Replacing Gasoline

If we could come up with some alternative for gasoline (and the other products of oil), then a lot of these problems would go away. So let's look at some possibilities.

Make cars a lot more efficient. You see a lot of publicity around hybrid vehicles right now. By combining an electric motor with a gasoline engine, cars get better mileage. The only problem is that the batteries and motor make a hybrid car more expensive than a regular car, and right now gas doesn't cost enough to justify it.

Turn plants into ethanol. Ethanol is a lot like gasoline - it is a liquid that contains lots of hydrocarbons. We can create ethanol from corn, or just about any kind of grass. Many cars in the United States are already set up to burn ethanol. Ethanol will certainly play a role, but it probably is not the whole solution.

Use electric cars more often. We can produce electricity with coal, wind power, sun power or nuclear energy, and then use the electricity to charge our cars. That cuts way down on the need for oil. Pure electric cars are still a problem though, because batteries are really heavy and it takes a long time to charge them. A partial solution would be to create "pluggable hybrids." A pluggable hybrid is a car you would plug in at night. It would be able to go maybe 20 miles or so - the average distance a car drives in a day -- from a charge, acting like a pure electric car. Then it would turn into a gasoline car. Pluggable hybrids might cut the amount of gas we burn in half.

Image courtesy © BP p.l.c. A BP fuel cell bus

Use hydrogen. You use electricity to make hydrogen. Then use the hydrogen in a fuel cell to create electricity. There's a big problem with hydrogen though - it's hard to store compared to gasoline. If we can solve the storage problem, hydrogen might have a chance.

Use coal and something called shale oil. The United States has lots of coal and shale -- enough to supply us with oil for hundreds of years. We can convert coal and shale to gasoline. It's expensive to do it, but as the price of oil keeps rising, coal and shale look better and better. However, this just makes the global warming problem worse.

What will we end up doing? You will actually get to watch the transition happen. Over the next 10 to 20 years, we are likely to see big changes in the world of oil. It will be fascinating to watch.

Oil Spills Supertankers are very hard to maneuver. What happens when one is close to shore and a storm comes up? Or, what if the captain makes a mistake and hits a rock? You can get a very big mess -- like when the Exxon Valdez tanker ship hit a reef near Alaska. It spilled somewhere between 10 million and 30 million gallons of oil into the ocean. And they couldn't clean it up. They tried burning the oil, skimming the oil out of the water and adding chemicals to disperse the oil. Nothing worked. A storm drove the oil right onto miles and miles of beaches. Hundreds of thousands of animals died, and many beaches are still contaminated today, 17 years later. To help prevent spills, by 2015, all supertankers in U.S. water will be required to have two hulls. The inner hull is the lining of the ship's oil tanks. The outer hull is the part in the ocean. The air space between the inner and outer hulls makes an oil spill much less likely.

Image courtesy © BP p.l.c. A super tanker