Ecobella Blog

President-elect Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress seem to have a clear vision of the auto industry they think the country needs. It must be financially self-sufficient. It also must be capable of producing highly fuel-efficient, next-generation vehicles that can help the nation cope with climate change and finite supplies of oil.

Yet for all the conditions attached to it, the multibillion-dollar aid package for Detroit’s carmakers approved by the White House (with Mr. Obama’s support) fails to address one crucial question: Who will buy all the fuel-efficient cars that Detroit carmakers are supposed to make?

The danger is that too few will, especially if gasoline prices remain low. Therefore, it might be time for the president-elect and Congress to think seriously about imposing a gas tax or similar levy to keep gas prices up after the economy recovers from recession.

Americans did not buy enormous gas guzzlers just because Detroit marketed them relentlessly. They bought them because they wanted big cars — and because gas was cheap. If gas stays cheap, Americans would be less inclined to squeeze their families into a lithe fuel-efficient alternative.

Furthermore, even if the government managed to convert General Motors, Chrysler and Ford to the cause of energy efficiency, cheap gas could open the door for a competitor — Toyota, perhaps? — to take over the lucrative market for gas-chuggers, leaving Detroit’s automakers eating dust once again.

Americans have flirted with fuel-efficient cars before only to jilt them when gas prices fell. In the late 1970s, for instance, they spurned light trucks as gas prices doubled. But as gas prices declined between 1981 and 2005, the market share of sport-utility vehicles, pickups, vans and the like jumped from 16 percent to 61 percent of vehicle sales in the United States.

The recent infatuation with the Toyota Prius and other fuel-efficient cars could well come to a similar end. It took a gallon of gas at $4.10 to push the share of light trucks down to 45 percent in July. But as gasoline plummeted back to $1.60 a gallon, their share inched back up to 49 percent of auto sales in November.

There are several ways to tax gas. One would be to devise a variable consumption tax in such a way that a gallon of unleaded gasoline at the pump would never go below a floor of $4 or $5 (in 2008 dollars), fluctuating to accommodate changing oil prices and other costs. Robert Lawrence, an economist at Harvard, proposes a variable tariff on imported oil to achieve the same effect and also to stimulate the development of domestic energy sources.

In both cases, the fuel taxes could be offset with tax credits to protect vulnerable segments of the population.

While oil prices are all but sure to rise again as the world emerges from recession, further tempering consumption with a gas tax would both slow the rise in the price of crude and steer more revenue from energy consumption to the United States budget, rather than that of oil-exporting countries.

A bitter recession is not the most opportune time to ratchet up the price of energy. But if the Obama administration is to meet its twin objectives of reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and cutting its emissions of greenhouse gases, it needs to start thinking now about mechanisms to curb the nation’s demand for energy when the economy emerges from recession in the future.

This also would serve as a signal to American automakers and American drivers that the era of cheap gasoline is not going to last.

Permalink: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/opinion/27sat1.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

• Should we start working toward ending our addiction to Oil?
• Can we take steps to reduce the Carbon Emissions?
• Should we engage to manage better our energy resources?
• Do we want to be in control of our energy security or do we want to be controlled?
• Do you have a doubt that after the economy bottoms out, demand for Oil will rise and price will trail?
• Its always easier to blame somebody for our problems that to engage to get them solved.

A very practical measure today would be to set a special tax that would set a floor at the price of a barrel of oil at $70. This would provide financing today for the plans several people are proposing. It would provide certainty for the consumers to make purchase decisions. Most important however is that it would take financial uncertainty to allow the market economy to finance the new projects.

In addition there is room for other initiatives. Specifically for Costa Rica I would like:

www.CostaRicaCleanAirInitiative

The fastest way to reduce America’s dependence on oil imports is to convert petroleum-driven miles to electric ones by retrofitting the SUVs and pick-ups now on the road with rechargeable batteries. Here’s how.

December 2008 • Andy Grove and Robert Burgelman

Every president since Richard Nixon has vowed to reduce the United States’ dependence on foreign oil. None has succeeded. Imports—and thus America’s vulnerability to disruptions—have increased to where now they supply two-thirds of consumption. As former Secretary of State George Schultz asked: “How many more times must we be hit on the head by a two-by-four before we do something decisive about this acute problem?”

