THE Solution to our Oil Addiction

All these "what ifs?" and "Yeh, buts" have been examined in detail in several publications, including: Garvin and Munger (26 Jan 2006). Sacramento On Empty. Sacramento News & Review, and Lovins & Dept of Defense (2007). Winning the Oil Endgame., and Kunstler The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century and The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape.

These are all discussions about changing the way we live. Yes, we are in Peak Oil. Yes, oil is finite and decreasing. Yes, we must all become more efficient in our daily lives and families. Yes, we can no longer substitute oil for knowledge and must instead, apply the knowledge.

 

I assume you're referring to the (false assertion) that China is drilling off the coast of Cuba?

 

Well, I said I wouldn't post any more, but I feel obliged to respond to this.

Quoting from the original post, the OP claimed to have "THE solution to our Oil Addiction". In keeping with that, he first downplayed every other option. Then he said: "Here's where I will get some flak...most of our driving could be replaced by riding a bicycle." Emphasis mine.

I mean, if the OP had started off by posting that we might save a bit of fossil fuel by substituting bicycle for car trips, to the extent feasible, sure I'd have agreed with that. Hell, I do that, and I've done it for a long, lone time. But he didn't. He said that "THE solution to our Oil Addition" was that "most of our driving could be replaced by riding a bicycle." THE solution, most of our miles. Got it?

Or, if he had said, as you now say, that the efficiency of a bike, relative to a Prius, is about like the efficiency of a Prius, relative to an SUV, when driven solo, then sure, I could have gone for that. I even gave the MPG estimates at the US national average dietary mix, for bicycling. In other words, that's what I already said, several times now. And, if you'll stick by your statement for just one minute, you'll see that what you just said (bikerius as Prius:SUV), that means I was also correct when I said that my family of four probably gets better fossil fuel mileage in the Prius than it does when we go out bicycling together.

At any rate, once somebody talks about replacing most vehicle miles by bicycling, then the energy used for the food required to drive those bicycle miles becomes a consideration. And if you are talking about replacing "most" US car miles with bike miles, then it is completely fair game to talk about the average US dietary mix, because you'd have to have most Americans doing it. Please note the number of times that I said that, even at the average US dietary mix, the bicycle miles would be about twice as fossil-fuel efficient as a Prius, and that choice of diet would affect efficiency.

So, I would accept either of these statements, neither of which was made in the original post. Converting some car trips to bike trips would be good for Americans and result in a small reduction in fossil fuel use. Or, The solution to our Oil Addition is to convert most car miles to bike miles, which, assuming the average Americans biking those miles would still eat the mix of foods that they currently eat, would cut our fuel use for those miles in half relative to driving a Prius, assuming that everyone always drove solo.

My statements are backed by facts. Unlike the other bicycle advocates who posted here, you at least grasp the fact that it would take food calories to drive all those bicycle miles. The only other thing you need to know is the amount of fossil fuel required to make food. If you don't have the facts there, look them up instead of flaming me.

 

Not only off the coast of Cuba but right of the cost of Key West Florida.

And to go back to my recent post, Caring for the environment is ok. But there is extreme environmentalism that I can't stand to tolerate. Prime example is forcing home owners to run CFL bulbs. Every product should be available either its incandescent or CFL. We choose what we want to use in our homes.

Now, Back on the oil subject. I'm gonna be heading up to Alaska again for a HUGE oil drilling project for the US.

 

That's what I thought. This assertion has been thoroughly debunked. China is NOT drilling off the coast of either Cuba or Key West.

 

And just what HUGE project is that?

 

If it were safe to ride to work I would seriously consider it, but I'm in a situation like Galaxee's. Part of the route is OK, but a good chunk of it is a narrow 55mph 2-lane road (most go 60+) without so much as a hard shoulder. I would have to be suicidal, and it doesn't matter how many cars are driving on it as long as they are there.

 

Fluxus, I agree 100% with both your posts. The other thing to consider is that as people start biking more, they naturally want to incorporate other bike-friendly venues into their life... shopping/dining locally instead of taking the car down the freeway to go to BigShoppingUSA three towns over. Think of all the unnecessary or 'luxury' trips (like driving half an hour away just to have dinner, and then back home, or going to a movie theatre 25 miles away instead of going to your smaller local theatre, etc.) that are included in your annual miles driven. I think 'converted' bikers who used to travel 12-15k miles per year in their cars will overall reduce their traveled miles probably in half, if not more.

This is a good point, Brad, and I think choe needs to account for that in the food calculations as well. The majority of restaurants serve more food on a plate than the human consumes, resulting in massive waste every single day.

