Will Peak Oil Turn Flying into Something Only Rich People Can Afford?

Sitting atop the queue in my inbox is an e-mail from a travel company advertising a $736 roundtrip flight from Los Angeles to Auckland. Captain Cook discovered New Zealand in 1769; for the next 200 years the idea of visiting it, for an American, would have been alien to all but a few very wealthy individuals. Things change. As I write this, a ticket to travel 6,500 miles — one-quarter of the circumference of the Earth — is only a few clicks away.

But how permanent is that change? In the last decade, studies have consistently demonstrated that the world’s storehouses of oil are drying up. Oil is now being consumed almost four times faster than it is being discovered, and in early March, Kuwaiti scientists projected that we will reach peak oil production in 2014.

Preparations to electrify much of the country’s ground transportation are under way. But airlines have a problem: No battery is large enough to power a jet.

“Electricity holds great promise for substituting for a large fraction of the driving we do,” says Joseph Romm, a physicist who writes the blog Climateprogress.org. “But it’s not a perfect substitute for liquid fuel. You’re not going to use electricity for air travel. We’re going to need an alternative.”

Developing a jet fuel alternative is vital not only to the commercial airline industry but also to the American military. The Department of Defense, the largest single oil consumer in the world, spends an enormous amount of money on jet fuel — more than $6 billion in 2006.

Unfortunately for both the DOD and the aviation industry, it will be difficult to duplicate the virtues of oil-derived jet kerosene. Jet fuel is compact and easily transportable, and it carries an immense amount of energy in a small volume.

In recent years airlines have begun experimenting with different kinds of biodiesel-jet fuel mixtures. But biodiesels and other biofuels, like biobutanol, are still prohibitively expensive, and their environmental benefits are in dispute.

They are also bedeviled by a geographic problem. Planes take off on one continent and land another; they must be able to use a chemically identical fuel in both places. Developing a single, inexpensive, high-energy biodiesel and then creating an infrastructure to ensure that it can be supplied to airports all over the world will be neither simple nor cheap.

A recent study by Swedish researchers found that it is “unrealistic” to imagine that biodiesels can rescue an aviation industry deprived of crude oil. “The possibility of biodiesel replacing conventional jet fuel is limited,” the authors conclude.

“The airlines are starting to develop alternative fuels, but it’s very preliminary at this stage,” says Andrew Goetz, a geography professor at the University of Denver who specializes in the aviation industry. “In the short term —and maybe the long term — aviation is still very much dependent on fossil fuels.”

Unfortunately, the cost and availability of alternative fuels isn’t the only institutional problem facing the airline industry. Most climate scientists believe that stabilizing global carbon emissions and then reducing them by 60 to 80 percent by mid-century will avert the worst consequences of global warming. Without such reductions, they say, the world faces climate disaster.

Representatives of the airline industry have argued in the past that they could reduce their collective carbon footprint by making more efficient planes and designing better air traffic control. Since the 1960s, they pointed out, average fuel efficiency industrywide has increased by 70 percent; by the 2050s, they claimed, they could cut emissions by 40 to 50 percent.