ABSTRACTS
 2nd International Workshop on Oil Depletion
Paris, France, May 26-27 2003
Organised by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas
The workshop was held at the  Institut Francais du Pétrole , Rueil Malmaison, Paris.

  Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Oil Depletion, Paris, France, May 26-27 2003,
Edited by K. Aleklett, C. Campbell and J. Meyer, www.peakoil.net/iwood2003 .

What Energy Sources for Transportation in the 21st Century? Pierre-Réné Bauquis During the whole of the 20th century transportation has been dominated by road transport.  Both cars and trucks have been powered during all that period by the internal combustion engine utilizing either gasoline or diesel fuels.  As during the 21st century we will see the decline of world oil production, this raises the question of what energy sources will be used for road transport and also for air and marine transportation. The author has developed a view on the world oil production profile for this century, ranging from 3.5 GToe today (75Mb/d) up to a peak of 5 GToe (100 Mb/d) around 2020 and slowly declining thereafter (back to 3 GToe in 2050 and down to 1 GToe in 2100).  From this total natural liquid hydrocarbon production, the author foresees that only 50 to 60% will be available for transportation.  As transportation will require some 4 GToe by the end of the century (based on the author's assumption of world GDP growth, population, technological improvement effects and so on), we will have to provide 75% of the required energy from sources other than natural hydrocarbon liquids. Facing this question, two kinds of responses exist today.  A dominant school of thought pretends that a new magic couple, consisting of hydrogen as a fuel coupled with fuel cells as energy converters, will replace the old magic couple, consisting of liquid hydrocarbons coupled with internal combustion engines, for ground transport or jet engines for aviation.  Another school of thought visualizes a breakthrough in the possible storage of electricity in road vehicles, allowing for a massive development of electric vehicles.  Pierre-Réné Bauquis proposes a different vision in which synthetic fuels will play a major role, while electricity could provide a rather large share (say 25%) of the world transportation requirements. In this vision, the author will develop two original points of view.  First, the synthetics would include not only those already known today (i.e. Fischer Tropsch liquids and biofuels) but also new synthetics (carbonised hydrogen produced by the nuclear industry).  Second, electricity would penetrate the automobile industry not thanks to new electric cars, but thanks to the development of new types of hybrid cars, which would be "rechargeable" with some limited autonomy (20 to 40 km) provided by their batteries. According to these views the future of the automobile industry would therefore avoid technological and logistical discontinuities and would be consistent with new oil pricing systems, which will emerge when the world oil production peak is reached. Back to Proceedings