7 ms·

One consequence of the transition to renewable energy and electrified transport, is that oil imports will start to decline. And the dollar is of course the curr

One consequence of the transition to renewable energy and electrified transport, is that oil imports will start to decline. And the dollar is of course the currency of choice for that. The US economy and other countries that export fossil fuels will feel the impact over the next decade or so. The energy transition might go a lot quicker than people seem to expect. Currently about 20% of global car sales is electric. In some countries it's well over 50%. China of course being one of them. And they are making rapid progress with electrifying freight as well. This is already impacting their fossil fuel imports. They still import a lot. One effect that I think people underestimate is that while it will take a long time for all the ICE vehicles to disappear, the new ones do most of the driving. So, new EVs have a relatively large impact on fuel consumption and imports pretty early on. E.g. Chinese diesel imports apparently already are being impacted by their rapid deployment of tens of thousands of electrical trucks. Soon hundreds of thousands. That's already a third of the market in China and will probably head for well over 50% in a few short years. The EU is not that far behind. The ripple effect that's going to have on oil trading, refinery capacity, etc. is going to be substantial. Of course current geopolitics is speeding things up massively. LNG and oil scarcity is causing a lot of issues globally and countries are accelerating moves to reduce their dependence on that.

UltraSane 2mo ago
People will keep burning oil as long as it makes economic sense to do so.
thelastgallon 2mo ago
Demand destruction will collapse profits and accelerate the oil/dollar downfall. Saudi Arabia can profitably pump oil probably under $10/barrel. If demand drops, thats where oil should be. China with [EVs|Solar|BESS|Turbines] will replace all of the fossil fuel countries (US, middle-east, Russia). This is probably the biggest transition in the history of mankind. This is energy production, storage and all the appliances that use electricity. After this, its incredibly hard for any other country to compete.
- toomuchtodo 2mo ago
  Saudi Arabia needs oil prices at ~$86.60/barrel to balance their budget, per Bloomberg. It is not the marginal cost to pump a barrel, but what a country needs to support their sticky spending from previously assured energy exports. Governments will collapse long before we approach low single digit oil prices on the global market. The World Is Awash With Oil and Prices Are Poised to Keep Falling - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-global-oil-supply-prices/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-global-oil-supply-pr... | https://archive.today/hkhtI https://archive.today/hkhtI - December 18th, 2025 (Control -F "Crude Price Forecasts Are Below Levels Needed for Budgets") > China with [EVs|Solar|BESS|Turbines] will replace all of the fossil fuel countries (US, middle-east, Russia). This is probably the biggest transition in the history of mankind. This is energy production, storage and all the appliances that use electricity. After this, its incredibly hard for any other country to compete. Strongly agree. China is replacing petrostate economic demand with demand for their clean tech products, which keeps their deflationary economy afloat, provides them soft power, and will transition the yuan to a global reserve currency. Today countries by dollars to by petroleum ("petrodollar"); tomorrow, countries will want yuan to buy "manufacturing fiat," to trade with the world's factory (China is 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity, as of this comment). Stocks of assets vs flows of energy.
  - thelastgallon 2mo ago
    Indeed. Electricity will be the only abstraction layer of energy, all end uses (transportation, cooking, heating, cooling, appliances) will switch to electricity. Electricity can be generated from any source (dirty + clean), but the abstraction layer of electricity will allow the grid to continuously increase the clean fuels. It helps that the cleanest is also the cheapest. Solar panels are cheap as dirt. In 1975, a solar PV module cost $128.27 per watt. In 2026 it costs $0.1 - $0.2 per watt, a thousand times cheaper. In 1975, only satellites could afford solar. Today, its the cheapest source of energy. China will be an electrostate. Are there any other electrostates? Maybe Bhutan, Costa Rica, but they are too small.
    - toomuchtodo 2mo ago
mekdoonggi 2mo ago
I had never considered the demand destruction effect of EVs on fuel like that. It makes sense though, because the biggest users will justify switching to electric faster because the payoff time is quicker.
codedokode 2mo ago
What's good in electric cars? If a large power plant is destroyed how are you going to charge your electric car to escape?
- jdlshore 2mo ago
  It’s always charged. You plug it in when you get home and it’s ready to go when you leave.
- vrganj 2mo ago
  You can have solar panels and batteries right at home. You can't have an oil rig at home.
- thelastgallon 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - mschuster91 2mo ago
    > And your gasoline pump works perfectly fine without power? Most decent emergency / contingency plans will have the fire department, police or whatever local group show up at one or two designated gas stations to provide power, or require these stations to have on-site emergency power.
    - vel0city 2mo ago
      As someone who has actually lived through multiple major catastrophes where fuel couldn't get delivered for days and electricity was out for days, when the pumps stop working there is no gas. Don't assume the gasoline the police and fire department have will be there for you. It's there for the first responders. They don't have infinite supply. Their supply is extra expensive to handle compared to when things were working. You've now got many thousands of families all trying to get to the two or three operating fuel stations...trust me they're not open to the public! When you're out of gas, you're out of gas. Meanwhile, those with solar panels not reliant on grid-tie, they can continue to charge their vehicles.
    - 2mo ago
pjc50 2mo ago
> In some countries it's well over 50%. China of course being one of them As always with these stats, I like to check whether that includes plug in hybrids, and it does. Those are still mostly dependent on fossil fuels, although they use less. Pure BEV adoption seems to depend on your radius from Norway: https://www.autonergy.co/blog/global-ev-adoption-leaderboard-2025 https://www.autonergy.co/blog/global-ev-adoption-leaderboard... (France should really be doing better, after all migration away from fossil fuels was a motive behind the Pompidou/Messmer nuclear buildout in the 70s!)
- jddj 2mo ago
  Wow. On mobile Firefox I have to use two fingers to scroll that site.
  - Epa095 2mo ago
    Yeah, that's some cursed JavaScript :-/
- thelastgallon 2mo ago
  Thats personal vehicles. But if China is going full speed with electric trucks, that will be the fastest gamechanger. Diesel trucks run 300K miles, under 5mpg, consume a gazillion gallons. Electric truck fuel costs are probably 10%. Its really sad that India is pro fossil fuel, it has an opportunity to follow China's strategy.
  - dyauspitr 2mo ago
    I don’t know what you mean by India is pro fossil fuel. It’s aggressively building out solar and has multiple nuclear reactors being simultaneously constructed. It would love to be an electrostate but is doing everything it can to satisfy its populations energy needs in the meantime which means they can’t just stop using coal and oil.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 2mo ago
    You will find Chinese electric trucks making inroads (heh) everywhere from UK and Europe (1) to Africa (2) now that it's a proven business model in the centre of the these things, of course. 1) https://octopus.energy/big-on-batteries-octopus-and-catl-team-up-to-unlock-electric-trucking-across-europe/ https://octopus.energy/big-on-batteries-octopus-and-catl-tea... 2) https://mybroadband.co.za/news/motoring/648661-electric-truck-battery-swapping-station-plan-in-south-africa.html https://mybroadband.co.za/news/motoring/648661-electric-truc...
trimethylpurine 2mo ago
All those EVs but demand is higher than ever. https://www.statista.com/statistics/271823/global-crude-oil-demand/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/271823/global-crude-oil-...
_heimdall 2mo ago
I'll be surprised if renewables overtakes oil for energy production anytime soon. I could see nuclear doing that, but I never can get past the challenges of maintenance and replacement costs for solar panels, turbines, and especially for storage. I will be very happy to be proven wrong here over time though. New battery technology could make a big improvement. And I keep hearing that AI will give us answers to all our technical challenges and lead to an age of abundance where we all make a high income, so there's that too.
- nemomarx 2mo ago
  Are we using that much oil for energy? The leading non renewable power source now is natural gas or similar, which I didn't think interacted much with the oil market. So even without nuclear, if the future is natural gas pipelines for baseload oil would still be mostly a manufacturing and vehicle fuel deal.
  - curmudgeon22 2mo ago
    My understanding is that the shift towards natural gas is largely because it is a very cheap byproduct of fracking (for oil). It happens to be "greener" when burned so gets green-washed also. I wonder what would happen if oil demand was significantly reduced, thus reducing fracking.
  - throwaway473825 2mo ago
    [dead]
- imtringued 2mo ago
  Ah yes, nuclear is known for having cheap replacement costs, especially Fukushima was known for being particularly cheap. Solar power is the worst, it gets more expensive every year. Regarding batteries... It's over for sodium based batteries (the ones promising us cheap battery storage) because dry coated Lithium ion batteries are coming onto the market which means sodium batteries are an economic dead end.
  - 2mo ago
DrBazza 2mo ago
I did a lazy ask google, and it thinks less than 3% of crude oil is used for energy. The vast bulk of oil being used: 'transportation (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel), heavy machinery, and non-energy uses like asphalt and plastics rather than power plants'. That is of course, one of the big problems of 'going green' - electricity production is low hanging fruit and understood by the general public. When that's 'solved' (solar, wind, geo, nuclear), how do we solve the other 97%? Oil really isn't going anywhere. It will be a slow tail, perhaps too slow to stop emissions. https://www.iea.org/world/oil https://www.iea.org/world/oil
- chabska 2mo ago
  We knew how to make synthetic hydrocarbon one hundred years ago. Nazi Germany used the Fischer Tropsch process to make synthetic fuel after the Royal Navy blockaded their oil import. The only reason we're still digging up fossil fuel is because it's cheap. According to some calculation, green hydrocarbon from atmospheric CO2 and electrolytic hydrogen could be commercially viable when fossil petroleum reaches $200/barrel , which is really not that far off.
- Al-Khwarizmi 2mo ago
  Around 50% is used for road transport, though, which is poised to be replaced and was one of the parent poster's main points.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
csomar 2mo ago
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-explorer https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e... Meanwhile everyone is being confused with AI-slop.
chaostheory 2mo ago
EVs don’t need renewables. What makes them attractive despite the bad marketing in the West is that they can be powered by anything that can create electricity, like coal; which is something China has a lot of The transition to EVs is key to the national security of many countries that currently do not have energy security like China and even most if not all member countries in the EU.
- nradov 2mo ago
  China doesn't have a lot of coal, at least not relevant to their energy requirements. They still have to import a huge amount and remain vulnerable from an energy security perspective. https://www.iea.org/countries/china/coal https://www.iea.org/countries/china/coal
  - FpUser 2mo ago
    >"remain vulnerable from an energy security perspective" - not while having Russia close by.
    - nradov 2mo ago
      Russia is a big place with limited internal transportation. Land routes from Russia can only supply a fraction of China's fossil fuel import requirements. Much of it still has to come via vulnerable merchant ships. China still lacks the capability to protect their sea lines of communication, although that might change in a few years.
      - Sabinus 2mo ago
        The other thing to keep in mind is the Chinese, quite reasonably, don't have a lot of faith that the Russian government they make deals with and invest in now will be the same one honouring those deals and investments next decade. Russia has a lot of risk, a lot of problems and not a lot of cash.
jmyeet 2mo ago
There's a lot of rosy or false assumptions here. For example, if every road vehicle became an EV tomorrow, global oil demand would drop from 100M barrels per day ("Mbpd") to... ~60M. And that assumes EV replacements for things we don't have EV replacements for yet, like long haul trucking. We also have avgas, for which there's no replacement, and global shipping. But beyond fuel there's a significant range of non-fuel usages (eg industrial, plastics, construction). There's another factor here too and that is that the oil economy props up the weapons economy. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [1]. That sounds like a good thing (and it is) but you have to realize there are forces who like that oil drives war became war is a huge profit opportunity. [1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar-panel/ https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
0xbadcafebee 2mo ago
> One consequence of the transition to renewable energy and electrified transport, is that oil imports will start to decline Unless Jevons Paradox. Cheaper energy might mean more oil use. 1) Never underestimate the world's hunger for energy; renewables and electrification have huge disadvantages (you can't get close to the energy density of gas/diesel). 2) Oil is used for most products. 3) Even if its use declined, that would raise the price without making it less important.
balderdash 2mo ago
I think what's missing here is the second order effects. refiners will adjust their crack, use blending etc but that's just a rounding error. you're still going to have demand for the other ~60% of the barrel, so refiners are going to have ~40% of the barrel to find a market for, EV's are going to look a lot less appealing when gallon of gas is <$1 (or ~$8 an mmbtu), and when its that price, people will find all sorts of uses for it (that's like ~1/2 the price of europe/parts of asia), all of a sudden people are going to be burning gasoline for power etc. it'll be a roller coaster for sure, but i think there are going to a lot of interesting substations and knock on effects.
- jillesvangurp 2mo ago
  A lot of especially the US market needs high oil prices to justify production cost. Some refiners might actually reduce capacity rather than sell below cost levels or at lower margins. The reality is probably going to be lots of price uncertainty (even more than today) and increasingly flaky supply chains as refiners and oil producers gradually reduce capacity to keep prices high enough to stay in business. As that happens, investments in refineries become more risky as well. Because if you can't rely on lucrative fuel sales anymore, that's a big problem for long term viability of a refinery. Before cars started burning petrol at scale, refiners were occasionally dumping fuel in rivers. It was just a worthless by product. All the money was in things like kerosene.
CraigJPerry 2mo ago
>> They still import a lot I don't think it's common knowledge how much they dropped imports since the Iran / straight of hormuz crisis. Back at the start of that conflict there were a lot of breathless takes about what catastrophe was in store in a few weeks time, and what materialised was bad but not in anything like the same league as what was predicted. The thing that wasn't accounted for in the analysis at the time was just how rapidly and by how much China could suppress its appetite for oil imports.
- greycol 2mo ago
  They had basically been planning for this shortfall for ever as a likely outcome of sanctions/blockades during an invasion of Taiwan. Curtailing imports so much is a smart soft power move in not only does it ingratiate countries that would suffer most from the price spike but it could soften the resolve of Taiwan in showing that one of the largest penalties that would result from the invasion isn't nearly as punishing which in turn makes Taiwan's porcupine strategy less viable. Along with US own goals like the thoroughly bungled and unplanned invasion, tariffs, corruption (both business crimes and more moral crimes like pedophilia or disregard for following legal process) it's made most of the west rate China above USA in favourability [latest Pew research poll].
marcus_holmes 2mo ago
ICE use will drop slowly, and then all at once. Because gas stations will go out of business and it'll get harder and harder to refuel them.

UltraSane 2mo ago

People will keep burning oil as long as it makes economic sense to do so.

thelastgallon 2mo ago

Demand destruction will collapse profits and accelerate the oil/dollar downfall. Saudi Arabia can profitably pump oil probably under $10/barrel. If demand drops, thats where oil should be. China with [EVs|Solar|BESS|Turbines] will replace all of the fossil fuel countries (US, middle-east, Russia). This is probably the biggest transition in the history of mankind. This is energy production, storage and all the appliances that use electricity. After this, its incredibly hard for any other country to compete.

toomuchtodo 2mo ago
Saudi Arabia needs oil prices at ~$86.60/barrel to balance their budget, per Bloomberg. It is not the marginal cost to pump a barrel, but what a country needs to support their sticky spending from previously assured energy exports. Governments will collapse long before we approach low single digit oil prices on the global market. The World Is Awash With Oil and Prices Are Poised to Keep Falling - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-global-oil-supply-prices/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-global-oil-supply-pr... | https://archive.today/hkhtI https://archive.today/hkhtI - December 18th, 2025 (Control -F "Crude Price Forecasts Are Below Levels Needed for Budgets") > China with [EVs|Solar|BESS|Turbines] will replace all of the fossil fuel countries (US, middle-east, Russia). This is probably the biggest transition in the history of mankind. This is energy production, storage and all the appliances that use electricity. After this, its incredibly hard for any other country to compete. Strongly agree. China is replacing petrostate economic demand with demand for their clean tech products, which keeps their deflationary economy afloat, provides them soft power, and will transition the yuan to a global reserve currency. Today countries by dollars to by petroleum ("petrodollar"); tomorrow, countries will want yuan to buy "manufacturing fiat," to trade with the world's factory (China is 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity, as of this comment). Stocks of assets vs flows of energy.
- thelastgallon 2mo ago
  Indeed. Electricity will be the only abstraction layer of energy, all end uses (transportation, cooking, heating, cooling, appliances) will switch to electricity. Electricity can be generated from any source (dirty + clean), but the abstraction layer of electricity will allow the grid to continuously increase the clean fuels. It helps that the cleanest is also the cheapest. Solar panels are cheap as dirt. In 1975, a solar PV module cost $128.27 per watt. In 2026 it costs $0.1 - $0.2 per watt, a thousand times cheaper. In 1975, only satellites could afford solar. Today, its the cheapest source of energy. China will be an electrostate. Are there any other electrostates? Maybe Bhutan, Costa Rica, but they are too small.
  - toomuchtodo 2mo ago

mekdoonggi 2mo ago

I had never considered the demand destruction effect of EVs on fuel like that. It makes sense though, because the biggest users will justify switching to electric faster because the payoff time is quicker.

codedokode 2mo ago

What's good in electric cars? If a large power plant is destroyed how are you going to charge your electric car to escape?

