Bullet Points: Winning the Oil End Game
WINNING THE OIL ENDGAME
G. Amory Lovins (Director, Rocky Mountain Institute, Defense Science Board)
- Amory Lovins’s book, Winning the Oil Endgame(www.move.rmi.org), outlines an efficiency-based vision, using DOD as a model
- The discussion of the revolution in military affairs over the 1990s resulted in DOD’s improving strategic vectors of speed, stealth, precision, and networking
- DOD should excel at two new strategic vectors, endurance and resilience
- Our issues with oil today resemble the issues we had with salt over a century ago. Until that time, salt was used to preserve food. However, with the advent of refrigeration, salt consumption plummeted. As a result, its value decreased and conflict over the mineral fell dramatically. Moral of the story: if we stop consuming oil, it will diminish in value and there will be no need to fight over it
- A systemic shock to oil:
- We can render oil largely irrelevant by 2030, and far less important by 2020
- Lovins outlines the possibilities of efficiency in the context of endurance and resilience
- Introduction of ultralight, ultralow-drag, and advanced propulsion into vehicle production. Efficiency averaged across all military platforms can triple over several decades, with uncompromised and generally improved combat capability
- Integrate the use of carbon fiber composites into vehicle design. Carbon fiber composite is much lighter than steel; several times stronger
- Reduce the weight and, subsequently, the energy required to move the vehicle (Most of the fuel that goes into acceleration is based on vehicular weight)
- This revolution could start in DOD and spread across industry
- Advanced composites offer strategic advantages in manufacturing but must also compete with valid metal solutions
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