 miles away, with a 15% living over 75 miles away. That's insane!

"The same legislation passed in the 1970s to force increased fuel efficiency, for instance, has brought no new innovation to U.S. vehicle fuel consumption in two decades"<p>I disagree with this. We've seen hybrids, pure electric and much more efficient normal engines created in the past 20 years with things like cylinder shut-off, etc. If someone from 1970 saw a Toyota Prius it would seem like something straight out of the Jetsons.

Because nothing else is as massively profitable?<p>I mean oil is insanely, massively profitable, nothing else can touch it, so why would big industry bother until they actually run out of it?<p>BP alone <i>made</i> nearly $2 BILLION the same quarter they had to pay for the deephorizon cleanup That's AFTER paying for it. Normally they make close to $10 billion per quarter.<p>Instead they can just run commercials before PBS shows telling us how they will "keep researching alternatives". Much cheaper.

Innovation didn't create oil in the first place, at least not human innovation. You might as well ask why innovation hasn't replaced the Sun or water or air.

We (the people involved in making decisions on behalf of politicians and the people who buy IP for tech that greatly improves energy efficiency so they can prevent everyone from using it) would rather keep using oil.<p>If we (people more generally) wanted to, we could do this - <a href="http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2491667" rel="nofollow">http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2491667</a>

Oil is a natural solution to storing energy.<p>Solutions provided by humankind are nowhere near as advanced as evolved natural processes.

Reluctance to adopt nuclear batteries.

It has, biofuel companies are even hotter than startups which huge amounts of money getting pumped into them. As the price of biofuels drop and the price of oil rises it's inevitable they'll cross-over and people will start buying biofuels because they're cheaper.

There's more money in stifling it than researching it.