How often do people eat out? For me, it's several times a week. I bet there are enough calories wasted by people every week to accommodate the extra calorie requirements by added biking. I think the calculation showing more food will be required is overstated based on this (since much of the food is already being delivered here but currently being wasted).

 

The title was an exaggeration. It's prepostertous enough to make it easy not to take it very seriously. The OP also backed off on it by saying "reduce oil dependency" in the first paragraph. One easily could argue the "most of our driving" point (an argument you missed making). The OP backed off on the "most of our driving" statement in the very next sentence ("Granted this may not work for everyone").

Using your source as "definitive proof" that bicycling is "twice as efficient" as using a Prius isn't really reasonable because it is based on many (arguable) estimates. It's quite possible that cycling is much more efficient. Anyway, using that logic, if being "twice as efficient" isn't compelling, there really is no reason for driving a Prius instead of an SUV.

What percentage of miles is your Prius driven solo? (Just to make it clear: if you have to have a car, a Prius is a good one to have.)

 

I never said anything like "definitive proof". Look at the section you quoted. Note my use of the word "estimate" to describe the mileage. Note how many times in this thread I said that the actual mileage could be different, depending on what you eat.

There is a fairly broad range of estimates for average fossil fuel calories per edible calorie in the US diet, of which the 10 calorie figure is probably the most credible and certainly in the middle of the range of estimates. It takes no effort to say "you're wrong", it takes some effort to determine some reasonable alternative estimate. If you want to contribute, don't just naysay, do a little homework and choose your own. The fact that there is uncertainty around the estimate does not mean it just goes away or is guaranteed to be so small as to guarantee that bicycling is vastly more efficient than stated. I didn't choose the figure to make bicycling look bad, I reviewed the available evidence and made a reasoned choice.

"Anyway, using that logic, if being "twice as efficient" isn't compelling, there really is no reason for driving a Prius instead of an SUV." Well, now there's another one. I never said that it wasn't worthwhile to get those savings. I just pointed out bicycling is not fossil-fuel-free, and that if you wanted to get a lot of savings you had to factor that in.

I think that's the real issue here, for most of the bike advocate posters. Many people, and certainly most of the bike advocates posting here, had never been exposed to this concept before. Never even considered the fossil fuel inputs to the US food supply. Never bothered to Google "fossil fuel food" and see what turned up. And they didn't want to hear this. It upsets the image of a fossil-fuel-free lifestyle. To put any MPG figure on bicycling was upsetting. The fact that my estimate was only twice the MPG of a Prius was anathema. The concept that a trip taken in an efficient packed car could (by my reasoned estimate) get better mileage than the same trip done by individuals on separate bicycles, well, that was too much for some people. So when that bicycling orthodoxy was challenged, I got a lot of largely nonsensical flack. From people who swore that bicycling required no calories, to people who said (in effect) that bicycling creates calories, to people who had any number of other reasons why bicycling wouldn't increase food consumption (or not increase it as much, which is a reasonable thing to suggest, so I did the calculations based on Centers for Disease Control data for that), and of course, people who couldn't be bothered to read the statistics on why the energy cost of vehicle manufacture and energy cost of fuel production scarcely matter in the calculation (because they are both small relative to the energy content of the gasoline).

And all or nearly all of these, I infer, were people who had no idea that food production requires significant fossil fuel inputs before they read this thread. Yet they were all instant experts on the topic, to read their posts. And none of which was helped by the way the OP selectively extracted quotes from my post, back on his board.

A few more calculations and I'm done. By my estimate (there's that word again), using data developed by Cornell U professor named Pimental, if you ate nothing but wheat berries (a good high fiber complex carb), you'd get about 220 mpg equivalent at 30 food calories per mile. And if you ate nothing but grain-fed beef, it would be about 25 mpg equivalent. For the US average diet mix, as I said earlier, it would be 90 mpg. For reference, a Prius gets 46 mpg. A Prius-sized electric vehicle (EV) would get roughly 160 mpg equivalent or so, my estimate (again) based on the EPA data for the RAV4 EV.

 

Chogan, I'm sorry that you keep misinterpreting what I said--I'm not denying that it takes food to "fuel" riding a bicycle. I'm just refuting that the average American's food intake would have to increase to power a relatively small amount of bicycle riding for the sake of commuting. Your estimates are interesting, for sure, but it's a much more complex issue than the small number of parameters you're choosing to focus on can accomodate.