Our aim should not be total independence from foreign sources of petroleum. That is neither practical nor necessary in a world of interdependent economies. Instead, the objective should be developing a sufficient degree of resilience against disruptions in imports. Think of resilience as the ability to absorb a significant disruption, bigger than what could be managed by drawing down the strategic oil reserve.

Our resilience can be strengthened by increasing diversity in the sources of our energy. Commercial, industrial, and home users of oil can already use other sources of energy. By contrast, transportation is totally dependent on petroleum. This is the root cause of our vulnerability.

Our goal should be to increase the diversity of energy sources in transportation. The best alternative to oil? Electricity. The means? Convert petroleum-driven miles to electric ones.

Electric miles do not necessarily mean relying on all-electric cars, which would require building an extensive and expensive infrastructure. They can be achieved by so-called plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). (Since many plug-in cars are modified hybrid automobiles, they are sometimes called PHEVs.) PEVs have both a gasoline-fueled engine and an electric motor. They first rely on the electricity stored onboard in a battery. When the battery is depleted, the vehicle continues to run on petroleum. The battery then can be charged when the vehicle is not in service.

The amount of gasoline a PEV consumes is dependent on the number of miles it is driven between the times when it is recharged. Let us explain this by simplifying the picture a bit. If the electric-only range is, say, 40 miles, and the number of miles driven between charges is less than 40, the vehicle uses no gas at all, so it’s not possible to calculate the miles per gallon. If the number of miles driven is greater than the electric range, the gas mileage starts out very high and then declines with the additional miles until the mileage approaches what an ordinary gasoline-powered vehicle would provide. Consequently, the fuel performance of the vehicle is defined by a curve (exhibit). The 40-mile mark was chosen because it is a good range to shoot for. More than 80 percent of the cars on US roads are driven less than that distance daily.

Several hundred prototypes of PEVs are currently on the road. So what would it take to build enough of them to make a significant dent in oil consumption? Revamping the fleet of automobiles already on the road through production of new automobiles would take far too long for comfort. If ten automobile manufacturers each introduced a new PEV now and increased its production as fast as Toyota did with its highly successful Prius, the vehicles would still account for less than 5 percent of the 250 million vehicles on US roads a decade from now.

We believe the United States should consider accelerating this movement by creating an industry of after-market retrofitters. What problems—technical and economic—would need to be solved in order to do that? With the help of a team of second-year graduate students in our Bass seminar at the Stanford Business School, we examined this question in the context of a proposed pilot program, whose aim would be to retrofit one million vehicles in three years. We felt that such a project would represent what in game theory is referred to as the “minimum winning game”: a significant step toward a long-term strategic objective (see sidebar, “Inside Andy’s real-world seminar”).

We estimate the price tag of such a pilot project to be around $10 billion, owing to the present high cost of batteries, which are around $10,000 each. One might expect such costs to drop as volume increases, but because this program is accelerated by design, we have to assume that batteries will remain expensive. Assuming an average gas price of $3 per gallon, the payback period to the owner of a retrofitted vehicle is at least ten years, not a strong economic incentive. But the benefits of this program—testing and validating a key approach to energy resilience—accrue to the well-being of the United States at large. As the general population is the predominant beneficiary, economic assistance flowing from everyone to vehicle owners, in the form of tax incentives, is justified.

There are different approaches to retrofitting vehicles. We favor GM’s Volt design, in which the car is directly driven by an electric motor. The vehicle’s existing gasoline engine is replaced by a smaller one, whose sole purpose is to generate electricity and recharge the battery. To simplify the retrofitting task, we would limit the scope of the program to six to ten Chevrolet, Ford, and Dodge models, selected on the basis of two criteria: low fuel efficiency and large numbers of vehicles on the road. Most of these vehicles would be SUVs, pick-ups, and vans.

Further, we propose targeting fleets of automobiles owned by corporations or government entities. That way, many retrofits could be performed at just a few locations. Fleet owners may also be motivated by a desire to support corporate or governmental green initiatives. However, some number of retrofits should also be performed on vehicles owned by individual consumers, exposing this process to that more demanding market segment.

Given the current difficult economic conditions, auto dealers and garage operators may well be attracted by this potential new source of revenue and be eager to participate, helping the program in its early stages.

