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China's E-Buses Dent Oil Demand More Than Electric Cars Do (bloomberg.com)
China's fleet of electric buses appear to be denting oil demand more than electric cars. "By the end of this year, a cumulative 270,000 barrels a day of diesel demand will have been displaced by electric buses, most of it in China," reports Bloomberg, citing a new report published by BloombergNEF. "That's more than three times the displacement by all the world's passenger electric vehicles (a market where Tesla has a share of about 12 percent)." From the report: Despite rapid growth, the impact on the oil market from electric vehicles remains relatively small. Collectively, buses and electric vehicles account for about 3 percent of oil demand growth since 2011, and 0.3 percent of current global consumption, according to BloombergNEF figures and data from the International Energy Agency. Buses matter more because of their size and constant use. For every 1,000 electric buses on the road, 500 barrels of diesel are displaced each day, BloombergNEF estimates. By comparison, 1,000 battery electric vehicles remove just 15 barrels of oil demand.
Still, the EV market's impact on oil consumption is only going to grow. By 2040, electric vehicles could displace much as 6.4 million barrels a day of demand, while fuel efficiency improvements will erase another 7.5 million barrels a day, according to BloombergNEF's May 2018 long-term EV outlook.
Still, the EV market's impact on oil consumption is only going to grow. By 2040, electric vehicles could displace much as 6.4 million barrels a day of demand, while fuel efficiency improvements will erase another 7.5 million barrels a day, according to BloombergNEF's May 2018 long-term EV outlook.
This is the true reality of the world. China is the EV leader because it is not tied to the fantasy of AI and self-driving as pre-requisite for emissions reduction. The solution that can be and has been implemented now is to use these EV busses with trained drivers. Then dozens of passengers have greater security and can do anything for leisure or productivity while riding to their destinations.
MPG is actually the inverse of fuel consumption. That is, the bigger MPG gets, the less fuel is consumed. This has the effect of exaggerating people's perception of the effect of high-MPG vehicles on fuel consumption. Most people are surprised to learn that upgrading from a 14 MPG SUV to a 20 MPG SUV saves more fuel than upgrading from a 25 MPG sedan to a 50 MPG hybrid. How can a +6 MPG improvement save more fuel than a +25 MPG improvement? Because MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption, meaning a +x MPG delta doesn't represent the same fuel savings throughout the entire MPG range. Say you drive 100 miles.
14 MPG SUV = 7.14 gallons
20 MPG SUV = 5.0 gallons
2.14 gallons saved per 100 miles
25 MPG sedan = 4.0 gallons
50 MPG hybrid = 2.0 gallons
2.0 gallons saved per 100 miles.
So +6 MPG @ 14 MPG results in more fuel savings than +25 MPG @ 25 MPG. A +x MPG improvement represents more fuel savings at lower MPG than it does higher MPG. The rest of the world measures fuel consumption in liters per 100 km to avoid this problem. That's a direct measure of fuel consumption, not an inverse.
This means econoboxes are actually the worst vehicle to convert to a hybrid. They already use very little fuel, so the potential fuel savings by converting them to a hybrid is even smaller. And you're spending a lot of money on a hybrid drivetrain for a very small fuel savings. The hybrid SUVs that environmentalists scoffed at are actually the best personal vehicles for converting into hybrids. Likewise, you get the biggest fuel savings when you convert pickup trucks, buses, and tractor trailers to hybrids or electric. Musk understood this, which is why he produced an electric semi-trailer truck. There are roughly 2 million semi-trucks in the U.S. vs 250 million cars. Yet the semi-trucks consume nearly as much fuel as the cars.
(The same problem affects hard drives and SSDs. MB/s is actually the inverse of how we perceive drive speed. We think of speed in terms of how long we have to wait for the drive to complete an operation. So those multi-GB/s sequential speeds that NVMe SSDs can hit actually make very little difference. They're so fast the operation is completed in the blink of an eye. It's actually the smallest MB/s speeds which make the biggest difference. If your NMVe SSD can only manage 30 MB/s 4k reads, even a small number of small files which need to be read will easily make you wait for a longer time than hundreds of MB of sequential data. If you want a good SSD, ignore the sequential speeds, get something with fast 4k speeds.)
That's now money that they can spend somewhere else instead of on oil imports. Meanwhile we're cutting back on support of renewables and clean energy initiatives here in the US in favor of deregulating coal. This is why we're going to be chasing China's lead.