You're right, that was too much for me. And here's another reason why: where is the gasoline you're putting in your car coming from? You've nicely described the "fossil fuel" costs of growing and distributing food supplies (which by the way I'm well aware of, as a long time advocate of local, organic food). But what are the "fossil fuel" costs of actually creating a gallon of gasoline from crude oil, and distributing that? It's only fair to include that in the comparison, right?

Unfortunately, it's hard to find estimates of exactly what that energy cost might average out per gallon produced, or to create a caloric equivalent for comparison. This page has some data that might help, but I don't have time to figure it out right now: The Oil Drum | EROI on the Web part 2 of 6, (Provisional Results Summary, Imported Oil, Natural Gas)

I suspect that the "fossil fuel" cost of finding, shipping, refining, and again shipping gasoline is going to be very similar to the "fossil fuel" cost of farming, processing, and shipping food products, though. Which would make that whole argument into more or less a wash where direct comparisons between bicycle and auto are concerned.

 

This just in:
Bicycle riding is bad for the environment because bike riding promotes healthy, and healthy people live longer...and thus screw up the environment more. Seriously. That's the conclusion of this study.

http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~ulrich/documents/ulrich-cycling-enviro-jul06.pdf

So let's do everybody a favor and die fat and young. Everybody got your car keys?

 

Fluxus, sure, by my estimate, the average adult American could accommodate about 300 miles of riding per year, with no additional food, based solely on the last year's US population average weight gain as measured by CDC. Whether or not that would occur (whether diet would stay constant as exercise was added) is more of a behavioral question, and is much harder to answer. But could, yes, just stopping the current weight gain would sop up 300 miles per adult per year. And health-wise (but extraneous to the OP), sure the US could benefit from more.

But if we're talking about a small amount of riding, then, back to the OP, this isn't "the solution", and it's not displacing "most" car miles. I don't have an problem with any reasonable argument. It's just that if the OP was going to propose this as "the" solution, I thought he ought at least to have been aware of the consequences of the impact on food consumption.

If we were to have a reasoned discussion about the actual real-world impact that any of the "solutions" listed in the original post, then you'd have to move beyond the simple energy calculation into consumers' likely behavioral responses to the options. I mean, the bottom line is that we already have, at hand, travel options that are far more efficient than the US fleet average (21?) MPG. To the extent that consumers aren't buying those now (or at least weren't until recently), those options are not effective solutions to reducing transport fuel use. Good technical efficiency, sure, but little net impact. So, it's not lack of options or lack of technology that keeps our fuel use high, it is first and foremost consumers' preferences. We already have technical solutions that would more than double the US fleet average MPG (e.g, the Prius). Or, for that matter, increase it N-fold (the bicycle).

But anything like those types of considerations was only marginally part of the discussion. I mean, clearly the OP and his buds were mostly young in-shape guys (go read their thread to see them disparaging fat people), and folks of that description typically don't think much about the population as a whole, or circumstances beyond their own. The oldest old, those with mobility impairments, people who need to travel at a higher speed than a bicycle will accommodate, people who can't afford to look like they just got off a bicycle while at work, and so on. I mean, I bought my first car at age 24 after bicycling through two Chicago winters while going to graduate school. And I can tell you that a) I was just about the only person doing it, and b) I would never consider doing that now. In retrospect, it was dangerous and stupid to have done that at the time. Yeah, you can bike in 10 degrees and snow, but no, very few people will if they have any alternative at all.

And I think part of the reason that "consumer preferences" part wasn't more central (except for a few posts pointing that out) is that bike advocates don't like the data. The real world effectiveness of bicycles as a solution to high US transport fuel consumptions will depend on people's propensity to use them. Which, imho, means that hybrids are at the top of the list of effective new technologies, because they are broadly acceptable. Bicycles are somewhere near the bottom, because most people won't. Simple as that. I'm not saying that is smart, on the part of the average American, I just think that is. And I'm also say that, presenting bicycles as "the" solution was more than a bit far-fetched, due to that. Bikes are already cheap and readily available, yet an almost infinitesimal fraction of US household travel miles use bike miles.

Why don't I look that up I'm while I'm rambling? Based on the National Household Travel Survey (by the US DOT, random-sample log diary with interview method, the gold standard for measuring how Americans travel), bicycle trips accounted for for 1.7 billion miles (in 2003 I think). Which sounds great until you realize that's 0.05% (five-hundredths-of-a-percent) of all US travel by all modes (everything from walking to aircraft). I'm sure the bike advocates hate that figure as well, and will present some advocacy number showing that it can't possibly be correct. But, it is what it is. The NHTS is the gold standard for measuring how Americans actually travel, based on log diaries for a large sample of randomly selected persons and days.

