China venue shows import of alternative fuel gathering
The well-meaning folks who attended last year's gathering of the alternative fuel industry in San Francisco knew the event was important, but as they posed for pictures in front of the Golden Gate Bridge there was little sense of urgency.
The event had a touch of the college debating society about it, like, ''Be it resolved that the world needs a new primary energy source for mobility.''
This year, at the world's most overwhelming F1 racetrack near the financial heart of the world's fastest-growing automotive (and every other) economy, the alternative fuel gathering had a whole other tone.
Overall, it was like ''Ahoy the bridge, iceberg on the starboard side.''
When you're in Shanghai or Beijing, you can see, hear and smell the hyper-development of China, and with every visit you can see the millions of extra cars sold every year filling up the old roads and the new highways at an astonishing pace.
This tends to excite the auto industry enormously, since there are little or no opportunities for volume or even market share growth in North America, Europe and Japan while China is believed to have vast growth potential.
The People's Republic has rocketed up the world's sales charts in the past few years to the fourth spot overall, to just ahead of Canada. It will pass Japan and Europe in due course, and should catch the U.S. by 2020 or 2025.
For the car companies, it's the only realistic opportunity for major market share growth, or even just corporate survival, so if you're thinking of a long-term (i.e. 15 to 20 years) investment opportunity in the car industry, it's an exciting time.
If you're just a Canadian who buys cars, pays for gasoline, or even just breathes the air around you, the growing Chinese car market should also interest you.
Let's leave aside for the moment the prospect of cars built in China going on sale in Canada and concentrate instead on the consequences of millions and millions of Chinese consumers buying cars for the first time.
If they run on the same type of gasoline that we use, what affect do you think this enormous vehicle growth will have on the world's oil reserves? It probably means that we'll be paying more for a finite amount of fuel that will be used up sooner.
As for the emissions from these millions and millions of extra vehicles, they will be certainly be a lot cleaner than anything that was on the road in China five years ago, or even many of the older cars in the developed markets. But there will indeed be millions and millions of them that weren't there five years ago.
It is probably in the world's best interests then if we come up with an alternative fuel source for China, particularly if that source can produce energy for non-automotive uses that might otherwise be produced by burning Chinese coal.
As it turns out, an alternative fuel source is exactly what the smart car companies have in mind, and that source is likely to be fuel cells, since they make more immediate sense in China than they do in any of the developed markets.
The developed markets all have an extensive fuel delivery industry, which is efficient, dependable and fairly inexpensive. Like everything else about the auto industry in China, the fuel distribution system is extremely limited.
So if China's going to build a fuel distribution network, it would seem to make sense to construct one for the next energy source, not the old one. The Communist government's decision to ignore landline phones in favor of cell phones is widely seen as proof that it has the smarts required to appreciate the foresight of this move to fuel cells.
The well-meaning folks who attended last year's gathering of the alternative fuel industry in San Francisco knew the event was important, but as they posed for pictures in front of the Golden Gate Bridge there was little sense of urgency.
The event had a touch of the college debating society about it, like, ''Be it resolved that the world needs a new primary energy source for mobility.''
This year, at the world's most overwhelming F1 racetrack near the financial heart of the world's fastest-growing automotive (and every other) economy, the alternative fuel gathering had a whole other tone.
Overall, it was like ''Ahoy the bridge, iceberg on the starboard side.''
When you're in Shanghai or Beijing, you can see, hear and smell the hyper-development of China, and with every visit you can see the millions of extra cars sold every year filling up the old roads and the new highways at an astonishing pace.
This tends to excite the auto industry enormously, since there are little or no opportunities for volume or even market share growth in North America, Europe and Japan while China is believed to have vast growth potential.
The People's Republic has rocketed up the world's sales charts in the past few years to the fourth spot overall, to just ahead of Canada. It will pass Japan and Europe in due course, and should catch the U.S. by 2020 or 2025.
For the car companies, it's the only realistic opportunity for major market share growth, or even just corporate survival, so if you're thinking of a long-term (i.e. 15 to 20 years) investment opportunity in the car industry, it's an exciting time.
If you're just a Canadian who buys cars, pays for gasoline, or even just breathes the air around you, the growing Chinese car market should also interest you.
Let's leave aside for the moment the prospect of cars built in China going on sale in Canada and concentrate instead on the consequences of millions and millions of Chinese consumers buying cars for the first time.
If they run on the same type of gasoline that we use, what affect do you think this enormous vehicle growth will have on the world's oil reserves? It probably means that we'll be paying more for a finite amount of fuel that will be used up sooner.
As for the emissions from these millions and millions of extra vehicles, they will be certainly be a lot cleaner than anything that was on the road in China five years ago, or even many of the older cars in the developed markets. But there will indeed be millions and millions of them that weren't there five years ago.
It is probably in the world's best interests then if we come up with an alternative fuel source for China, particularly if that source can produce energy for non-automotive uses that might otherwise be produced by burning Chinese coal.
As it turns out, an alternative fuel source is exactly what the smart car companies have in mind, and that source is likely to be fuel cells, since they make more immediate sense in China than they do in any of the developed markets.
The developed markets all have an extensive fuel delivery industry, which is efficient, dependable and fairly inexpensive. Like everything else about the auto industry in China, the fuel distribution system is extremely limited.
So if China's going to build a fuel distribution network, it would seem to make sense to construct one for the next energy source, not the old one. The Communist government's decision to ignore landline phones in favor of cell phones is widely seen as proof that it has the smarts required to appreciate the foresight of this move to fuel cells.