Peak oil to hit in five years?

Bill Reinert believes that the internal-combustion engine has a place in the car of the future -- as long as it's the not-too-distant future.

"I think that the future of the automobile is robust through to the end of the next decade," Reinert, National Manager of Toyota's Advanced Technology Group in the US, told visiting journalists from Australia at Toyota Motor Sales' Torrance, California facility.

Peak oil production will be the prime motivator in the car industry moving away from engines burning fossil fuels, according to Reinert, who strongly supports the work of oil industry analyst, Peter Wells.

"This is a supply-side analysis," Reinert says of Wells' five-year study, "most of the global governments use a demand-side analysis to project this economic theory that somehow supply will keep up.

"I think [Wells] tracked about 44,000 oil fields, how much gets invested and what the attrition rates are and the geopolitics of how this oil gets apportioned out.

"I don't want to be definitive, but I'll just tell you that the top line is somewhere around 2014, conventional oil [production] peaks.

"Already this year, the non-OPEC, non-FSU (former Soviet Union) oil has peaked and starts to decline.

"Certainly we're going to have some new supplies come along -- deep-water stuff off Brazil and some of the deep-water stuff in the [Arabian] Gulf. The problem is that such wells have fairly short lives and they're 15,000 feet [down] -- I'll save you the math: 5000 metres -- and it's very hard to do extended oil recovery.

"In other words, you might inject sea water down into [the wells] or natural gas to enhance the oil recovery as the field pressure starts to decline... the way to enhance that is to pressurise the field with either natural gas, salt water or steam -- something like that. That's very hard to do when you're doing deep fields like that.

"Doctor Wells will tell you that by about 2014, conventional oil will peak and then decline. Now that doesn't mean that traditional liquid fuels will be going away, because you've still got natural gas... you have the heavy oils, the tar sands, coal-to-liquid... bio-fuels -- those kinds of things.

"Give or take a year or two -- somewhere around 2020 or 2023; in that band -- the world's energy demand for liquid fuels will exceed the world's capacity to supply liquid fuels...

"That's why we're interested in the alternatives... Whether it's electricity or natural gas...

"By the way, I think it's the same for Australia too; I don't think you have a whole lot of energy supplies at your beck and call either -- to develop. You do have coal supplies, you do have some natural gas -- the problem is turning those into fuels with a very high carbon footprint.

"High-CO2 types of approaches to liquid fuels -- someone's going to have to pay for it somewhere."

Although Toyota has argued consistently that hybrid-drive vehicles have a life expectancy beyond the short term, Reinert's views seem to contradict that -- and certainly, the company has progressed a long way in the development of real-world fuel-cell technology.

Toyota's experimental FCHV, based on the previous generation Kluger, is a fully-functioning car, which the Carsales Network drove briefly in Los Angeles. To all intents and purposes, it's just like driving a cross between a typical crossover SUV and a golf buggy -- except it offers a range of up to 500 miles (800km) between (hydrogen) fills. There's no clue at all from driving it that it contains an operational fuel cell system -- something as arcane as a nuclear reactor to most people.

It certainly seems ready for consumers to buy and operate -- but it remains nominally experimental, unlike the Honda FCX Clarity, which Honda has already begun delivering to private users in the US.

Reinert walks a line between criticising Honda for the inherent limitations of FCX Clarity and praising Toyota's competitor for undertaking its share of the "heavy lifting" developing fuel cells for mass market consumption.

"Toyota had the first fuel cell program," he says, as a prelude to taking a swipe at Honda with his next words.

"We get overshadowed by a lot of folks who do more marketing than we do, but Toyota had the first fuel cell program here in the United States."

Reinert does commend Honda for its fuel cell car, but he effectively says it's a dead-end -- not from a technological point of view as much as a logistical/production and marketing perspective.

"Honda will take a very different approach -- and hats off to the [FCX] Clarity. It's a wonderful car, wonderfully well engineered, a beautiful car. Their approach is to develop a unified car. Our approach is to not focus so much on the car, as to focus on systems development.

"Our car has a more open architecture. On the Clarity, it's very difficult to change the stack, because it's a dedicated format for where you put the stack."

Reinert then explains that Toyota's fuel cell philosophy is more or less a 'parts-bin' method, employing some technology from the Prius in the Kluger/Highlander-based FCHV, for example. And the reason for the Kluger testbed? If it's damaged, the mechanicals can be transferred into a new vehicle and the body can be written off at very little cost to the company.

The componentry is modular and doesn't need to be scaled up or scaled down for vehicles in different market niches and segments. In theory, a Yaris-sized production fuel cell vehicle might make do with smaller storage batteries and electric motors, but the actual fuel cell stack could be shared with a production fuel cell vehicle as large as a Camry.

"What you're going to see from us is well-finished mules -- test mules. We can change our stack as things improve, we can change our motors as things improve, our power, electronics..." says Reinert.

"All the while, this feeds into our product development for the cars that actually will hit the streets -- sometime in the middle of the next decade. Beyond 2010, before 2020.

"When we say 'hit the streets', I don't mean limited partnerships or demonstration products. I mean go to a dealer, trade in your SUV and drive away in a fuel cell car."

Reinert has that mid-decade timeframe in mind for America, but is less certain about other prospective early-adopting countries.

"It's hard to put a fix exactly on the date, if I don't know how much different administrations -- here, Australia, Japan... -- are going to focus on hydrogen infrastructure [more here].

"There's been a lot of bad press written about hydrogen. It seems to be people say 'It's going to be a miracle to make these fuel cells okay'. It's not. We're probably further along with our fuel cell development... from an electro-chemical point of view, we're as far along as some of our advanced battery development."

The rationalisation of parts for Toyota's future fuel cell vehicle range prompted the Carsales Network to ask about the prospects of fuel cells in commercial vehicles, such as Ford's evergreen (not) F-Series trucks -- or Toyota's equivalent, the Tundra. Can Toyota, in fact, encourage migration from petrol/diesel internal combustion to fuel cells for America's favourite 'car'?

Not easily, admits Reinert. At its current level of technology, the fuel cell develops about 100kW of power -- and the only way that sort of power will be adequate in such an application is if the vehicle goes on a crash diet.

"Those cars will have to be made with hydroformed metal, lightweight metal -- because you're dealing with a fuel cell not with unlimited power. You're dealing with about 100kW. Just because of the space constraints and stuff like that -- and 100kW in an 'F-whatever they are', that's not going to pull horse trailers.

If packaging is not a consideration though (and in traditional light trucks, that's usually the case), there IS a way of providing a truck with the sort of power required in conventional truck applications.

"If you had the space available to you..." says Reinert, "then you could double-stack the fuel cells and go to 200kW or even triple-stack them and go to [300kW].

In the meantime, Reinert -- a self-confessed fan of apocalyptic science fiction ("'Blade Runner' was a serious thing for me," he says with tongue in cheek) -- is doing his bit to reduce his own personal carbon footprint -- by driving his Porsche 911 less.