5 ms·

Saudi Arabia to Cut Oil Prices as Demand Fears Grow

30 points by maydemir 6y ago

rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
Fears? One can see hope.
- paledot 6y ago
  I mean, not if one is oilprice.com, but yes. Hopefully demand never rebounds. Unfortunately, cheap oil does have repercussions on the value proposition for electrification of transportation. However, electric cars are now mature enough that they have other selling points: quieter, not dependent on gas stations, better performance, better resale price (at least in the case of Tesla). Buying a new gas car in 2020 seems downright foolish.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    These are all great points, but we can do more to accelerate the electrification of everything and the deprecation of petroleum for all but the most niche use cases. We’re almost to the point that non essential combustion should be banned after a reasonable amount of time.
    - danans 6y ago
      > we can do more to accelerate the electrification of everything Definitely. The first thing is suggest is replacing old gas furnaces with heat pumps. No exotic tech needed, just bigger scale to reduce upfront prices.
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Agree! And these are good paying trades jobs that can’t be outsourced. Heat pumps, insulation, houses that’ll pass a blower door test ~4 or lower aren’t sexy but they’re the biggest bang for each buck spent.
        danans 6y ago
        The big challenge is cost effectively retrofitting existing homes for greater efficiency in the general direction of net zero or passive house. I'm trying to do it now and ouch it's pricey.
    - paledot 6y ago
      A smart government would have increased their carbon tax to absorb the dip in price. (Here I'm assuming, of course, that a smart government already has a price on carbon.)
  - nicbou 6y ago
    > not dependent on gas stations Gas stations are much easier to find than electric plugs that are near your destination and available for a few hours. Electric cars are still very impractical if you intend to travel more than 300 kilometres from your home. A five minute pit stop is easier to organise than a full charge outside of a metropolitan area.
    - paledot 6y ago
      Unless you're getting a car specifically for road trips, the increased inconvenience of a 20-minute fast charge over a 5-minute stop at a gas station is more than offset by never needing to stop for gas on the way to/from work again.
      - nicbou 6y ago
        > Unless you're getting a car specifically for road trips I do (a motorcycle, actually), but that's irrelevant here. You assume that everyone has a dedicated parking space with access to an electrical connector. This is not the reality of most city dwellers. When I travel by motorcycle, I can fuel up at any point in the trip. It's a non-event. It requires no planning. If I had to take a longer lunch in a specific town while my car is charging, I'd regret my purchase. Let's say you want to get on the Autobahn and visit your grandma for Christmas. You might need to stop because it's cold and you're driving fast. You'll have to wait 40 minutes, not 20, to add a 300km range to your car. Those are the German numbers. The Canadian winter is probably much harsher. You might have to deal with a bunch of red lights too, because those quick chargers are often in the city centres, not right next to the highway like gas stations. They can also be occupied.
- gralx 6y ago
  A point often missed is our dependency on plastics and petroleum-based pharmaceuticals. If oil demand as fuel decreases, so the price of those increase. Otherwise oil becomes too expensive to produce. Greenhouse gas emissions have to decrease dramatically, but it will bring with it some extraordinary inflation in common consumer and medical product prices, to name two knock-on effects.
seibelj 6y ago
I hope people who are diehard renewable promoters realize that hydrocarbons have many advantages, such as energy density and their ability to be stored and used at any time. It’s not hard to draw a line from rolling blackouts in California to their removal of coal and natural gas. Simply buying power from Nevada doesn’t cut carbon emissions if Nevada uses hydrocarbons. Until we get nuclear back in a major way then we need hydrocarbons. Wind and solar don’t cut it.
- mxschumacher 6y ago
  in my estimation, political opposition against nuclear is so strong in the west that it will be next to impossible to build new reactors. I'd be really surprised if there a net gain in fission reactors in Europe or the US. The ongoing shift away from coal is powerful - environmentalists push hard and some cities close to coal plants became too dirty to be livable. "Coal-to-gas" is a central piece of China's energy policy. Energy storage, transportation and space for on-shore wind puts some limit on the renewable-build up; Germany's number of active wind turbines might actually decrease in the coming years. Take the above three aspects together and combine it with an ever richer and energy-hungry humanity and I believe gas and oil demand will be higher than most want to believe. Even if passenger cars are shifted to electric: air planes, ships, freight trains and most importantly, trucks still run on oil. Consider how most passenger cars spend most of their lives being parked, in contrast, commercial trucks move as much as possible,
  - seibelj 6y ago
    There is a large amount of religion to anti-carbon people. They want to wish away carbon based fuels but the tech honestly isn’t there yet, and refuse to listen to rational people who actually understand the technology. 100% renewable isn’t even remotely close. We maybe can make up a portion but if you want the power a modern society needs then the only clean energy that exists is nuclear, which is also something they can’t stand. It is extremely frustrating.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

