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Originally Posted by Rochard
Oil companies need to invest in something else and quickly - like batteries.
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They have been. Not as much as you might think because unfortunately until there's a major scientific breakthrough, something as big as the discovery of nuclear power, large scale deployment of electric cars just doesn't work with the known laws of physics. We WISH we create electricity from nothing, but for large scale use fossil fuels and nuclear are the only reasonable ways to make that much power. Hydroelectric, for example can provide only about 7% of the power we use in our homes, not nearly though to also power our cars and trucks.
Hydrogen is very costly to produce and is only about as clean as petroleum - theoretically very clean, clean in a laboratory environment, but subject to the same issues that make peroleum burn in less than ideal ways in a real engine with 80,000 miles on it.
Nuclear obviously has the twin issues of dealing with a lot of low level waste and a small amount of high level waste. There's the political issue of people purposely confusing the two, making it appear to be a much bigger problem than it actually is. Do you foresee environmentally conscious people favoring nuclear power as a cleaner alternative to petroleum any time soon?