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Power Transportation China

China's E-Buses Dent Oil Demand More Than Electric Cars Do (bloomberg.com) 148

Posted by BeauHD from the denting-demand dept.
China's fleet of electric buses appear to be denting oil demand more than electric cars. "By the end of this year, a cumulative 270,000 barrels a day of diesel demand will have been displaced by electric buses, most of it in China," reports Bloomberg, citing a new report published by BloombergNEF. "That's more than three times the displacement by all the world's passenger electric vehicles (a market where Tesla has a share of about 12 percent)." From the report: Despite rapid growth, the impact on the oil market from electric vehicles remains relatively small. Collectively, buses and electric vehicles account for about 3 percent of oil demand growth since 2011, and 0.3 percent of current global consumption, according to BloombergNEF figures and data from the International Energy Agency. Buses matter more because of their size and constant use. For every 1,000 electric buses on the road, 500 barrels of diesel are displaced each day, BloombergNEF estimates. By comparison, 1,000 battery electric vehicles remove just 15 barrels of oil demand.

Still, the EV market's impact on oil consumption is only going to grow. By 2040, electric vehicles could displace much as 6.4 million barrels a day of demand, while fuel efficiency improvements will erase another 7.5 million barrels a day, according to BloombergNEF's May 2018 long-term EV outlook.
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China's E-Buses Dent Oil Demand More Than Electric Cars Do More

China's E-Buses Dent Oil Demand More Than Electric Cars Do

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  • good for them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stooo ( 2202012 )

      That's only the beginning. BEV will capture more over 50% of the bus and delivery vehicle market share in 3 years globally.
      While those crazy European cities are still ordering ICEd busses, what a huge mistake.

      • A lot of European cities already have electric (for shorter routes) and natural gas buses (for longer routes).

  • And the petrodollar? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Krishnoid ( 984597 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2019 @04:52PM (#58306668) Journal

    By 2040, electric vehicles could displace much as 6.4 million barrels a day of demand, while fuel efficiency improvements will erase another 7.5 million barrels a day, according to BloombergNEF's May 2018 long-term EV outlook.

    So what influence will this have at that point and into the future on the value of the US dollar, or that portion of the USD's value as the exchange currency for oil?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Well for a start the year of real cost is wildly delayed. It will be far quicker and there will be quite a precipitous fall off at one point.

      There existing fuel delivery market needs a high number of vehicles to function at current retail prices. The fewer the number of fossil fuel consuming vehicles, the greater the impact of the cost of servicing those vehicles become. As service stations get less vehicles through, they have to charge more to continue to be viable and this spreads through the whole syste

      • you will be hard pressed to sell it to junk yard as replacement parts for other vehicles idiots are desperate to keep on roads because they just have to be dicks making noise and generating pollution.

        Or, you know, because they don't have $30k+ lying around spend on a new EV...and it saves the emissions involved in the production of any new car.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dryeo ( 100693 )

        A new thing in Vancouver, where many gas stations have shut down as the land is so valuable, is gas delivery. Small tanker trucks driving around in the night, filling up peoples cars. Price is comparable to the gas station as well.
        Industries adjust.

        • A new thing in Vancouver, where many gas stations have shut down as the land is so valuable, is gas delivery. Small tanker trucks driving around in the night, filling up peoples cars.

          That's cool in cities, but it won't help people living in the sticks. They're too spread out, and their vehicles aren't conveniently parked along an orderly street. And those are the people who are going to get screwed over. They have the furthest distances to go to get to where they're going, they have the most power outages, and they have the fewest filling stations already.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dryeo ( 100693 )

            Yes, it'll awkward for them. Get large quantities of diesel delivered if wealthy enough or burn something they can make themselves such as wood.

          • > That's cool in cities, but it won't help people living in the sticks. They're too
            > spread out, and their vehicles aren't conveniently parked along an orderly street.

            Note that the GP post mentioned gas stations were shutting down because of land costs in cities. This forcing of shutdowns does not apply to rural stations.

            • Note that the GP post mentioned gas stations were shutting down because of land costs in cities. This forcing of shutdowns does not apply to rural stations.

              All of the other issues still apply, so yes it does. Maybe slightly later.

          • I don't see this as a problem, but as a solution. Why should people be living all spread out? Everything is more efficient if you cram people into walkable cities.
            • Why should people be living all spread out? Everything is more efficient if you cram people into walkable cities.
              Pray tell, where shall you obtain the food to feed all those people living in those efficient walkable cities?
              • In the cheap farmland made available by the bulldozing of the suburbs. You don't need many farmers out there to feed the city - you could move your farms closer to the city if the cities were more compact, which would result in less waste.

