When it comes to gasoline, are Americans transforming from the world's chief gluttons to models of moderation? According to Philip Verleger, the energy economist, that is more or less the country's direction, with surprising consequences.

Verleger spells out this scenario in a note to clients, his version of the narrative of coming fossil-fuel abundance that we have heard elsewhere. Verleger's 11-page note is as oil-bullish as his most enthusiastic colleagues, who as a group say the U.S. is on the cusp of near energy independence. The oil-abundance narrative is a global one, and asserts flatly that peak oil theory is wrong.

Where Verleger diverges is in ascribing most of the responsibility for this U.S. oil boom not to more prolific oilfields, but to consumer efficiency. "[Gasoline] use will drop significantly by 2020 thanks to conservation, natural gas substitution and the ethanol mandate," Verleger told me in an email.

By 2022, 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels must be blended into gasoline, in line with a George W. Bush-era law. On top of that, President Obama has raised the bar for vehicular fuel efficiency to 54 miles per gallon, up from the current 30 miles a gallon. Plus long-haul truckers are making a shift to natural gas fuel, Reuters reports.

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More where that came from: When it comes to oil, people generally cluster in glass-half-full, and glass-half-empty groupings. The former are led by techno-optimists such as industry consultant Daniel Yergin who believe that, given a higher price, oilmen will always manage to extract more barrels from a given field. The latter fall somewhere under the rubric of peak-oilers, who believe that supply is already stretched thin, and that unless alternative fuels scale up fast, the world must prepare for a hand-to-hand struggle for resources. The Financial Times' Sheila McNulty dives into the debate as part of a special section of the paper this week entitled "Modern Energy".  McNulty profiles Chevron's work in Texas' Permian Basin (pictured above: boom days at another Texas oil region -- Spindletop), where since the 1920s the company has produced a whopping 30 billion barrels of oil, and reckons that it will extract an equal volume in the coming years. Chevron and the rest of the industry are moving into the age of the "intelligent oilfield," in which they are using visual technology "to see thousands of feet underground to where the oil remains stuck, so as to pinpoint and target a specific zone for further recovery," she writes. The piece tilts toward the glass-half-full folks. As punctuation, she quotes Dallas Parker, a partner at the law firm Mayer Brown: "Every time the oil price goes up, people find a way to get more oil out," he tells her. "It's all a function of the price of oil and the technology."

Annals of China's clean battery movement: Authorities in Shanghai have shuttered a battery manufacturing plant run by the U.S. company Johnson Controls through the end of the year. The reason is lead -- a wave of alarm has spread through Shanghai and other Chinese cities regarding the use of lead in manufacturing, and the health risks to children, writes James Areddy in the Wall Street Journal. For instance, just last month a court imprisoned the president of electric-bicycle-maker Suqi Battery for 15 months because of the suspected lead poisoning of some 100 villages near Hangzhou. Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls categorically disputes that it's responsible for any lead poisoning in Shanghai. In fact, writes Areddy, the company's lead standards are far tougher "than Chinese law requires, permitting one-seventh the amount released into the air as allowed in China, and one-tenth what China's water standards allow." Rather, it appears that Johnson is being shut over a quota issue -- by last month, it had already exceeded its annual manufacturing limit. As this blog has reported numerous times, the Chinese are surprisingly intolerant of pollution, and are pushing back against the hell-bent pace of economic growth, what is locally called "blood-soaked GDP."

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When big-thinkers at companies with the most skin in the energy game are behind closed doors and they discuss how the world really looks going forward, do they say that there are bumps in the road but that things will be fine, just fine, as they suggest publicly? Three years ago, we got a glimpse into the room when Royal Dutch/Shell issued a scenario forecasting the world in 2020. Based on current economic and energy-use patterns around the world, Shell said that energy supplies will be so tight that they will tip the world into a full-blown crisis in which governments will force their populations to reduce driving, use less electricity, and pay an extremely steep increase for what they do consume. There will be a massive, decade-long economic slowdown, and geopolitical power will shift dramatically to energy-producing nations, the company said.

Today, Shell returned with an update. The company said that the 2008 financial crisis interrupted the slide it predicted, but that the clock has begun ticking again. If the world does not change how it uses energy, its scenario will hold true.

In recent weeks, we've heard almost identical energy-consumption projections from ExxonMobil (here is Exxon's neat slide show), BP and now Shell: The world will use about 40 percent more energy by 2030. The difference is that Exxon and BP more or less just toss out the numbers, while Shell suggests that one might consider running for the hills, oh, sometime around 2016 or 2017 before everyone else shows up. You all can plan to return home around 2030, Shell has said, when the world has come to its senses and adopted all the efficiency and price-signal mechanisms that some forward-thinkers are suggesting now.

There is some optimism in the report, such as descriptions of actions by nations like Japan and Norway and companies like Wal-Mart to lower greenhouse gas emissions. But the United States, for example, has not reversed energy-use practices that helped lead to the Shell scenario, the company says.  

I myself tend to believe that, although it looks otherwise at the moment, nations will not put themselves in the collective position of unhappiness described by Shell. For example, there will be an even greater than projected shift to plentiful natural gas, thus tempering Shell's projections. Yet, it's worth reading on to the jump for more about the reports. Meanwhile, for the visual-minded, here is Shell's glossy video presentation.

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