All transportation within, to and from Hawai'i on land, sea or by air is totally dependent upon oil. A growing number of expert analysts believe that rapidly increasing oil prices are due to the outstripping of supply by demand and the coming exhaustion of global oil reserves, neither of which can be solved by the crass panderings of politicians promising cheap gas. How then can we keep our residents, visitors and cargo moving? The short answer is only in dramatically reduced numbers and with great difficulty at that.

What are the options for ground transport, perhaps the easiest problem to solve? Corn ethanol has been justifiably debunked over its low net energy return ratio, lack of sufficient cropland and other problems. Its only real value lies in its creation of infrastructure enabling cellulosic ethanol, which has much greater prospects for success, although years away.

Brazil's cane ethanol miracle will never be duplicated in the U.S., which has far less suitable cropland and vastly greater consumption. Notwithstanding ads touting E85 vehicles, ethanol will never be more than a partial solution.

Hydrogen's problems are also substantial: There is no existing storage infrastructure and the major energy-conversion inefficiencies in both its electrolytic creation and its ultimate consumption in fuel cells make it unlikely to be useful anytime soon.

The brightest spot in auto technology today is electric vehicles. It seems likely that soon cars will be available which can drive 40 miles on a single overnight charge. The Chevy Volt, for instance, is expected to go on sale in 2010. This will work well on the U.S. Mainland with its large diverse electric grid, but it remains to be seen how soon Hawai'i will have enough non-oil-fired electric power for it to give us truly oil-free mobility here.

Our best hope for now is mass transit, which has vastly superior energy-to-passenger-miles numbers over personal cars. The current debate over O'ahu rail transit is pathetic — it should be framed not in terms of whether people will use rail instead of their cars but rather if they will be able to go anywhere at all without it after they can no longer buy gas for those cars. All ground transit, including buses, should be electrified where possible to broaden our range of potential energy inputs to the system.

SHIPPING

Marine shipping is critical to our Islands, carrying virtually all of our food supply, construction materials and consumer goods. It is run almost entirely on bunker fuel refined from oil. Theoretically, we could build a fleet of nuclear-powered container ships, but this would be enormously expensive, require the training of a tremendous number of nuclear engineers, and present significant security concerns. It is technically feasible but very unlikely.

Ironically, more immediate help can be provided by sailing technology. SkySails of Germany is well along in the development of a parasail system suitable for retrofit to most cargo ships that could save up to a third of annual fuel consumption.

Air transport underpins our entire economy. With no tourism, our options for bringing money into the state will be severely curtailed. It is difficult indeed to see any hope whatsoever for maintaining economy-class tourism in the face of skyrocketing fuel costs. Airline analysts now talk openly about the coming transformation of the industry, whereby no one but the rich will ever fly again. Virtually all airlines are losing massive amounts of money and surviving on cash reserves. Fuel costs will continue to rise, cash reserves will evaporate and ultimately airlines will gut fleets and raise fares drastically to become profitable.

Air travel will not disappear entirely even when all oil is gone, as planes can run on synfuel from coal and properly processed biodiesel, but these will not be cheap or available in high volume. It may return to its current level, if we are very lucky, only decades from now when as-yet-undeveloped processes allow us to transform energy from renewable sources into liquid fuels in massive quantity.

ACT NOW OR PAY LATER

The foregoing discussion certainly presents a bleak picture, but all is not hopeless if we act now before gross shortages commence. There will be substantial amounts of oil-derived fuels around for many years (at increasingly unaffordable prices, of course), and there is a strong possibility that likely advances in the very young sciences of synthetic genomics and nanotechnology will yield dramatic improvements in the production of liquid fuels from renewable sources. It will be many years until these efforts can bear fruit at a useful scale.

Until then, we must make especially careful choices on how to use whatever small amount of liquid fuel will be on hand. Burning it in personal vehicles is clearly the most wasteful choice of all. We should in fact ask ourselves if a Hawai'i whose roadways were largely emptied of cars and used instead by buses and huge numbers of bicycles might not actually be a better place to live.

Roger Davis is a software engineer in the School of Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa. Manfred Zapka has a doctoral degree in engineering from UH-Manoa and works as a consulting engineer in Honolulu. The views presented here are their own. They wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.