INFORM: Transportation Boom in Asia, Crisis for the US

23 January 2005

INFORM Inc, a nonprofit research organization, is publishing a new analysis: The Transportation Boom in Asia: Crisis and Opportunity for the United States.

The report provides a very useful summary and quantitative description of critical market drivers—the growth of transportation and energy use in China and India and the ongoing growth of oil consumption in the US.

The report is not yet available from the Inform website, but it is available for download from the Westport Innovations website as a pdf file.

INFORM’s policy solution here is heavily oriented toward promoting natural gas vehicles and the US natural gas vehicle industry as a primary interim solution on the way to a hydrogen economy. The two  obvious omissions from the report, given the proposed solution, are:

• An analysis of natural gas supply, import infrastructure and cost, especially given a hypothetical increase in consumption based on a rise in transportation use, and
• An analysis of the lifecycle environmental and energy impact (positive or negative) attendant to a surge in NGV use.

Presumably, it would be a positive impact compared to the current state of gasoline and diesel use, but perhaps not as much as one might think, given the growth in production and transportation infrastructure necessary for the US, including a more rapid growth in LNG use.

That said, it is a good, accessible document for the facts, figures and trends that underlie one of our biggest challenges.