By Irina Slav
A couple of weeks ago, Bloomberg published an article headlined Why We Shouldn’t Confuse Peak Oil With the Price of Bananas, which argued that this time BP was not wrong in calling an end to peak oil demand. This time it’s really over.
Because my memory is quite mean and retains some surprising titbits of information while discarding some rather more important bits such as where I last put the car keys, I remember how BP was confident oil demand had peaked in 2019. It was really over, the supermajor said in its annual energy outlook. Of course, it was proven wrong within a year.
In the Bloomberg article, authored, by the way, by a “climate technology investor”, there’s the usual abundance of net-zero targets set by governments, wind and solar’s latest feat of overtaking gas and coal as the biggest electricity generators in Europe (although I keep wondering which day this happened on), and, of course, Biden’s IRA — the most unfortunately named bill in the history of unfortunately named bills.
So, what’s new, you might ask. Well, nothing in the article, really. But here’s a new report about the car industry’s chances of meeting its own targets for a transition to net-zero. In fact, according to the authors of the report, sponsored by two EV makers, one of which Rivian, the industry is set to miss its targets by as much as 75%.
The only way to avoid this development, which no doubt someone has already called catastrophic, is to combine the increase in EV sales with two more “levers” for achieving the emission reduction goals necessary to fulfill the Paris Agreement pledges. These two levers are: powering the growing EV fleet with fossil-free electricity only and reducing supply chain emissions.
Shockingly novel ideas, I know. What I find refreshing, however, is the notch-up in apocalypticity: none of these “levers” alone will get us to the 1.5-degree scenario. It will not be enough to just ban ICE cars. It will not be enough to just make electricity generation 100% low-carbon. And it will not be enough to reduce Scope 3 emissions. We need all three or we’re doomed.
Funny enough, around the same time that study was published, another one came out from Seattle. A battery research firm called Recurrent conducted a study on charge loss in EVs in cold weather. The findings were, for some cars, stunning. Range loss could be as much as 35% at temperatures between -1 and -7 Celsius.
The two main reasons for that loss were, first, that “Chemical and physical reactions in the battery occur more slowly in cold temperatures. This reduces the EVs power” and, second, that unlike ICE cars, EVs need to produce their own heat for the inside of the car, which consumes additional battery power. Well, as I live and breathe.
The ultimate problem appears to be EVs’ efficiency. That’s right. Because ICE cars are so “super inefficient”, per one Recurrent researcher, the waste heat their engines produce while working, can be fed into the car to heat its insides. EVs, alas, cannot do that. It’s the same with cooling, by the way. Cooling the inside of an EV in hot weather is an additional battery drain but you already knew that.
What’s going on is a confusion of facts and wishes. In the facts corner, we have people’s attachment to vehicles that you can rely on to take you from A to B without you having to freeze or stew to make sure you do get from A to B without having to make one or more hours’ long breaks to charge them.
Also in the facts corner are those unpleasant chemical and physical details about the effect different temperatures have on the speed of reactions. I mean, trust the science, right?
In the wishes corner we have a global car fleet that is 100% EVs, declining oil demand, and vast charging networks that are powered with electricity produced entirely from wind, solar, hydro, and possibly green hydrogen.
Also in the wishes corner the above facts are being regularly overlooked in EV adoption forecasts and oil demand projections, the most notorious of which — and my all-time favourite — was, of course, the IEA’s Roadmap to Net Zero that said we can stop all new oil and gas exploration in 2021 because we won’t need more oil and gas. Talk about forecasts that did not age well.
Yet the wishes camp is winning. Its latest victory was a top management change in the auto industry, with Toyota president Akio Toyoda stepping down and getting replaced by the head of Toyota’s Lexus unit. Because Toyota is lagging behind other carmakers in the EV department.
“Because of my strong passion for cars, I am an old-fashioned person in regards to digitalisation, electric vehicles, and connected cars. I cannot go beyond being a car guy, and that is my limitation,” Toyoda told reporters. You and me both, Mr. Toyoda, you and me both.
Then there was yet another report that found hybrid cars pollute more than previously believed. Shock. Horror. Catastrophe. Hybrids, which many including myself consider a more reliable alternative to full EVs, are obviously becoming inconvenient, so let’s attack them.
How do they pollute, you ask? Well, by having shorter than advertised ranges, that’s how. In other words, the problem is in their… battery. Yet Transport & Environment, authors of the study and outspoken advocates of EVs, are calling for an end to subsidies for hybrids. Presumably, the subsidy flows are better focused on EVs alone.
Yep, the wishes camp is winning, for now, but it seems the triumph is beginning to waver, as suggested by the Polestar/Rivian study cited above. The calls to go beyond just EVs sounds a little bit desperate to me. It sounds a bit too freak-outy urgent.
It sounds like the EU’s recent declaration it would take on both China and the U.S. on green subsidies. Wishing, even desperately, is still free. Unfortunately, the bill is coming.
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