Surprisingly, upon some examination of the numbers, Air Cars probably don't pose as great a threat to the Oil industry as one might initially suspect.

In this month's report on "Where does all the Oil go? ", we discussed that just 35% of the world's oil production goes to passenger vehicles. In this article, we examine just what impact an Air Car society would have on the world crude oil industry. 

Current air technologies require a hybrid of air and gas (or other) combustion engines onboard to assist propelling the vehicle at highway speeds. The same is true for most all-electric vehicles as well. MDI's current engine and transmission solution, for example, has a top speed of 40 km/h - so for the 6000 taxis being delivered to India in 2008, many will be gasoline hybrids - very efficient gasoline hybrids - but there is still gas in the tank.

Just how efficient are Air Cars (click here to view videos)? Well, its initially predicted that a single tank of gas could get your car from Los Angeles to New York.

Yes - that's efficient, but its also reasonable to expect many consumers will suffer the price at the gasoline pumps for luxury and speed advantages that combustion engines may always have over compressed air.

So if all of us were driving Air Cars tomorrow, we might reduce the 35% share of world oil going to passenger cars to - lets say from 35% to 15%. There is still plenty of oil demand left as the  75% of other oil consumers continue right on filling the coffers of Big Oil on a quarterly basis. One foresees that the Oil companies will be able to cash in on some of their enormous real estate holdings as demand drops, and the can always increase their cost per unit sales (aka. profit per litre) to make up for any demand shortfalls. 

In fact, the ones who stand to loose most when the Air Car "takes off" are probably going to be the battery-electric and fuel cell manufacturers. Battery companies are affected because current hybrid designs call for many dozen(s) of batteries per car - instead of the current standard of just one single battery per car. The fuel cell manufacturers are affected because their technology is 20 to 30 years away from viability - and yet they were capturing financial investment because they were the only viable alternative out there.

Please note that these observations only relate to the automotive applications of these technologies of course. Both Battery and Fuel Cell technologies look forward to a long, healthy life in other energy providing roles and - wouldn't it be great to see an Air/Fuel-Cell hybrid Car on your dealer's lot within the next 20 years?.

These manufacturers have had big investments made by financial and automotive groups and its clear that an Air Car solution is going to be preferred by an educated consumer due to the high environmental cost of building and discarding massive qualtities of used batteries or expensive and complex fuel cells. I won't touched on the logistix problems of distributing volitile hydrogen fuel to the masses but using freely available air to drive our cars makes a lot of sense.

Air stocks while they're cheap; Oil stocks to continue strong in the short and mid-term; and then examine more carefully their positions in "press darling" stocks in the battery and fuel cell technology industries.

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites