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Oil is still being used for plastic products. It will still be mined and drilled or fracked until all uses of oil diminish.

• ric2b 3y ago
  It will still be less if demand is lower. And if plastics become more expensive due to no longer being a "free" byproduct of oil consumption their usage will also go down.
  • barbazoo 3y ago
    What a beautiful spiral this would be.
  • mechagodzilla 3y ago
    Right - as the biggest consumer of petroleum, gasoline subsidizes a lot of other uses that would be much less attractive otherwise.
• jonnat 3y ago
  While it't true that oil is used for plastics and chemicals today, it's absolutely not the case that it will be drilled into the future when demand for gasoline disappears. Oil is not strictly a necessary precursor to much of the chemical industry, it is rather a convenient raw material because the high value of gasoline makes lights virtually free. In the early days of oil exploration, lights were constantly burned as they had no economic use at the scale they were produced. If oil exploration would continue just for the sake of chemicals, the cost structure of these precursors would fundamentally change and it would become more attractive to replace them with renewable sources.
• phantom784 3y ago
  If oil is only being used in a product that won't eventually be burned and produce CO2, then that's a big win.