          • It wasn't that long ago that people in the sticks regularly bought a barrel (about 60 gallons) of gasoline at a time.
            That might return.

      • > The fewer the number of fossil fuel vehicles the greater the price has to be to service
        > them and service stations with low demand will shut down, spreading them further
        > and further apart, creating greater inconvenience to fuel vehicles. As service
        > stations shut down, so supply costs to them must increase. So the costs of running
        > a fossil fueller will increase even as demand for oil falls off reducing it's price.

        So, instead of 3 gas stations on the street corner near me, there might only

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stooo ( 2202012 )

      USD is doomed.
      Oil as a transportation fuel is doomed.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by tarks ( 529856 )
      Fuel efficiency cannot have any effect in 2040 given that we need to be carbon neutral worldwide by 2030 at the latest

  • Gas or diesel buses are, themselves, better than the equivalent number of cars, although I wonder if that considers average ridership on buses. They may be better than 20 cars, but not 2 for an almost empty bus.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )
      I would guess that the impact here is influenced by high public transport use and low private car ownership in China compared to Western countries. More buses = more impact when you reduce their emissions. Possibly also, China may be upgrading from an older bus fleet, which is more polluting than the newer buses that are common in Western countries.

  • Makes sense - a bus gets typically 6 miles per diesel gallon, 5 for gasoline, compared to a car's average of 25 mpg, and the duty cycles of busses is typically 25% or more, vs consumer-owned cars that are typically around 5% utilization, so busses burn about 5x as many gallons per mile driven, and are driven about 5x as much of the day, so each bus converted to an EV would equate to 25 cars converts to EVs, so electrifying busses is a very efficient way to reduce gas consumption. And I bet fleet owners like

    • Makes sense - a bus gets typically 6 miles per diesel gallon, 5 for gasoline, compared to a car's average of 25 mpg, and the duty cycles of busses is typically 25% or more, vs consumer-owned cars that are typically around 5% utilization, so busses burn about 5x as many gallons per mile driven, and are driven about 5x as much of the day, so each bus converted to an EV would equate to 25 cars converts to EVs, so electrifying busses is a very efficient way to reduce gas consumption. And I bet fleet owners like it, too - EVs have much lower operating costs and lower maintenance costs, which are a big deal for fleets.

      On the flip side, globally there are over 900 million cars on the road, vs perhaps 100 thousand busses, so there's a lot more fuel consumed by cars than busses, so while each car has less impact, they outnumber busses by 9,000:1, so converting all of them to EVs would have a lot more impact.

      The problem is, whereas communities may be thoughtful and conscientious; individuals are selfish and less thoughtful. It's easier to get cities to flip to electric than people. It has to happen eventually, and the environment will be better for it- but people suck!

  • Need to assess oil displacement per capita (Score:3)

    by presidenteloco ( 659168 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2019 @05:00PM (#58306704)
    Conventional diesel buses are already much more efficient than cars.
    A bus emits approximately 1/6 the CO2 per passenger kilometer as does a single-occupant ICE car.

    From that perspective, electrifying cars should give more ghg reductions, in a population where most people are using cars.

    In China, the car use is probably not that high yet, as a proportion of population, so it makes sense that busses are having a bigger oil displacement there. That is not replicable to other car-centric places like USA.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Wrong, actually China has similar vehicle numbers per working capita. You "probably" don't know anything real about this, or how the numbers actually work - it's about rates of actual adoption, not fantasy optimal lab efficiency, derp.

      • Wait, did I say per working capita?
        No, I believe I didn't.
        I said per capita, which means per person with a head.
        USA 833 moter vehicles per 1000 people.
        China 173 motor vehicles per 1000 people

        I know how numbers work pretty well.

        Per capita is the only fair way to assess GHG emissions policy and progress.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jrumney ( 197329 )
        As of 2012, China's level of motorisation was at approximately 80 passenger cars per 1000 population, a level last seen in the United States in the year 1920 [1 [sciencedirect.com]].

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Not just CO2, it's the soot and other particulate matter. In the UK you can be walking down the steer and a diesel bus pulls up and sprays you with soot, makes your clothes stink and your skin feel grimy. It's disgusting.

      That doesn't happen in many Chinese cities any more.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hawk ( 1151 )

      >A bus emits approximately 1/6 the CO2 per passenger kilometer as does a single-occupant ICE car.

      That depends *entirely* on how full the bus is . . .

      The last report I saw locally came out to them emitting more per actual passenger.

      hawk

  • China is the global EV leader (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jzanu ( 668651 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2019 @05:10PM (#58306742)
    This is the true reality of the world. China is the EV leader because it is not tied to the fantasy of AI and self-driving as pre-requisite for emissions reduction. The solution that can be and has been implemented now is to use these EV busses with trained drivers. Then dozens of passengers have greater security and can do anything for leisure or productivity while riding to their destinations.