The engineering and organizational issues involved in retrofitting on a large scale are far from trivial. The biggest problem, however, is the availability of batteries. The most suitable battery technology, which offers both a sufficient range and enough power to provide the acceleration required by today’s drivers, is the lithium-ion battery system. Current battery-manufacturing capacity is limited, and nearly all of it is dedicated to supplying batteries for the nearly 200 million laptop computers and other handheld electronic devices built each year. Making the batteries required for one million vehicles would mean doubling current manufacturing output.

There is another issue we need to consider. While there are many sources of the batteries’ raw materials—such as lithium and cobalt—battery manufacturing is almost exclusively based in China, Japan, and Korea. The reason can be found in history. When consumer-electronics manufacturing moved from the United States to Japan in the 1970s, battery manufacturing followed. Later, when laptop computers emerged, they and their portable power sources were also made in Asia. To avoid battery manufacturing becoming the next source of dependency, we have to build domestic technical and manufacturing capability. This will require large and patient investments. We can build on the technical expertise of some US universities, as well as national laboratories such as Argonne. In fact, one of the national laboratories could be placed in charge of the program. An appropriate target: by the end of the three years, making domestic sources for about half of the batteries required for this pilot program.

Another important goal is to improve the cost and quality of battery technology. Advances in material technology, experimenting with different chemicals, and the use of nanotechnology may all play a role in this. If the government makes a significant commitment to a program of electric miles, as we propose here, the venture-capital industry would likely respond to this signal. Large US high-tech companies currently on the sidelines may join as well. The overarching aim for all participants should be to develop an equivalent to Moore’s Law¹ in battery technology.

The study of corporate transformations yields a valuable lesson. Whenever a business finds itself in the midst of a major upheaval, a critical situation—called a “strategic inflection point”—occurs. Leaders at such times must clearly articulate a strategy that, through transformation, aligns the capabilities of the corporation to the demands of the new environment. Only when such a match is achieved can the corporation seize the unique opportunity inflection points offer.

We are approaching the inevitable decline of oil availability—the mother of all inflection points—which gives the United States the opportunity to move into a more desirable strategic position. Today, we compete with countries whose richer natural resources give them a strategic advantage. If we shift transportation towards electric miles, we gain an opportunity to employ our own resources: newly energized governmental leadership, a tradition of high-volume manufacturing, and a culture of technological innovation. These capabilities and skills have served the United States well in the past, and the drive toward electric miles may help revitalize them. That result is every bit as important as the electric miles themselves.

Permalink: http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/An_electric_plan_for_energy_resilience_2276

Brendan I. Koerner 11.24.08, 12:00 AM ET

The gas engine made petroleum the world’s biggest commodity. The electric car could do the same for the third element on the periodic table.

Nothing grows in the heart of the Salar de Atacama. this ancient Chilean lake bed 700 miles north of Santiago may be the driest place on Earth, a wasteland strewed with salt-encrusted rocks that resemble cow pies. Annual rainfall on the salar (which in Spanish means “salt lake”) rarely tops a few millimeters. The cloudless skies combine with the high altitude, 1.4 miles above sea level, to produce punishing solar radiation, capable of frying exposed flesh in minutes.

Humans would steer clear of the Salar de Atacama were it not for the precious brine that bubbles 130 feet below its surface. When first pumped from the ground, the brine looks like slushy, dirt-stained snow, of the sort that piles up on Manhattan sidewalks after a spring flurry. But when left to broil beneath the desert sun, the water in the brine slowly evaporates, leaving behind a yellowy mineral bath that could easily be mistaken for olive oil.

This greasy solution yields the substance that makes modern life possible: lithium. The lightest of all metals, lithium is the key ingredient in the rechargeable batteries that keep cell phones and laptops humming. Chile is the Saudi Arabia of lithium. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, this single ancient lake bed contains 27% of the world’s reserve base of the metal.

Until recently lithium was a minor commodity, used in small quantities by manufacturers of glass, grease and mood-stabilizing drugs. But demand has skyrocketed in recent years, as BlackBerrys and iPods have become middle-class staples. Between 2003 and 2007 the battery industry doubled its consumption of lithium carbonate, the most common ingredient used in lithium-based products.

