Diesel, diesel everywhere; time to stop and think?By Tim Worledge | April 16, 2013
Ancient, historic, glorious Venice became the latest European location to lob a brick into the spokes of diesel’s dominance across the continent, with a stage-managed, short-lived but thought-provoking ban on all powered vessels using the legendary Grand Canal. Is Europe’s most romantic city signaling the beginning of the end for Europe’s diesel love affair? Idly wafting along the Grand Canal on a warm summer’s evening, maybe the strains of O Sole Mio crooned by a swarthy Italian in a straw hat floating across the still water. Eating ice cream. Catching glimpses of a phantom Canaletto flitting between market stalls on his way to set up his easel in a quiet corner of St Mark’s Square, brush poised ready to cast the quiet brilliance of the setting sun into immortality… these are all experiences that the modern traveler will find hard to replicate in modern Venice. Such is the noise and bustle along Venice’s main thoroughfare these days that Caneletto would as likely sling his easel into the river than attempt to sit and paint, with the situation reaching such proportions that the city’s elders were moved to close the canal this past weekend to all but the ecologically sound. The straw-hatted gondolier was still allowed through, as was any one wisping silently through the water in an electric powered boat (surely a not-sensible combination of electricity and water) but if you had a motor, you were out. While many outboard motors remain gasoline reliant, the real culprit here is the two stroke diesel-powered motor boat. The deep, throbbing, constant ‘phut-phut-phut’ of engines, the pollution, and the wash from the bigger vessels pummelling up and down Venice’s waters collectively led to their suspension on Sunday April 14 for five hours. Ok, so it’s a token gesture designed as much to highlight the fact that Venice, as it settles into the lagoon that makes it famous, is very much listed under the “see-it-now-while-you-still-can” category (see also, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Naples, Silvio Berlusconi’s political career), but for the Italians, the move is the latest snub to Europe’s diesel fixation. Italy already has delivered one substantial snub. In October 2012, the news broke that the country had bought more bikes than cars as diesel and gasoline prices surged at the pumps. And, while total car volumes are down across all of Europe, the proportion of new cars that are diesel in the Italian market shows signs of wobbling too. At its peak, 58.2% of new Italian cars were diesel, according to ANFIA, the Italian car maker’s association. That was back in the golden years of 2006 and, while the proportion remains a way off the 70%+ seen in the fundamentalist French diesel market, it’s a hefty majority. Since then, however, it’s waned, dropping as low as 41.8% in the horror year of 2009 (total car registrations in general fell to their lowest levels in nearly a decade that year) and while it has recovered since then to surpass the key 50% level, there are signs that it’s no longer assured of its advantage. 2011 saw it peak again at 55.2% of new car registrations, and 2012 saw it settle back to 53.1%. the signs are in 2013 so far that March’s new car registrations will see diesel’s proportion slip back versus last year’s figures. Moreover, at a recent gathering of refiners, a representative from one of Italy’s refining companies stood up before the assembled masses and suggested — no, stated — that maybe Europe had gone too far in favoring diesel at the pumps. Could this be the tip of the iceberg? Have Europe’s consumers had enough of noise and engines and exhausts and diesel’s generally un-sexy tractor heritage? Signs are that Spain and Belgium have also seen the diesel proportion slip back, admittedly only a single percentage point in what remains an epically overwhelming dominance. More worrying is France’s apparent slide in its proportions. Diesel cars in the first quarter of 2012 amounted to 73.3% of all new car sales, according to the French car maker’s association CCFA. Over the same time frame of 2013, it’s dropped to 69.31%, while overall car sales have slumped by 19.2% to just over 300,000 units, this even after Francois Hollande’s government tried to relight the fire with a road fuel tax cut toward the end of 2012. And all this as the rest of the world continues to invest heavily in all new and all improved refining capacity designed to churn out enough 10 ppm diesel to fill the Venetian lagoon several times over. While there’s mileage yet in the dieselization of Europe, it may well be that some new strategy is needed to fully rekindle that loving feeling. Maybe a romantic break. I hear Venice is lovely at this time of the year… © 2013 Platts, The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved. To subscribe or visit go to: http://www.platts.com |