85% of Germany's vehicles run on diesel. Most natural gas utility vehicles run on natrual gas. Some cities use natural gas in their buses and garbage trucks. Some cities like San Francisco run on biodiesel collected from restaurants in surrounding areas. Lots of work being done to convert to other means without Federal help or making the national news. Most heavy crude is made into plastics, synthetics, and asphalt. It can be made into gasoline or even better, diesel. We have a diesel-natural gas combo vehicle in Birmingham, an F250 diesel getting 36 mpg with the combo fuel. We in the natural gas industry are trying to get diesel trucks to run the blend to cut down on imported oil. Again, we also have a supply of oil, untapped, waiting on the Feds to allow drilling.
Worse case senario, if we do start actually running out, we will make algae oil in greenhouses along the coasts and the Mississippi valley. A boon to new algae farmers. An area under greenhouses the size of Rhode Island can provide all the oil for fuel we need. New Mexico is considering getting into this by building the greenhouses in their deserts along the Rio-Grande and pumping the algae oil collected east to Texas refineries. Algae is carbon neutral taking as much carbon dioxide out of the air as put back in when it burns as fuel. So the greenies are happy with that solution. It will cost about $4.00 a gallon to grow, produce and add taxes. Algae is also more efficient in oil production than corn or sugar cane is to ethynol production, like about 10 times as much per acre.
A solution to kick starting algae oil production is to not tax any fuel made from algae, thus getting it into the $2.50 range per gallon of fuel at the pump. Then adding a per barrel tax to offset the road tax from algae on imported oil. If this is done, I say within 5-10 years we will have jobs created here producing our own oil and not paying for imported oil. Right now algae diesel is the most productive, but they are trying to crossbreed and manipluate the genetics of algae to produce gasoline to eliminate refining.