The lithium bonanza may just be starting. Lithium-ion batteries are integral to the automobile industry’s plans to wean itself off fossil fuels. The hotly anticipated Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid car slated to debut in 2010, will use a lithium-ion battery alongside a 1.4-liter gas engine. Mercedes plans to roll out a hybrid version of its S-Class sedan in 2009 and will similarly rely on lithium-ion technology to produce superior mileage. Nissan is working with NEC to mass-produce lithium-ion batteries for hybrids, in hopes of churning out 65,000 per year by 2010.

Since a vehicle battery requires a hundred times as much lithium carbonate as its laptop equivalent, the green-car revolution could make lithium one of the planet’s most strategic commodities. The rush is on to find and develop new sources of it, a race that has mining companies scouring the globe’s remotest corners, from the high-altitude deserts of Chile and Bolivia to the wilds of northern Tibet. The prospectors seem undeterred by the possibility that lithium’s automotive heyday could be cut short by the cost and complexity of lithium-ion batteries. They prefer instead to focus on optimistic forecasts. Kevin McCarthy, a commodity chemicals analyst at Bank of America, sees the potential for double-digit annual sales growth for lithium carbonate at least through 2012.

Such rosy short-term predictions have investors swooning over Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile S.A., or SQM, the Chilean fertilizer and mining company that produces nearly a third of the world’s lithium carbonate and whose leather-skinned employees brave the Salar de Atacama for the sake of gadget lovers. In the past three years the Big Board-traded shares of SQM have climbed from $11 to $22. In the first six months of 2008 SQM reported a profit of $191 million, up 103% from a year earlier, on sales of $787 million, up 41%.

SQM is controlled by Julio Ponce Lerou, who heads Pampa Calichera, a Chilean investment group; he is also the ex-son-in-law of Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s military dictator for 17 years. But Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan has coveted SQM since at least 2002, and it now owns 32%, roughly the same amount as Ponce Lerou and the maximum allowable under SQM’s bylaws. Ponce Lerou controls SQM via a deal he struck with Kowa, a Japanese firm that owns 2% of SQM’s shares. But he has also had to take on a huge amount of debt to increase his stake in Pampa Calichera, which Standard & Poor’s placed on negative credit watch in July. That turmoil might open the door for Potash, which briefly seized control of SQM in 2005.

The lithium craze explains only a portion of Potash’s interest in taking over SQM. The Chilean company gets 58% of its revenue from fertilizers, compared to 11% from lithium. But it’s clear that investors are intrigued by SQM’s rapidly expanding operations in the Atacama desert. Chile boasts at least ten more salars that have yet to be explored for lithium reserves. If GM is right and drivers are willing to pay a steep premium for lithium-powered cars, SQM could be poised for a windfall.

But the lithium industry is still young, even embryonic. China, which produces 23% of the world’s lithium carbonate but most of it at a far higher cost than Chile does, recently started extracting brine cheaply from a Tibetan salar. This operation has already had an impact. When SQM’s lithium revenue fell 10% in the first quarter of 2008, the company blamed “the growing presence of Chinese producers.”

SQM’s lithium fields are ringed by blindingly white knolls of magnesium chloride, a salty substance that looks suitable for skiing. These magnesium hills, the by-products of a neighboring potassium chloride plant, provide an excellent vantage point from which to view the rectangular lithium ponds that stretch out toward the dull-brown Andes. From atop the tallest of these snowy mounds, one can see dozens of rectangular man-made ponds, each one bigger than a hockey rink.

The plastic-lined ponds, arranged in neat grids, are filled with brine in various states of evaporation. Ponds awash in the freshest brine are tinged a brilliant turquoise; others, nearly ready for harvest, are richly yellow around the edges. Scarcely any human intervention is needed; the sun does all the work. After the brine reaches a lithium concentration of 6%, which takes not quite a year, it is pumped into tanker trucks and driven three hours west to a plant near the Chilean coast. There the solution is purified and dried until all that remains are crystals of lithium carbonate. These crystals are then granulated into the finished product coveted by battery manufacturers, a fine white powder resembling cocaine.

The solar energy keeps SQM’s costs to an estimated $1,260 per ton of lithium carbonate. It sells that ton for up to $12,000.

Lithium production wasn’t always this simple, or this cheap. For almost half a century, starting in the early 1950s, the world’s primary source of lithium was North Carolina, much of it from a mine in the town of Kings Mountain. The soft metal, vital to the military’s H-bomb program, was laboriously extracted from spodumene, a silicate mineral occasionally used as a gemstone. By the mid-1970s the U.S. was producing about 2,900 tons of lithium per year.