On the cost of extracting and refining crude, the best studies I have seen come from the Argonne National Labs or the US DOE. They do "wheel-to-well" estimates for all types of vehicles and fuels. The "well-to-tank" portion of that analysis pins down the energy lost in extracting and processing the fuel. That's were I got the 15% figure that I cited earlier in this thread -- that the additional costs of extracting, shipping, and refining crude into gasoline, worldwide, add about another 15% to direct energy cost of the gasoline. That's an average for all oil.

Table 1 of the article you cited lists oil and gas at between 11:1 and 18:1 energy return on investment (ie, between 9% and 6% overhead). That seems quite low to me, and may not include all the processes in getting from well to tank. I didn't want to take the time to study it to see why their numbers are lower than Argonne's. I'd rather use Argonne's data.

There is some argument to be made that the marginal (additional) oil has much higher energy costs (e.g., the energy ROI for the tar sands is not going to be anything like 18:1, in fact they list it there as possibly as low as 2:1, even worse than oil shale, which is quite a trick). So it may be valid to say that new oil has higher overhead than the 15% I cited, but all I wanted to do was look at the average overhead.

 

Just a peeve of mine.
"higher rate of speed"

Speed is a rate. A rate of speed would be an acceleration. "higher speed" is what you're looking for. Don't shoot me. Just trying to help.

 

Cool, those guys are bigger nerds than I am. But their numbers are in the ballpark. They say 20% energy overhead for oil, and just under 6 fossil fuel calories per edible calorie, and their comparison is the average vehicle, not the Prius. Otherwise, they pretty much said what I said. Minus the health thing.

Edit: I also see that they got the relative mortality risk per mile about right, compared to what I calculated some years back here using hospital and death certificate data. I didn't comment on it when it came up in the thread, but I'm sure the bicycle advocates would take exception to that as well.

And their concluding section is very good and hits all the high points. That bicycling may lead to more awareness and reduced energy consumption in other aspects of life. That light-duty electrical transport has roughly the same energy efficiency as bicycle transport. The free miles from the one-time recovery of the existing population stock of body fat. Really, wish I'd just posted that rather then going through the exercise myself.

Darelldd, I know you hate the paper, but it has all the earmarks of a serious and thoughtful analysis. Even if the punchline rings a bit odd. The only part that went over the line, I'd say, is where, if I read that right, they'd tax healthy behavior to offset the environmental cost of the additional longevity. That's a little too flaky even for me.

Two comments. One, the reason Medicare (US health insurance for the elderly) never joined in the lawsuits against tobacco manufactures is that -- you guess it -- smoking saves the Feds money. For both Medicare and Social Security. Because smokers live an average of (I believe the current data is) 8 years less, so a lot fewer of them collect their pensions.

But serious, in health care, these effects come up all the time. There is an ongoing pilot program in Medicare to take particularly good care of persons with congestive heart failure, typically a very expensive population. And, guess what -- extending life span by even a small amount more than offsets the per-month cost reductions, in terms of lifetime total cost.

My response to that article would be this one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/health/nutrition/04bike.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Sure they'll live longer, but they have more trouble having kids, so in the long run, hey, it'll be a saver. My argument doesn't apply to recumbents, of course, only traditional upright and crank-forward models.

I particularly liked the industry spokesman's response:

"Most people are not riding long enough to damage themselves permanently," That's reassuring.

 

Oh, I don't hate the paper. It makes some valid points, and the study is actually a response to this study:

Exercise-based transportation reduces oil dependence, carbon​

emissions and obesity

The previous paper I linked to is actually intended to call attention to the oversight of this (directly above) "good" study - the oversight of fit people living longer and thus screwing up our environment.

My mind is vibrating now, so maybe I missed it. But it seems that everybody is ignoring all the energy-intensive infrastructure and maintenance required for cars? Roads, parking, etc. Yes, bikes would need roads and parking, but nowhere near the same amount or complexity. And the roads wouldn't need to carry as much weight, and would not crumble with heavy vehicle use like today's roads. Automobile infrastructure is a HUGE consumer of fossil fuels. As is the building of and maintaining of automobiles.

But anyway... thanks for letting me interject my stuff without taking it personally.

