mandarine

Be careful when mixing information

One day in early February, I opened one of these innocent e-mails that colleagues absent-mindedly forward around to whomever they can think of. It was the minutes of a conference on the candidate technologies to replace kerosene for commercial airliners. The conclusions was that none was a credible alternative for the next few decades at least.

I could have just pressed the ‘delete’ button and forgotten about it, but before I could, this piece of info collided with another one about how much oil prices had increased in just over two years. It was like mingling glycerine with nitric acid: kabloo ! As a result, I quit my job as an R-and-D engineer for future commercial aircraft projects.

Let me walk you through the chain reaction in slow motion.

Future aircraft improvements are absurdly inadequate

Kerosene is what powers turbofan or turboprop aircraft. A very sober jet like the Airbus A380 can fly eighty miles per gallon per passenger. You might think this is not much; but imagine yourself checking-in with a couple of carts carrying two hundred 1-gallon cans of jet fuel (or alternatively sunflower oil if you are biofuel-minded) for your Bombay - New-York return trip, and you have a clue why air travel needs inexpensive fuel like rice crops need abundant water [5].

I was an R-and-D engineer for future commercial aircraft projects. I was struggling to scrape 2% off the fuel burn of futuristic airliners. No need to have a PhD in rocket science to see that this is absurdly inadequate: oil prices rise by 2% each week, and we are trying to shave that much off an airline’s fuel bill in five years from now… In 2008, the Boeing 787 dreamliner will save 20% fuel burn compared to the ageing 767. Now 20% is exactly how much oil prices rose between January and May just this year - therefore, despite all its novelties, the 30-year younger 787 design will offset only five months worth of oil prices rise.

Inevitable decline

If new designs cannot mitigate the issue, impending oil production decline and the resulting soaring oil prices are not compatible with sustained air traffic growth.

Sustained air traffic growth is however necessary to build and sell airliners: it convinces bankers that lending money to a non-profitable airline so that it can buy 100-million-dollar-apiece flying machines is a good investment; it entices communities to spend billions in taxpayer’s money for airport infrastructures; it motivates aircraft manufacturers’ shareholders to give zillions for new aircraft developments. Without sustained air traffic growth, neither Airbus nor Boeing can go on selling 400+ planes a year, investing in new airplane designs, or for that matter maintaining a workforce of 40,000+.

You can find more details on on the Hubbert ‘Peak Oil’ theory [1]. The reality of the impending change is undeniable. What is still unclear is whether we are already witnessing the peak oil phenomenon or whether there are still good years ahead of us. Oil companies admit that 2020 is a reasonable prediction. Even if we take their word for it, it is hardly a satisfactory respite for aircraft manufacturers: 2020 is only 8 years beyond entry into service of the A350 - and aircraft manufacturers generally consider that a model is worth investing in, if it can sell for 20 years at least.

Now you might think that the industry should see this coming: they probably do, but admitting it would be telling their bankers that they are on the brink of major change. It is a very tricky situation. If they launched the development of a revolutionary slow-flying, medium-size, medium-range turboprop to save 50% fuel burn (that’s more like it), they would be confessing that they expect drastic turmoil in air travel models. As bankers hate turmoil, it might just hasten the fall. So they prefer to bury their heads in the sand, praying that this be just a temporary blip and that oil prices will soon nicely settle back to 30 $ a barrel and stay at that price for the next thirty years. Or they sell their stock options and abandon ship.

In the best of scenarios

Now I am no fatalist and I do not consider that the oil crisis will necessarily result in a global economic collapse. It may even be beneficial if we collectively take up the challenge of transitioning smoothly to a post-oil era (read [4]). I do not imply that aircraft will stop flying. Still, in the best of scenarios, fuel prices will eventually be much higher (fossil-, bio-, cryo-, you name it), airline ticket prices will rise, fewer people will fly, fewer aircraft will sell.

Having said that, I could just as easily have gone back to work and hoped for the best, or hoped that the worst would come late enough. Or I could do something about it. I began to look around and found a great position in the space sector from where I had originally come, and quit my job. Career-wise, it was a great opportunity, but saying bye bye to my childhood dream of inventing new aircraft was tough, especially not knowing whether the crisis is for this year or for 2020.

Epilogue(s)

This is not the end of the story, though. Having worked in one of the industrial areas that will be most massively impacted by the coming oil crisis made me realise how much of my way of life depended on cheap oil. I will not go into detail here, but now the term ’sustained development’ means a lot more to me. After all, it was easy to convince my scientific mind that continued exponential growth in a finite world is not possible.

A last word of advice if you want to go on and read more about the peak oil crisis. You have to be prepared for three phases:

1. disbelief: what you read is so far from what you currently believe. Yet everything is so logically obvious.
2. despondency: there are a lot of end-of-the-world scenarios surrounding the oil crisis websites. It is easy to be very dispirited.
3. hope: there are things we can do something about, and the challenge awaiting us is a great new frontier for our generation.

Read on

Cheer up, you do not want to live long anyway

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[1] Hubbert peak theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[2] Airliners.net Articles: Peak Oil: The Coming Global Crisis and the Decline of Aviation

[3] ASPO - The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas


[4] Peak Oil Optimist - an interesting blog

[5] A french website (in English) with very acute scientific proofs

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