Around that same time an Exxon chemist named M. Stanley Whittingham was working on a novel rechargeable battery, one that volleyed lithium ions between anode and cathode. Whittingham’s design took advantage of the fact that lithium stores an unusually large amount of energy for its volume, making it ideal for portable electronics. Though Exxon failed to commercialize the technology, probably because it couldn’t easily eliminate the risk of fires, the engineering world realized that lithium might someday go places.

Foote Mineral, which owned the Kings Mountain mine, hoped to get the jump on the lithium boom by expanding to northern Chile, where desert brines were rumored to contain vast, cheaply obtainable amounts. In 1975 Foote signed an agreement with the Chilean government, then run by Pinochet, to explore the Salar de Atacama. Nine years later Foote began extracting lithium from a sliver of the lake bed. (The Foote subsidiary that worked the salar is now owned by Rockwood Holdings of Princeton, N.J., which continues to produce lithium on the tract.)

Newly wise to the desolate salar‘s value, Pinochet’s government decided to auction off the rest of the region’s mining rights. The American firm Amax (now part of Freeport-McMoran) won the bidding but didn’t develop the property. In 1992 Amax sold its rights to a former arm of the Chilean government that had recently been privatized and handed over to Pinochet’s then son-in-law, Julio Ponce Lerou.

Lithium’s boom had begun in earnest just a year before, when Sony launched its first generation of lithium-ion batteries for consumer electronics. By the end of 1991 Sony was making 100,000 a month. SQM began selling lithium carbonate in late 1996, and within a matter of weeks, lithium carbonate prices fell by a third, to $2,000 a ton. The American lithium industry vanished overnight.

Prices didn’t fully recover until 2002, as cell phones and laptops became affordable for millions of consumers. Since then prices have climbed steadily upward, especially for so-called battery-grade lithium carbonate, a powder with the finest particles and fewest impurities. Glass and ceramics makers pay $6,000 to $7,500 a ton for relatively chunky grades of lithium carbonate. Demand for the good stuff has been growing 20% to 25% a year. There’s no telling what will happen if and when lithium car batteries catch on.

Today’s hybrid cars have batteries in which nickel is the operative metal. Why might lithium displace it? Simply because it weighs less. A lithium-ion battery stores two to three times as much energy per pound as a nickel-metal hydride battery, says Charles Gassenheimer, chief executive of Ener1, a New York firm that purchased Delphi Corp.’s lithium-ion battery business. (Lithium-ion batteries are very different from lithium batteries, which are not rechargeable and are used in things like hearing aids.)

General Motors‘ long-awaited Chevrolet Volt, a compact car priced at around $40,000, will feature a 400-pound lithium-ion battery pack capable of holding 16 kilowatt-hours of energy. That’s 21 horsepower-hours. Doesn’t sound like much, but supposedly the Volt will be able to go 40 miles on battery power before needing a recharge from its small gas engine. With a full charge from a wall outlet, the car will go 100 miles for every gallon of gasoline burned. (At least if the driver behaves; read Lisa Margonelli’s “The Plug-In Paradox”)

Other sickly automakers are focusing on purely electric vehicles. In September Chrysler announced that it was developing an electric Dodge capable of traveling 150 miles on a charge. Tesla Motors recently began selling its $109,000 all-electric Roadster, which contains a battery studded with 6,831 lithium-ion cells.

The U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium, a research organization funded by Detroit’s Big Three, opines that lithium-ion batteries will need to hold 40kwh of energy before electric-only vehicles are ready for mass commercialization. There is considerable debate as to how much lithium carbonate is required per kwh in a lithium-ion battery, but 3.1 pounds is one common estimate that’s in line with calculations from Argonne National Laboratory. If you use that rule of thumb, a mass-market electric car will require 124 pounds of lithium carbonate.

Only 102,000 tons of lithium carbonate were produced in 2007, and only about a quarter went into batteries of any kind. SQM forecasts that global production will rise to 176,000 tons by 2018, 10% of which will be for automobiles, enough for 284,000 electric-only vehicles. That doesn’t even account for demand from future hybrids using lithium batteries. The Freedonia Group, a market research firm, has forecast that worldwide hybrid sales will hit 4.5 million vehicles in 2013. There’s quite a gap here.

