Petrol prices

That's the view of General Motors' planner Larry Burns, who is leading the company's switch from petrol to an alternate fuel future. Burns, the vice-president of research and development and strategic planning based in Detroit, was in Australia recently when Carsguide interviewed him about GM's future. He says Australia must end its dependence on imported oil and capitalise on the country's bank of alternative energy sources.Burns says we should start with LPG and then look down the track at everything from compressed natural gas to hydrogen and even solar power.And he talks big about the GM Volt electric car, hydrogen, a nuclear future for motoring and improvements to GM Holden's home-grown Commodore. AUSTRALIA“I definitely would focus on energy diversity, I would ask myself, do I need to be importing any petroleum at all into this country,” he says. “I would look at LPG as a starting point. I think that'sa very exciting opportunity you have here already, there's a distribution for that already and the natural gas is relatively inexpensive and relatively clean.“I would anticipate compressed natural gas down the road and, longer term, I would ... go after solar big time. I do think it's going to be economically viable and then I would look at bio-mass.“And then I would anticipate that fuel cell vehicles and plug-in electrics are going to be very real solutions and set myself up for that.” THE FUTURE“Clearly, the industry is in a transformational period. Fuel, globalisation ... we need to get out in front of that better, as an industry, and we think the key is to focus on efficiency and energy diversity. Efficiency's important because energy supply looks like it's going to run short of energy demand and we think the supply of petroleum is plateauing. But efficiency alone won't solve this challenge.” THE CHALLENGE“Let's say you went to bed and had 900 million vehicles in the world ... all have their efficiency improved 25 per cent — that'd be a miracle. Now you pick your technology: they were all hybridised, they were all converted to diesels, HCCI, or something like that. So you have 25 per cent improvement — how much time have you bought yourself?“If you believe that the global economy is going to grow at 3 or 4 per cent per year, that's a pretty good bet. Energy demand correlates with that at 2 or 3 per cent per annum. So, 10 years from now after that miracle last night, we'll start consuming more petroleum for automotive than we did when we had this miracle happen.” PETROL PRICE CRISIS“I'd like to believe some markets have always had higher fuel prices, so I don't think they necessarily need a wake-up call. I was in Germany about a month ago and diesel fuel was the equivalent of $US8.25 a gallon (about $2.50 per litre). So the wake-up call really is where gasoline is relatively inexpensive, like the US. And it is not just a wake-up call for auto companies, but for consumers political leaders.“Gasoline became very, very inexpensive over an extended period of time and that defined the consumer choice, and the consumer choice tended to be for more power and more size in the vehicle. One of the things I get very concerned about is: `What if petroleum dropped back under $20 a barrel?” THE CHOICES“You have all of these people digging their heels in thinking there is a simple answer and that's the only thing you should invest in, and in fact you have to invest in all of it. Then we get paralysed by that indecisiveness on people thinking it's one answer. We can solve it, but we can't solve it by being paralysed by all these parochial different views, and what's happening is people who tend to like natural gas over gasoline promote that and they overly criticise all the other ones. People who tend to like ethanol overly promote that and they overly criticise all the other ones.” POTENTIAL IN AUSTRALIA“I was fascinated to see how much coal you have and certainly pathways where coal could find its way to automobiles, whether it's through electrically-driven vehicles or creating hydrogen or coal liquid,” he says. “I was intrigued by how much sunshine you have and solar energy continues to look promising longer term. I'm intrigued by how much natural gas you have and the potential for LPG and CNG vehicles and, quite frankly, I'm intrigued by the amount of bio-mass that could exist, both in the form of municipal waste and also plants that we don't need. So you can find a way to reduce the dependence on petroleum by finding pathways for this energy to get to the automobile.” HYDROGEN FUEL“Right now, in the world today, there's enough hydrogen being produced to fuel over 200 million fuel cell vehicles. That's almost a quarter of the cars in the world could be fuelled by hydrogen. What's all that hydrogen being used for? It's used to make fertiliser — one half of it. The other half is used as input making gasoline. By 2012 just the hydrogen used at refineries could fuel 175 million vehicles with fuel cells.” FUTURE FUELS“The sun shines on my roof, I create electricity and I put it in my electric vehicle. The time frame on LPG is right now ... the bio-mass time frame is three to five years. The good news on bio-mass technology is it's already very, very inexpensive to make your car capable of running on E85 and we'll find clever ways with LPG and compressed natural gas to get more cost out as well. I want to emphasise that this is not food-based bio-mass ... it's garbage.” FUTURE CARS“We think the tipping point for fuel-cell vehicles is at the point where we have sufficient scale and sufficient cost and market learning. That could be 2018 to 2020 and you might ask, `Can the world wait that long?'. Well, we're not waiting. We're playing hard on ethanol, we're playing hard on plug-in electrics, we have eight hybrids , and we'll have eight more in the next two years, and we're pushing solutions like CNG and LPG — and that is energy diversity.” NUCLEAR FUTURE“I know nuclear is not necessarily the right thing in Australia but in the US I would build one nuclear plant on a closed military base so it's secure.I'd dedicate it to creating hydrogen ... you can make a lot from a nuclear plant. I'd introduce hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles using that because they're an exciting vehicle customers like and then I'd go to OPEC and say, `Do you want to talk?' ... we don't necessarily have to rely on petroleum any more.”

