Who's driving the energy revolution?

Motoring editor Alastair Sloane and the Independent's Michael McCarthy look at the development of alernative fuels - automotive technology that is the enemy of Opec.

Toyota continues to trial its petrol/electric Prius. Honda is doing the same with its hybrid, the Insight. Ford this week landed its LPG-only Falcon. Each car is designed to reduce exhaust emissions and make motoring cheaper and cleaner in New Zealand.

Carmakers are talking more about fuel options as the price of petrol and diesel soars. Petrol in Auckland on Thursday cost between $1.20 and $1.25 a litre, up 30-odd cents in a few months. Diesel was around 85c, up nearly 40 cents. LPG, however, cost roughly 60 cents a litre.

Ford says its LPG (liquid petroleum gas) Falcon is an affordable alternative. "This is not a concept car showcasing technology that is many years away from providing a viable alternative to petrol," said Ford New Zealand managing director Nigel Harris. "It is available and accessible, at an affordable price, here and now."

The only mainstream petrol-electric hybrid car that has done any time on New Zealand roads is the Toyota Prius. It uses a 1.5-litre four-cylinder petrol engine and an electric motor. At slow speeds electricity drives the car; at higher speeds the engine takes over. It's a Scrooge at the petrol pumps, capable of 80mpg, or less than three litres of fuel for every 100 km. But it would cost about $50,000 in New Zealand.

Toyota has sold 40,000 Prius models in Japan over the past three years and the car has just gone on sale for $US20,000 ($47,600) in America, where 12,000 are expected to sell this year. Britain will get it soon, too.

Colossal sums of money are going into research on how to replace the internal combustion engine with powerplants that do not depend on petroleum.

Ford alone is spending more than $2 billion to put a car on the road by 2004 that runs on hydrogen.

The prototype, the P2000, is already driving around.

General Motors will showcase its hydrogen car during the Sydney Olympic marathon tomorrow. Mercedes-Benz and BMW are running hydrogen models around Germany. Several technologies are being investigated, by all the big car manufacturers, that will make the importance of the oil industry, and our reliance on its product, dwindle and perhaps vanish.

Driving the effort is the pressing need to reduce what comes out of exhaust pipes, with tougher legislation being directed at vehicle emissions. Not so much at the noxious pollutants, such as carbon monoxide and the oxides of nitrogen: they have already been cleaned up considerably by the introduction over the past 15 years of catalytic converters, now standard on all new cars.

The focus of attention now is the basic by-product of the combustion of carbon fuels - carbon dioxide, whose rising levels in the atmosphere are now accepted as bringing about global warming.

Road traffic not only produces a third of all CO2 emissions; it represents the fastest-growing emissions sector and the one that most urgently needs to be curbed.

The new engine technologies seek to limit CO2 and then do away with it completely by replacing petrol with a non-carbon source of energy.

First on the list is improvement in the workings of the internal combustion engine. All Europe's car manufacturers have signed an agreement to make standard engines 25 per cent more efficient by 2008, although there are no sanctions if they fail to deliver.

European legislation drastically reducing the sulphur content in fuels clears the way for direct fuel-injection systems that will make diesel, especially, cleaner and even more efficient. Volkswagen chairman Ferdinand Piech believes that by 2005 diesel will have overtaken petrol as the first choice for Europe's new-car buyers.

Next is the development of alternative fuels for standard engines, like LPG and CNG (compressed natural gas).

More radical are the coming technologies abandoning oil entirely. One is already here: battery power. Electric vehicles are a reality in Norway and Sweden, where a city runabout called TH!NK has been developed, and is on sale, with the help of investment from Ford.

But battery-powered cars can only go so far, and so fast. They produce zero emissions, but as a transportation system they are limited.

The hybrid, like the Prius and Insight, is seen as a partial but efficient solution. But for environmental groups - and for other motor companies such as Ford - the real path to the future is more radical.

The hydrogen fuel cell will make the internal combustion engine a thing of the past, and oil with it. It is a rapidly evolving device that generates electricity by electrochemically combining hydrogen (from a fuel tank) and oxygen (from the air) without combustion. All that comes out of the exhaust pipe is water vapour.

The problem waiting to be solved is the onboard storage of the hydrogen, either in gaseous or liquid form, which at present takes up so much space there is no room for a boot. But enormous research is being devoted to solving this.

Support for the view that oil will soon be supplanted also comes from a more unlikely source: Sheikh Yamani, the one-time Saudi oil minister who spoke for Opec in the 1970s when the cartel was at the peak of its power and influence.

He warned the oil-producing nations last week that the return to $30 a barrel crude has only hastened the day when the oil era will close.

"The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil," he said, warning that hybrid engines and hydrogen fuel-cells will drastically cut petrol consumption.

"Technology is a real enemy for Opec," he said. "The real victims will be countries like Saudi Arabia with huge reserves which they can do nothing with - the oil will stay in the ground forever."