William Tahil, the founder of Meridian International Research, a technology consultancy in Martainville, France, has argued that there simply isn’t enough economically recoverable lithium on the planet to support the auto industry’s ambitious plans. Tahil estimated that only 4.4 million tons of the world’s lithium resources can be extracted without prohibitive cost, a supply he believes will be quickly exhausted if lithium-ion batteries become a staple of next-generation cars.

Tahil reserves particular skepticism for SQM. The company states that it has already discovered 5.7 million tons of lithium in the Salar de Atacama and that only 45% of its lake-bed claim has been explored. But Tahil, who is not a geologist, scoffs at that assessment; he believes that the brine starts to run out below 130 feet under the salar.

“You have a mother lode, where [the brine] is excellent quality, and every time you put the pick in you come out with a nugget. But the further out from the mother lode, you have to start panning. It takes more work.” By Tahil’s estimate the Chileans may have already exhausted half of the salar‘s mother lode.

Tahil’s controversial “peak lithium” argument has been vigorously disputed by metal suppliers and automakers. Argonne National Laboratory has stated that although “significant market penetration by [electric vehicles] with Li-ion batteries would perturb the market and require expansion of imports or U.S. production … long-term supply should not be a major concern.”

R. Keith Evans, a geologist who has worked in the lithium business since the 1970s, has been Tahil’s most vehement critic. In a rebuttal to Tahil published in March, Evans pegged global reserves of lithium carbonate at 165 million tons. He also argued that if demand spikes as anticipated, higher prices will make it cost-effective to extract lithium from clay and wastewater.

“Well, geez, it’s only the 33rd most abundant element in the world,” says Ener1’s Gassenheimer. “We’re quite certain the world will not run out of lithium.”

Toyota is less sanguine. According to published reports Toyota originally planned to use a lithium-ion battery in its 2009 Prius, but decided to stick with nickel-metal hydride (the company denies ever fully committing to lithium-ion). “The future supply of lithium will not be able to sustain both the exponential growth in batteries for consumer electronics and a large automotive battery demand,” says Jaycie Chitwood, environmental strategy manager for Toyota’s advanced technology group.

Toyota is also skeptical over lithium-ion technology’s long-term viability. Bill N. Reinert, national manager for Toyota’s advanced technology group, predicts that lithium-ion batteries will be in vogue for only about a decade, after which the auto industry will switch to a lighter, more affordable solution–perhaps fuel cells or an as yet untested battery chemistry. “If people want an electric vehicle that goes 200 miles but doesn’t cost $100,000, that’s not lithium, that’s something else,” says Reinert.

“Lithium-ion batteries are still not usable from our perspective,” Honda President Takeo Fukui told Automotive News last March. The 2010 Honda Insight, another much-anticipated hybrid, will sport a traditional nickel-metal hydride battery.

The thirst for lithium carbonate will continue to send miners to inhospitable locales. FMC, the corporate descendant of Foote Mineral, mines lithium at the ominously named Salar de Hombre Muerto in Argentina’s mountainous northwest. Rincon Lithium, a subsidiary being sold off by Admiralty Resources, is set to step up production in the nearby Salar del Rincón.

The continent’s most tempting prize is the Salar de Uyuni, in the southwestern corner of Bolivia. The lake bed is said to contain even more lithium than Atacama. In September an investment company controlled by French industrialist Vincent Bolloré announced plans to mine lithium in Bolivia; that lithium would be used to produce the so-called BlueCar, an electric vehicle that Bolloré is developing with the Italian design firm Pininfarina. But the brine beneath the Salar de Uyuni is tainted with a lot of magnesium and will be expensive to purify.

SQM has a permit to extract enough lithium to produce 66,000 tons of lithium carbonate per year but can always apply for permission to go beyond that figure. “Chile’s government at the national and regional levels is very pro-mining,” says Christopher Ecclestone, a mining analyst for Hallgarten & Co. “It’s in the blood.”

For the moment SQM is waiting to see if the Chevy Volt is a hit. The company has launched a new advertising campaign that features the sunny slogan “Lithium: Driving Us to the Future.” But SQM had better hope that automakers like Toyota don’t drive right past lithium-ion technology en route to the Next Green Thing.