Australian motorists could save almost $2billion a year — $200 for every car — in fuel by applying a couple of simple rules when they drive.

 Is the price of petrol hurting you? Take our and tell us how.. Community advocacy organisation Getup looks set to make some waves with an irreverent TV ad.The parody advertisement targets the Government’s Fuelwatch proposal, and contains repeated bleeped expletives.It depicts FuelWatch Headquarters filled with civil servants manning high-tech binoculars and reporting on tomorrow’s petrol prices today.Getup emailed the ad around Australia on Thursday morning, asking for donations online and by the end of the day had more than the 50,000 needed to buy a television spot, and was on the way to hitting the $70,000 that would extend the spot to an extra million viewers.“The spoof humorously demonstrates how the Government knows exactly where fuel prices are going – through the roof. If Mr. Rudd and Dr. Nelson are truly committed to helping average Australians, they should look beyond the bowser wowsers and their short-term petrol populism, towards long-term transport solutions,” GetUp campaigns coordinator Ed Coper says.“FuelWatch, or tinkering with the excise, is like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic when Australia needs to invest billions towards better public transport and mandatory fuel efficiency standards.”“The ad cuts right though the oil slick onto the larger problem at hand -- petrol prices will keep going up regardless of what our Government does. So let us take this opportunity to invest in real solutions that address both the transport and the climate crises,” Mr Coper says.GetUp is a not-for-profit and receives no money from any political party or the government.

Sydneysiders are leading the push away from cars, with a 6 per cent increase in public transport use over the past year and a corresponding 6 per cent decrease in drivers.

The pain felt at Aussie petrol pumps looks set only to increase as world oil prices surge to record highs, reflecting global gloom at diminishing fuel stocks.

Motorists should prepare for petrol prices to remain above $1.50 a litre as the world oil price continues its climb, amid predictions they could hit $2.The average price nationally for a litre of petrol was $1.47 last week, but Asian benchmark refining prices have already moved higher since Monday, meaning motorists would soon be slugged extra at the bowser.In a grim warning to the world, Goldman Sachs said, in a note to clients that oil prices could soon reach $US200 a barrel, a price that would send Australian petrol prices to $2 a litre.BHP Billiton chief executive Marius Kloppers last night added that global oil supply would continue to be constrained because the best new deposits were nearly all located in politically sensitive countries. “I can't see any scenario where strong oil prices are not here to stay,” Mr Kloppers said.A spokesman for Caltex said there was not much Australian retail sellers of petrol could do while Singapore prices were high. Economists suggested that households needed to adjust spending patterns to cope with the higher motoring costs.Craig James of CommSec said: “The tipping point now for consumers to again adjust their behaviour is $1.50 a litre.”The rule of thumb is that for every $US 1 rise in the price of a barrel of oil, the increase at the pump is 1c a litre.The rising petrol price also adds to the inflationary woes for the Reserve Bank of Australia, particularly as the higher costs flow through to food prices. Is it getting to the point now that you are having to adjust your lifestyle to allow for increasing petrol prices?  

The announcement could be made as early as next week, according to sources within the NRMA and the Australian Automobile Association, to coincide with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's return from overseas.

