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Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Electric buses were seen as a joke at an industry conference in Belgium seven years ago when the Chinese manufacturer BYD showed an early model. Suddenly, buses with battery-powered motors are a serious matter with the potential to revolutionize city transport -- and add to the forces reshaping the energy industry. With China leading the way, making the traditional smog-belching diesel behemoth run on electricity is starting to eat away at fossil fuel demand. The numbers are staggering. China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the country's entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transporters -- the equivalent of London's entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance. All this is starting to make an observable reduction in fuel demand. And because they consume 30 times more fuel than average sized cars, their impact on energy use so far has become much greater than the than the passenger sedans produced companies from Tesla to Toyota. For every 1,000 battery-powered buses on the road, about 500 barrels a day of diesel fuel will be displaced from the market, according to BNEF calculations. This year, the volume of fuel buses take off the market may rise 37 percent to 279,000 barrels a day, about as much oil as Greece consumes, according to BNEF.
Slashdot is turning into the retarded version of the DailyKos.
The 'long tailpipe' thesis has been debunked for years.
Overhead wires are prohibitively expensive over long distances. For example if you use rail electrification costs as a benchmark, it works out to be about a million dollars per mile to install, and then there's ongoing maintenance of the catenary cable which does wear out from all that rubbing.
Apart from the poles and cabling above the road, there's also transformers, substations and etc that need to be spread along the route. In a city that's not really a problem, but long distance it starts to get difficult.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Given that world oil production is around 35 billion barrels a year, 279,000 barrels isn't even a blip on anyone's radar.
They wish they could, but the effect of the last round of high oil prices was to drive a great deal of innovation by US domestic producers. There are a lot of wells waiting to get turned on again at various price levels.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"China is big in green energy because it is big. Per capita it isn't as impressive."
Like their pollution compared to the US.
96 million/day
so about a third of a percent.
but if it's an accelerating trend (7 years to 1/3 percent, 8 years to .4 percent), and it's not a proven tech, so it may spread to other countries, I bet they're watching it with some nervousness.
If it can handle buses, local delivery is next (Tesla truck for example).
growth 2016-2017 was .7%, so this in theory is hitting growth significantly.
(growth sourced here, daily use 2016 on a google search)
https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/data/browser/#/?pa=000gfs0000000000000000000000000000vg&c=4100000002000060000000000000g000200000000000000001&tl_id=5-A&vs=INTL.53-1-AFRC-TBPD.A&vo=0&v=H&end=2017
Political uncertainty in the Middle East has returned to the fore in recent days. As we write, uncertainty about the next steps in Syria and Yemen have helped propel the price of Brent crude oil back above $70/bbl. It remains to be seen if recently elevated prices are sustained and if so what are the implications for the market demand and supply dynamics. In the meantime, our overall view of global demand and supply growth in 2018 is unchanged from last month. For demand, early in 2018 stronger growth in the US was partially offset by weaker growth in China. India has seen a strong start to the year. Globally, we expect oil demand to grow by 1.5 mb/d in 2018. However, there is an element of risk to this outlook from the current tension on trade tariffs between China and the US, and we look at this issue in the demand section of this Report. For supply, our outlook for non-OPEC growth remains unchanged at 1.8 mb/d. Data for US production show that in January output fell by a modest 24 kb/d, much in line with our forecast with adverse weather playing a part. We retain our view that US crude production in 2018 will increase by 1.3 mb/d versus last year. However, there is concern about bottlenecks in takeaway capacity that have seen recent discounts for WTI Midland versus Houston widen to a record at nearly $9/bbl. This issue applies in Canada as well as in the US.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It doesn't work out like that in China. Factory and powerplant emissions in Beijing city are quite low, many factories got moved out of the city for the 2008 Olympics and most of the road vehicles are fairly new (typically they meet an equivalent of Euro 4 vehicle emission standards or better).
All the dirty factories in the surrounding province of Hebei now produce so much pollution that Beijing has among the worst air quality in the world in winter, even if the pollution sources are not nearby. From a tall building (there are many in Beijing) can see a chance in wind direction bring in the grey mist of fine particles that smell burnt and irritate your lungs.
Just moving the pollution out of town doesn't help you when there's a lot of pollution.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Generalising "factories" is disingenius. You're right the vast problem is factories. However the long tail pipe is not a nearby factory, it's a distributed power network across the country.
By the way before you say it doesn't work like that you should consider that it's not only the factories that are incredibly sub par in China, the shitty old diesel busses are too (a typical replacement program isn't throwing out new Euro 4 busses). Don't underestimate just how much of a difference it makes getting these old belchers out of the city.
For all the problems that were still there after 2008 note that the air quality in China has steaily been improving over the past 5 years.
Meanwhile: Trump is removing environmental protections as fast as he can.
No sig today...