    • Re:China is the global EV leader (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2019 @05:40PM (#58306920) Homepage Journal

      They didn't muck about either. None of this "I need to drive it for 12 hours straight without stopping" or "oh but my cabin in the wilderness with no electricity is range+1 km away, so EVs are totally useless and I need the fossil" rubbish, they just got on and built the vehicles and the massive batteries. The biggest anyone else does is 100kWh, BYD has had busses with 450kWh in mass production for years now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      China is not very innovative or fast here. But the rest of the world is an unmitigated catastrophe. In a world of the incapable, the semi-competent is king. How did the West go so wrong?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 )

      China is the EV leader because it is not tied to the fantasy of AI and self-driving as pre-requisite for emissions reduction.

      Heh, no. It's simpler than that. China is the EV leader because they have a population of 1.4 billion people and a centralized/top-down system of government that can (to a large degree) simply declare "okay, we're all going to do this now" and coerce the nation into obeying.

      Combine that with some of the world's worst environmental problems, and presto -- you've got a country making a beeline for EVs.

  • Only a surprise if you use MPG (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2019 @05:39PM (#58306910)
    MPG is actually the inverse of fuel consumption. That is, the bigger MPG gets, the less fuel is consumed. This has the effect of exaggerating people's perception of the effect of high-MPG vehicles on fuel consumption. Most people are surprised to learn that upgrading from a 14 MPG SUV to a 20 MPG SUV saves more fuel than upgrading from a 25 MPG sedan to a 50 MPG hybrid. How can a +6 MPG improvement save more fuel than a +25 MPG improvement? Because MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption, meaning a +x MPG delta doesn't represent the same fuel savings throughout the entire MPG range. Say you drive 100 miles.

    14 MPG SUV = 7.14 gallons
    20 MPG SUV = 5.0 gallons
    2.14 gallons saved per 100 miles

    25 MPG sedan = 4.0 gallons
    50 MPG hybrid = 2.0 gallons
    2.0 gallons saved per 100 miles.

    So +6 MPG @ 14 MPG results in more fuel savings than +25 MPG @ 25 MPG. A +x MPG improvement represents more fuel savings at lower MPG than it does higher MPG. The rest of the world measures fuel consumption in liters per 100 km to avoid this problem. That's a direct measure of fuel consumption, not an inverse.

    This means econoboxes are actually the worst vehicle to convert to a hybrid. They already use very little fuel, so the potential fuel savings by converting them to a hybrid is even smaller. And you're spending a lot of money on a hybrid drivetrain for a very small fuel savings. The hybrid SUVs that environmentalists scoffed at are actually the best personal vehicles for converting into hybrids. Likewise, you get the biggest fuel savings when you convert pickup trucks, buses, and tractor trailers to hybrids or electric. Musk understood this, which is why he produced an electric semi-trailer truck. There are roughly 2 million semi-trucks in the U.S. vs 250 million cars. Yet the semi-trucks consume nearly as much fuel as the cars.

    (The same problem affects hard drives and SSDs. MB/s is actually the inverse of how we perceive drive speed. We think of speed in terms of how long we have to wait for the drive to complete an operation. So those multi-GB/s sequential speeds that NVMe SSDs can hit actually make very little difference. They're so fast the operation is completed in the blink of an eye. It's actually the smallest MB/s speeds which make the biggest difference. If your NMVe SSD can only manage 30 MB/s 4k reads, even a small number of small files which need to be read will easily make you wait for a longer time than hundreds of MB of sequential data. If you want a good SSD, ignore the sequential speeds, get something with fast 4k speeds.)

    • Who the heck knows about your freaky american units. My friends hybrid toyota vehicle gets 4L/100km in the city. I get like 12 or 13. So its 3x more efficient than my 20 year old 170hp gas sedan, in the city.

      Yet another reason that the metric system is far far far more intuitive. Language dictates reality and if you have confusing language, its no wonder americans are so confused about things like the proper size of vehicle to drive. At least i know my car is wasting money, and by exactly how much.

      • This has nothing to do with metric vs. Imperial (or pseudo-imperial if youâ(TM)re American), but more to do with people who with people who donâ(TM)t accept change and stick with anachronistic systems. Non-metric people could just as easily use a measure of gallons per 100 miles (or US gallons per 100 miles)

    • uh!oh! Slowdown cowboy! Highly technical terms like blink of an eye to measure the seek time in the hard disks! What next? Going to use cubits to measure the thickness of paper? Or may be go all the way and express speed in furlongs/fortnight?
    • I think that'll depend on personal circumstances. If your daily commute is less than 30 miles per day and you plug in your hybrid every night, you'll hardly use petrol.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The great thing about EVs is that those inefficient SUVs like the Model X, iPace and eTron all help to push down battery prices for the more efficient models. Unlike the cost of a larger fuel tank which is pretty minimal, battery costs scale fairly linearly with capacity.