One of the first tasks confronting the new federal petrol commissioner, Pat Walker - who began work yesterday - is to examine the spiralling price of diesel fuel. Diesel has jumped from $1.46 on February 17 to nearly $1.60.While it is an efficient and miserly petrol alternative, its value to motorists has been eroded by the price differential of more than 10c a litre compared with petrol.Yet diesel is cheaper to produce and there is superficially far less demand, at least among Australian drivers.What Mr Walker should establish, and quickly, is whether the causes of the rise in diesel prices are justified.Have petrol companies pushed up the price of diesel because, in effect, it is under the radar? Has the public and political focus on petrol prices allowed the incremental increase in diesel to go almost unchallenged?As always in the case of motor-fuel prices, there is no easy answer.Diesel prices have been pushed up because of the traditional winter fuel price demand of the northern hemisphere, which is now abating.Emission standards, particularly in Europe, have demanded a greater reduction in sulphur from diesel, which impacts on costs.Also, the shutdown of refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, diversion of mass refining from diesel to petrol, the growing popularity of diesel vehicles (both domestic and industrial) in Europe and Asia and increasing industrial demand from China and other emerging industrial nations have all played a role.But are they genuine reasons for the rapid rise in diesel prices - and the negative differential with petrol - or are they excuses grasped by petroleum companies to exploit an emerging sector of the motoring market?That is something Mr Walker should put high on his agenda.

Station operators say petrol prices of nearly $1.50 a litre are putting a huge strain on motorists and are leading to increased fuel theft.SA's Motor Trade Association deputy director Dennis Baldock estimated it would be costing operators as much as $7.1 million a year.“It certainly seems as the price of fuel increases the incidence of reported drive-offs increases,” he said.“I don't think it's the families doing this, I think it's the notorious offenders."“People who target certain sites, certain areas, who are up to all the tricks like dodgy number plates, stolen cars.”But he said operators were still reluctant to switch all their pumps to a pre-pay system.“It's still in use, but it's a bit off-putting for some motorists,” he said.“Motorists don't like it, so they don't particularly want to introduce it on a regular basis."“But it's a question of how much can they afford to lose - they might get to the point where it's better off losing a few customers and not having drive-offs.”In Victoria, record pump prices are being blamed for the rise of mum and dad petrol thieves, with fuel theft costing operators up to $300,000 a week.“When it first hit the $1.40-a-litre mark, we saw mums driving off with the kids in the car without paying,” Victorian Automobile Chamber of Commerce spokesman Terry Conroy said.He said some offenders were making a choice between paying for groceries or paying for petrol.What should be done to to stop you having to decide between groceries and petrol? Can you afford petrol these days? 

Queensland motorists are becoming more fuel miserly, buying more fuel-efficient cars, catching public transport, cycling or walking, and offsetting carbon emissions.Just as well, because the Australian Greenhouse Office estimates our cars will emit more than 40 million tonnes of carbon this year.Motorists are starting to get the message with two in five Queenslanders buying a more fuel-efficient car, according to Woolcott Research conducted for NRMA Insurance.Mature-aged women living on the Sunshine Coast are leading the charge for greener cars.Across the state, women are slightly more environmentally conscious with 42 per cent saying they had swapped to a fuel miser, compared with 38 per cent of men.The older the motorist, the greener they get, according to the statistics.The least environmentally conscious are motorists aged 25-34 years.Up to age 24, 37 per cent are switching to smaller cars and over 45 it is 45 per cent.The Sunshine Coast leads with 52 per cent choosing a greener car, compared with 32 per cent in Brisbane and 47 per cent on the Gold Coast.When it comes to public transport, young Brisbane males are more active.Across the state only one in five has deliberately chosen public transport over a car; 27 per cent males and 16 per cent females.Almost half of those aged up to 24 are likely to take a bus or train, declining to 14 per cent in the 45-55 years age group.In Brisbane it is 31 per cent, Gold Coast 23 per cent and Sunshine Coast only 10 in a hundred.More women than men are cycling or walking more instead of driving.Statewide the walking/cycling participation level is 40 per cent, made up of 42 per cent women.Top walkers and cyclers are those aged 25-40, with older age groups not far behind, while the under 24s have only 17 per cent activity.NRMA Insurance has also released figures which show that Queenslanders taking up its Carbonators offer had helped offset more than 19,700 tonnes of carbon emissions.That is the same amount of pollution as more 4500 cars emit in a year, according to NRMA Insurance.It uses a formula based on a conservative average of a car emitting 4.3 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.Using NRMA Insurance's online carbon calculator (climatehelp.com.au) that relates to a family car travelling about 20,000km a year.Last year, Australians bought a record 1 million new cars which potentially means 3.4 million extra tonnes of carbon a year.Private car use makes up 34 per cent of all Australian household greenhouse gas emissions, making it the worst contributor of CO2 emissions.