ANWR vs. Hybrids
Power Line reports that a bill allowing drilling in ANWR is set to pass.
On Laura Ingraham’s show the other day, Laura played a clip from the Oprah Winfrey show claiming that “if everybody bought the most fuel-efficient car available, the United States would save approximately 1.47 billion gallons of gasoline each year!” (The same claim is on her web site, here.) She said the word “billion” with a Dr. Evil level of excitement, and the audience ooohed and aaahed as, I presume, the flashing signs told them to do.
But the odd thing was, Oprah also ran a clip on her show that contained this factoid: “It’s estimated that Americans use more than 380 million gallons of gas every day.” (This claim is also on Oprah’s site.) Oprah didn’t bother to do the math, but it wasn’t hard for me to do even while driving (and I’m no mathematician): this means that driving the most fuel-efficient hybrids out there would save us less than 4 days’ worth of gas every year.
I was immediately reminded of ANWR opponents’ claims that ANWR would bring us only 6 months’ or so worth of oil. Again playing amateur mathematician, I calculated that 6 months is about 45 times more than 4 days. So, it would take 45 years of all of us driving in the best hybrids possible to save as much fuel as drilling in ANWR would produce. (And that’s accepting the six month claim at face value — and there are good arguments to suggest it’s not even close to true.)
Don’t get me wrong: I think hybrids are great. The next time I purchase a car, I hope to get one myself. I have my eye on the Toyota Highlander, which is the model that Glenn Reynolds just bought. My brother-in-law just got one and I rode in it when I was in Kentucky earlier this month. It’s a tank of an SUV, it’s safe, it’s powerful (zero to sixty in eight seconds), and it gets better gas mileage than a Corolla. It’s incredibly quiet because the engine isn’t even running a good part of the time. The technology is so simple that all cars should use it.
I’m just putting things in perspective, that’s all.
UPDATE: As Nels Nelson points out in the comments, these numbers sound strange. After all, hybrids are much more efficient than gasoline-powered cars. Nels’s theory as to why hybrids apparently make such a little dent in the amount of fuel used per year is that a relatively small percentage of the oil consumed in this country is used to fuel passenger vehicles. But this theory doesn’t pan out, as 40 percent of our oil use is for passenger vehicles. Another theory: Oprah’s numbers are off.
If anyone has any insight on this topic, feel free to leave a comment.
Regardless of the exact numbers, my overarching point is how you can describe the same phenomenon in different ways and achieve a substantially different effect. If you want to make the savings of hybrids sound substantial, you go Carl Sagan on us and talk about the billions and billions of gallons saved. If you want to pretend that ANWR wouldn’t help much, you make the unrealistic assumption that all of our oil consumption would come exclusively from ANWR, and then argue that it would last us only a few months.
As the ANWR vote is reported over the next few days, watch and see which way the media spins the benefits of ANWR.
Those numbers sound strange, as they work out to the “most fuel-efficient car available” being a little over 1% more efficient than what we’re currently driving, which wouldn’t make sense even without hybrids. Probably the daily figure includes all uses of gasoline, not just filling up passenger cars; if so, it doesn’t diminish that individuals would save themselves a good amount of gas by driving hybrids, but it suggests that little of our gas is going into our cars.
Nels Nelson (2bbb29) — 11/2/2005 @ 8:04 pmWhat is not explained by opponents of ANWR is that claims that the oil from ANWR would run out in x period of time (x = usually very short) are based on the their assumption (which is the most extreme one imaginable) that ANWR would be the ONLY source of oil used. That is how they then come to the conclusion that drilling in ANWR is not worth it.
Ken Keane (e64dca) — 11/2/2005 @ 8:34 pm6 months of oil at what price?
actus (c9e62e) — 11/2/2005 @ 9:03 pmIf you want to inflate the numbers, you should be measuring your savings in the official unit for energy: the Joule.
One gallon of gasoline averages 120 megajoules. So you can shift over a couple of prefixes from ‘billions and billions’ to, say, quadrillions.
My 2002 Prius had a lifetime average of 42 MPG before it was totalled. (The one bad effect of a Prius as far as I could see is that there’s a $7000 power inverter that can get damaged in a very low speed collision. With a highlander, amusingly enough.)