Permalink: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/1124/034.html

December 9 Release

Overview. The increasing likelihood of a prolonged global economic downturn continues to dominate market perceptions, putting downward pressure on oil prices. World real gross domestic product (GDP) growth is projected to slow from about 4 percent in 2006 and 2007 to about 2.7 percent this year and 0.5 percent in 2009. Last month’s Outlook assumed world GDP would increase by 1.8 percent in 2009. The condition of the global economy and production decisions by members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are expected to remain the crucial factors driving world oil prices.

Consumption. The status of the global economy has become the most important driver of oil consumption growth and EIA’s oil consumption projections continue to be revised downward in response to lower forecasts for global economic growth. As a result, global oil consumption is expected to decline by 50,000 bbl/d in 2008 and by 450,000 bbl/d in 2009, which would mark the first time in 3 decades that world consumption would decline in 2 consecutive years. In both years, growth is concentrated in countries outside of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), especially China, the Middle East, and Latin America. However, projected sharp declines in oil consumption in OECD countries more than offset any non-OECD oil consumption growth (World Oil Consumption). If the world economy recovers sooner or is stronger than EIA now anticipates, oil consumption could decline at a slower rate or potentially increase instead, putting upward pressure on oil prices.

Non-OPEC Supply. Non-OPEC supply is expected to decline by 310,000 bbl/d in 2008, reflecting a combination of factors that include large supply disruptions in Central Asia and the Gulf of Mexico and project delays. Although declines in many non-OPEC basins, especially Mexico, the North Sea and Russia, are expected to continue in 2009, EIA projects that total non-OPEC supply will grow by 410,000 bbl/d in 2009, with the largest sources of growth coming from Azerbaijan, Brazil and the United States.
The global economic slowdown and falling oil prices bring additional risk to the usual uncertainties (unexpected disruptions, project delays, underestimation of decline rates) concerning non-OPEC supply growth. Lower oil prices bring into doubt the viability of some high-cost non-OPEC projects, especially those utilizing nonconventional technology or those seeking to exploit frontier oil basins. The credit crunch associated with the global economic crisis can also make it difficult for oil companies to acquire financing for new projects. If problems in global financial markets lead to delayed investment in existing and new oil fields, then even a short-lived economic downturn could have longer-term ramifications for world oil supply. This would heighten the risk of a return to a tight supply situation once the world economy and oil demand growth recover.

OPEC Supply. OPEC is scheduled to meet on December 17 to evaluate the effectiveness of its earlier decisions to cut production targets by 1.5 million bbl/d and to weigh the need for additional production cuts. Although the extent of OPEC members’ compliance with the last production cut is still uncertain, EIA believes that the continued weak market conditions will prompt higher-than-usual compliance among OPEC members. It remains unclear whether production cuts so far are enough to avoid a counter-seasonal inventory build in the fourth quarter of 2008, a build that would add to downward price pressure over the winter. The position of some OPEC members at the upcoming meeting may be influenced by a desire to avoid excessive production cuts that might further tighten the market and trigger a sharp price rebound that could hurt the world economy.

EIA projects that OPEC crude production will fall from 32.6 million bbl/d in the third quarter of 2008 to 30.6 million bbl/d in the first quarter of 2009. OPEC crude production is expected to average 30.6 million bbl/d in 2009, about 1.6 million bbl/d below 2008 levels. The combination of lower demand for OPEC oil and capacity expansions expected in several OPEC countries would lead to a rise of surplus production capacity to an average of 4 million bbl/d in 2009 (OPEC Surplus Oil Production Capacity). In addition, EIA expects that OPEC production of non-crude liquids will rise substantially next year, growing by 770,000 bbl/d in 2009. Our price forecast for 2009 reflects both of these factors.

Inventories. Revised data indicate that OECD commercial inventories rose by 568,000 bbl/d in the third quarter of 2008, somewhat higher than historic rates for inventory builds during this time of year. OECDcommercial inventories stood at 2.65 billion barrels at the end of the third quarter, equivalent to 57 days of forward consumption cover. On the basis of days of forward cover, OECD commercial inventories are well above historic levels, and EIA projects that they will remain there through the end of 2009 (Days of Supply of OECD Commercial Stocks).

Permalink: http://www.eia.doe.gov/steo