  • Yeah, but we've got coal! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kimgkimg ( 957949 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2019 @06:07PM (#58307100)
    That's now money that they can spend somewhere else instead of on oil imports. Meanwhile we're cutting back on support of renewables and clean energy initiatives here in the US in favor of deregulating coal. This is why we're going to be chasing China's lead.
  • Coal, water, solar, wind, nuclear? Displacing one, usually means generating up for the other.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Coal and nuclear plants, have to be revved up and revved down slowly. If peak demand is breakfast and dinner time, the wind down can be used to charge things on the down hill of the shoulder demand.

      China is so efficient, like the Germans, charging will take place at optimum demand periods that consume what would be wasted. In any case, EV Bus has maximum priority.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stooo ( 2202012 )

      The only ones going up these days are solar and wind.
      The others stagnate or drop very slightly.

  • Nothing in the referenced articles note whether the buses are battery operated or use overhead wires for the electricity delivery. The latter situation might be more efficient as the buses wouldn't need to be take out of service to charge the on board batteries or exchange them. Batteries also add weight to the buses and have a limited lifetime thus the cost of using them vs. overhead cables would increase cost.

    • Intriguing question, with my hometown of San Francisco (900K folks) having
      a multiplicity of delivery types, all sourced from 100% GHG-free
      power from Yosemite-area hydro.

      We have quaint cable cars, the EM motive force then converted to mechanical force.

      We have light rail and traditional trolley streetcars, both sourced with overhead wires.

      We have surface-only buses which started to be petroleum diesel until 2007,
      then B20 biodiesel until 2015, now renewable plant "green" diesel,
      supplemented with hybrid batteri

      • It's been a long time since I visited San Francisco, but, if I remember correctly, many, if not most, of the buses were electric using overhead wiring. They were pretty quiet and there was no smoke coming from a non existent tail pipe. Not sure the input energy source for the cable cars, but I'm guessing electricity. Cable cars are not likely an important transportation source, but they're nice for tourists.

    • Batteries also add weight to the buses and have a limited lifetime thus the cost of using them vs. overhead cables would increase cost.

      That depends on routes, and number of buses. The catenary wire system has to be built and maintained. Trains can pick up the catenary wires themselves with a simple scissor lift system, but buses have to be able to move side to side, so the contactor arms have to be connected to the wires manually. I'm sure you could make that system robotic, but at the moment that's not how it's done. (How much would that cost, how reliable could you make it, etc.) It therefore really only makes sense to use trolleybuses w

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stooo ( 2202012 )

      Batteries cost less than wires.
      Also batteries are less ugly.

    • I think you can take it they mean battery operated otherwise they'd not be refer to cars as part of the discussion. Batteries will be recycled and yes, they are heavy - its all been factored into the equations. No need to take them out of service to charge as they all return to the depot at some point during the day especially when the driver has to have lunch and as the battery will not be fully discharged at that point, it won't take long to put enough charge in to finish the day. Once you get the idea t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shilly ( 142940 )

      They're BEVs, not trolley cars.

  • Maybe we need to have that little talk - you know: about where electricity comes from.

    If the electricity comes from a diesel, or worse yet, coal plant, then I doubt there is any environmental benefit.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by godrik ( 1287354 )

      Maybe we need to have that little talk - you know: about where electricity comes from.

      If the electricity comes from a diesel, or worse yet, coal plant, then I doubt there is any environmental benefit.

      While that's a good question I disagree with you. It is a lot simpler to have particle filtering at the plant rather than in many buses.
      Also it makes your energy consumption depend on the grid which gives you a choice of burning diesel, or natural gas, or use a renewable when it is there.

      Of course there is some loss in transport and battery storage, but you have also a gain of efficiency because it is simpler to have one efficient plant than 1000 efficient buses engines.

  • Even a small drop will lower prices significantly because it's the barrel that costs $60 to pump that sets the price, not the billions of barrels that cost $15 to pump.

    This sets up an interesting feedback loop since electric cars are an *awesome* deal at $4 gasoline and $0.11/kwh electricity but not so great at $2 gasoline and $0.11/kwh (much less the $0.28/kwh it is in some countries).

    So plug in electric vehicles (PUV) lower the cost of gasoline thereby making themselves less attractive.

    Of course as intern

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