I ride a bike. I eat locally. I eat very little meat, and not much processed crap. Even my beer and wine are local. My total caloric intake is the same now as when I was sedentary and 50 pounds heavier. The same. And today I ride 500 miles/week on average through the year. This means that every mile I ride instead of drive directly removes that much petroleum from the equation. I'm pretty sure that I'm doing way the hell better than 66 mpg equivalent on my bicycle. And I'm also sure that I'm doing WAY the hell worse than 66 mpg equivalent in the Prius. But that's me, and I can't speak for the Average American - who at one point thought that a full-size SUV would make an ideal commute vehicle.

 

Here's an amazing fact:

The most efficient (reasonable) land transportation is....

The e-bike/scooter.

Yes, it takes more money and hydrocarbons to provide the food you eat to allow you to pedal a bike than it does to provide electricity to an e-bike. Of course if you pedal for exercise then you are going to use those calories anyway, so it is often still better to use a pedal bike, but still, there you have it.

BTW, in 1995, China built 20,000 e-bikes to see how they work. In 2007 they produced over 20m, and as I sit here in Shanghai I'm seeing eye-witness proof that some cities are 95% e-bike over motor cycle now. It is unreal how fast they are switching over.

 

The paper darelldd cited made essentially the same observation about relative efficiency of light electrical transport. I think they said it was about the same as bicycling at around 7 fossil-fuel calories per food calorie.

Interesting to hear from an on-the-ground observer.

I read up on ebikes from time to time purely by accident. I ride a bike-e, a (now defunct) brand of recumbent. Every time I Google for parts I get to read up on e-bikes.

I'd like to see the numbers on the battery replacement cost before being totally convinced about the total energy costs. With daily riding, you'd have to replace the heart of the system every year or two. I see battery lifetimes listed on the order of 300 charges (lead-acid) to 600 charges (NiMH). But barring that, what you said about relative efficiency appears correct to me. And the battery improvements that are part of the race to market PHEV/EV cars will eventually trickle down to electric bikes.

I think about getting one from time to time, but mostly I bike for the exercise. I could definitely see this as a low-investment alternative urban commuter vehicle if I were in the market for one. Certainly buy one of these before I'd get a Segway.

I wonder if this couldn't be the transition vehicle that would get more out-of-shape Americans biking? A lot of the models are moped-ish in design (ie, 70 or 80 pounds of bike, with rudimentary gearing, and look like they'd be difficult to use as a bike). But some of them appear to be decent bikes with electric assist. It would be a question of whether it's just the effort level that's keeping people off bikes, or everything else about routine biking. My guess is it's mostly everything else. At the minimum, most Americans would still have to travel on bicycle-unfriendly streets.

 

Darelldd,

With your diet you would almost certainly be using far fewer fossil fuel calories per edible calorie than the average. The same amount of food, only you can judge. At 30 calories a mile (probably higher given your average speed), that's 15,000 calories of exercise per week.

On the infrastructure, I can give you a plausible estimate of that, based on spending, because (arguably) most of it is paid out of public funds. Using the same source that tells me that total gas taxes and vehicle fees don't come close to paying for the roads.

Highway Statistics 2004 - FUNDING FOR HIGHWAYS AND DISPOSITION OF HIGHWAY-USER REVENUES, ALL UNITS OF GOVERNMENT, 2004 - Table HF-10

In those figures, on the bottom line is ~$150B, which is the annual cost of building and maintaining the entire pubic road network, for 2004. The annual cost of all the energy involved must be less than $150B per year.

In 2007, the US used roughly 150 billion gallons of gasoline, and another 65 billion gallons of diesel, which can be calculated from these DOE data:

U.S. Product Supplied for Crude Oil and Petroleum Products

Pricing that at $4/gallon, we spent about $800B on fuel, and $150B on the roads. The fuel purchases are pure fossil fuel, the road purchase are part fossil fuel. If I had to guess, I'd say the road network energy costs are about like the car building and scrapping energy costs - they might add another 10 or 15 percent to the energy embodied in the gasoline.

Basically, it's still all about the fuel.

 

That's where you're dead wrong and the experiments support my view. The equation that you're referring to is deltaE = Ein - Eout. You're thinking that what I'm saying violates the 2nd law of Thermodynamics because you are assuming that Ein and Eout are independant variables.... but they most definitely are not.

If you under eat, your body's metabolism will slow down. This is one of the reasons that semi-starvation diets don't work if they contain a large proportion of carbohydrates.

Conversely, if you increase you calories your body will increase its metabolism to compensate. You get into trouble, however, if you are increasing your caloric intake with refined carbs. You will get fat in that case, but not because of deltaE, but because your insulin levels will spike and trap fatty-acids in your adipose tissue.