Appearently 17.8 MPG is the national average here. So 42 – 17.8 is a huge freaking gap. The input data is hopelessly screwed up.
Hmm. Here is a source for data up to 2002. They claim 22.1 mpg average for _passenger_ cars. And an average consumption of 75,000,000,000 gallons per year by passenger cars.
I get a new US passenger vehicle consumption of 39.5 billion gallons per year. A savings of 35.5 billion gallons per year. Also known as 106.5 gigabucks, or 4.26 petajoules (PJ).
Al (00c56b) — 11/2/2005 @ 9:22 pmThe 380Mg/day number seems reasonable. 150M cars @ 2.5g/day would do about that. But it doesn’t really matter, as we can more easily compute percentage savings.
Assume that your average car gets 20MPG and your average hybrid, as driven, gets 30. Pessimum numbers, but still a 33% savings on gasoline, given constant miles driven.
That drops the 380Mg/day to about 250-255, for a savings of about 125Mg/day. Or 45 billion gallons/year.
Converting to barrels (yes, I know it’s not all gasoline), that’s just short of a billion barrels a year, and slight more than 2 million barrels a day.. It is quite possible that Oprah, using more optomistic estimates of hybrid efficiency, was quoting 1.47 barrels/year and just mixed up barrels and gallons.
More interesting, however, is what it does to the price of oil, which is driven at the margin. It would be like adding a few million barrels a day to the market.
Kevin Murphy (6a7945) — 11/2/2005 @ 10:10 pmMy take home message is to never believe anything a celebrity says at face value. Factcheck.org (and others) rule.
Charles D. Quarles (5d11c1) — 11/2/2005 @ 10:13 pmPart of the problem might concern driving conditions. I don’t think hybrids get exceptional savings in stop and go traffic. A lot of driving happens in conditions that limits hybrids advantages.
Then again, the touchy-feely crowd has always had a bit of trouble with math. The numbers could just be wrong.
Ken Hahn (b376d3) — 11/3/2005 @ 1:19 amStop & Go traffic is actually a Prius’ most competitive traffic regime.
It is exceedingly disconcerting to have the engine turn _off_ while you are on the freeway during rush hour, but it happens quite often. You aren’t ‘idling’, you’re _off_. The electric engine portion can sustain 15 mph, so when you’re in a jam, you can sometimes get through the entire jam with the engine ‘off’.
42 mpg was my car’s lifetime average on 50% downtown driving, and 50% short highway jaunts in Seattle – a very hilly area. And more than 50% of our transportation money goes to buses – so you can guess the amount of congestion.l YMMV of course, but I did rack up 40,000 miles at 42 mpg.
Al (00c56b) — 11/3/2005 @ 8:21 amA savings of 35.5 billion gallons per year.
Seems like there is some knee-jerk opposition to optimism about hybrids, probably driven by some kind of Sierra Club-Prius association. Skepticism of the media hype is all well and good, but if Al & Kevin Murphy are in the ballpark, that’s a big impact on consumption, prices, and pollution.
At the end of the day, investment in efficient technologies such as hybrids will provide indefinite returns. Meanwhile, the ANWR yield is finite.
ANWR is one way to postpone the need for efficient cars will kick in. But why is that so desirable?
biwah (f5ca22) — 11/3/2005 @ 1:18 pmThat is, ANWR may postpone the inevitable, but hybrid cars are inevitable.
biwah (f5ca22) — 11/3/2005 @ 1:21 pmBiwah – my boyfriend owns a civic hybrid that he and I have driven since August 2003. It’s got more than 40,000 miles on it, and the lifetime average MPG has been 40.2.
That’s overall average, including both city driving and highway driving.
aphrael (e0cdc9) — 11/3/2005 @ 2:18 pmThe diesels (and biodiesel) are the main competitor biwah.
Diesels have a bad rep here in the states, which is fueled by the types of diesels we’ve already got. But the modern incarnation of the diesel (The Jetta, say) is in the same class as the hybrids. Except the emissions of NOx. Diesels have inherently higher combustion temperatures/pressures, and are thus always going to make more NOx based on the chemistry.
It isn’t either-or anyway. It had better be _both_. More domestic production _and_ more domestic refining _and_ more domestic nuclear _and_ more domestic energy research _and_ more efficient vehicles.
Al (00c56b) — 11/3/2005 @ 10:07 pm