30 points by maydemir 6y ago

rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago

Fears? One can see hope.

paledot 6y ago
I mean, not if one is oilprice.com, but yes. Hopefully demand never rebounds. Unfortunately, cheap oil does have repercussions on the value proposition for electrification of transportation. However, electric cars are now mature enough that they have other selling points: quieter, not dependent on gas stations, better performance, better resale price (at least in the case of Tesla). Buying a new gas car in 2020 seems downright foolish.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  These are all great points, but we can do more to accelerate the electrification of everything and the deprecation of petroleum for all but the most niche use cases. We’re almost to the point that non essential combustion should be banned after a reasonable amount of time.
  - danans 6y ago
    > we can do more to accelerate the electrification of everything Definitely. The first thing is suggest is replacing old gas furnaces with heat pumps. No exotic tech needed, just bigger scale to reduce upfront prices.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Agree! And these are good paying trades jobs that can’t be outsourced. Heat pumps, insulation, houses that’ll pass a blower door test ~4 or lower aren’t sexy but they’re the biggest bang for each buck spent.
      - danans 6y ago
        The big challenge is cost effectively retrofitting existing homes for greater efficiency in the general direction of net zero or passive house. I'm trying to do it now and ouch it's pricey.
  - paledot 6y ago
    A smart government would have increased their carbon tax to absorb the dip in price. (Here I'm assuming, of course, that a smart government already has a price on carbon.)
- nicbou 6y ago
  > not dependent on gas stations Gas stations are much easier to find than electric plugs that are near your destination and available for a few hours. Electric cars are still very impractical if you intend to travel more than 300 kilometres from your home. A five minute pit stop is easier to organise than a full charge outside of a metropolitan area.
  - paledot 6y ago
    Unless you're getting a car specifically for road trips, the increased inconvenience of a 20-minute fast charge over a 5-minute stop at a gas station is more than offset by never needing to stop for gas on the way to/from work again.
    - nicbou 6y ago
      > Unless you're getting a car specifically for road trips I do (a motorcycle, actually), but that's irrelevant here. You assume that everyone has a dedicated parking space with access to an electrical connector. This is not the reality of most city dwellers. When I travel by motorcycle, I can fuel up at any point in the trip. It's a non-event. It requires no planning. If I had to take a longer lunch in a specific town while my car is charging, I'd regret my purchase. Let's say you want to get on the Autobahn and visit your grandma for Christmas. You might need to stop because it's cold and you're driving fast. You'll have to wait 40 minutes, not 20, to add a 300km range to your car. Those are the German numbers. The Canadian winter is probably much harsher. You might have to deal with a bunch of red lights too, because those quick chargers are often in the city centres, not right next to the highway like gas stations. They can also be occupied.
gralx 6y ago
A point often missed is our dependency on plastics and petroleum-based pharmaceuticals. If oil demand as fuel decreases, so the price of those increase. Otherwise oil becomes too expensive to produce. Greenhouse gas emissions have to decrease dramatically, but it will bring with it some extraordinary inflation in common consumer and medical product prices, to name two knock-on effects.

seibelj 6y ago

I hope people who are diehard renewable promoters realize that hydrocarbons have many advantages, such as energy density and their ability to be stored and used at any time. It’s not hard to draw a line from rolling blackouts in California to their removal of coal and natural gas. Simply buying power from Nevada doesn’t cut carbon emissions if Nevada uses hydrocarbons. Until we get nuclear back in a major way then we need hydrocarbons. Wind and solar don’t cut it.

mxschumacher 6y ago
in my estimation, political opposition against nuclear is so strong in the west that it will be next to impossible to build new reactors. I'd be really surprised if there a net gain in fission reactors in Europe or the US. The ongoing shift away from coal is powerful - environmentalists push hard and some cities close to coal plants became too dirty to be livable. "Coal-to-gas" is a central piece of China's energy policy. Energy storage, transportation and space for on-shore wind puts some limit on the renewable-build up; Germany's number of active wind turbines might actually decrease in the coming years. Take the above three aspects together and combine it with an ever richer and energy-hungry humanity and I believe gas and oil demand will be higher than most want to believe. Even if passenger cars are shifted to electric: air planes, ships, freight trains and most importantly, trucks still run on oil. Consider how most passenger cars spend most of their lives being parked, in contrast, commercial trucks move as much as possible,
- seibelj 6y ago
  There is a large amount of religion to anti-carbon people. They want to wish away carbon based fuels but the tech honestly isn’t there yet, and refuse to listen to rational people who actually understand the technology. 100% renewable isn’t even remotely close. We maybe can make up a portion but if you want the power a modern society needs then the only clean energy that exists is nuclear, which is also something they can’t stand. It is extremely frustrating.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]