jdlshore 2mo ago
It’s always charged. You plug it in when you get home and it’s ready to go when you leave.
vrganj 2mo ago
You can have solar panels and batteries right at home. You can't have an oil rig at home.
thelastgallon 2mo ago
[flagged]
- mschuster91 2mo ago
  > And your gasoline pump works perfectly fine without power? Most decent emergency / contingency plans will have the fire department, police or whatever local group show up at one or two designated gas stations to provide power, or require these stations to have on-site emergency power.
  - vel0city 2mo ago
    As someone who has actually lived through multiple major catastrophes where fuel couldn't get delivered for days and electricity was out for days, when the pumps stop working there is no gas. Don't assume the gasoline the police and fire department have will be there for you. It's there for the first responders. They don't have infinite supply. Their supply is extra expensive to handle compared to when things were working. You've now got many thousands of families all trying to get to the two or three operating fuel stations...trust me they're not open to the public! When you're out of gas, you're out of gas. Meanwhile, those with solar panels not reliant on grid-tie, they can continue to charge their vehicles.
  - 2mo ago

pjc50 2mo ago

> In some countries it's well over 50%. China of course being one of them As always with these stats, I like to check whether that includes plug in hybrids, and it does. Those are still mostly dependent on fossil fuels, although they use less. Pure BEV adoption seems to depend on your radius from Norway: https://www.autonergy.co/blog/global-ev-adoption-leaderboard-2025 https://www.autonergy.co/blog/global-ev-adoption-leaderboard... (France should really be doing better, after all migration away from fossil fuels was a motive behind the Pompidou/Messmer nuclear buildout in the 70s!)

jddj 2mo ago
Wow. On mobile Firefox I have to use two fingers to scroll that site.
- Epa095 2mo ago
  Yeah, that's some cursed JavaScript :-/
thelastgallon 2mo ago
Thats personal vehicles. But if China is going full speed with electric trucks, that will be the fastest gamechanger. Diesel trucks run 300K miles, under 5mpg, consume a gazillion gallons. Electric truck fuel costs are probably 10%. Its really sad that India is pro fossil fuel, it has an opportunity to follow China's strategy.
- dyauspitr 2mo ago
  I don’t know what you mean by India is pro fossil fuel. It’s aggressively building out solar and has multiple nuclear reactors being simultaneously constructed. It would love to be an electrostate but is doing everything it can to satisfy its populations energy needs in the meantime which means they can’t just stop using coal and oil.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2mo ago
  You will find Chinese electric trucks making inroads (heh) everywhere from UK and Europe (1) to Africa (2) now that it's a proven business model in the centre of the these things, of course. 1) https://octopus.energy/big-on-batteries-octopus-and-catl-team-up-to-unlock-electric-trucking-across-europe/ https://octopus.energy/big-on-batteries-octopus-and-catl-tea... 2) https://mybroadband.co.za/news/motoring/648661-electric-truck-battery-swapping-station-plan-in-south-africa.html https://mybroadband.co.za/news/motoring/648661-electric-truc...

trimethylpurine 2mo ago

All those EVs but demand is higher than ever. https://www.statista.com/statistics/271823/global-crude-oil-demand/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/271823/global-crude-oil-...

_heimdall 2mo ago

I'll be surprised if renewables overtakes oil for energy production anytime soon. I could see nuclear doing that, but I never can get past the challenges of maintenance and replacement costs for solar panels, turbines, and especially for storage. I will be very happy to be proven wrong here over time though. New battery technology could make a big improvement. And I keep hearing that AI will give us answers to all our technical challenges and lead to an age of abundance where we all make a high income, so there's that too.

nemomarx 2mo ago
Are we using that much oil for energy? The leading non renewable power source now is natural gas or similar, which I didn't think interacted much with the oil market. So even without nuclear, if the future is natural gas pipelines for baseload oil would still be mostly a manufacturing and vehicle fuel deal.
- curmudgeon22 2mo ago
  My understanding is that the shift towards natural gas is largely because it is a very cheap byproduct of fracking (for oil). It happens to be "greener" when burned so gets green-washed also. I wonder what would happen if oil demand was significantly reduced, thus reducing fracking.
- throwaway473825 2mo ago
  [dead]
imtringued 2mo ago
Ah yes, nuclear is known for having cheap replacement costs, especially Fukushima was known for being particularly cheap. Solar power is the worst, it gets more expensive every year. Regarding batteries... It's over for sodium based batteries (the ones promising us cheap battery storage) because dry coated Lithium ion batteries are coming onto the market which means sodium batteries are an economic dead end.
- 2mo ago

DrBazza 2mo ago

I did a lazy ask google, and it thinks less than 3% of crude oil is used for energy. The vast bulk of oil being used: 'transportation (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel), heavy machinery, and non-energy uses like asphalt and plastics rather than power plants'. That is of course, one of the big problems of 'going green' - electricity production is low hanging fruit and understood by the general public. When that's 'solved' (solar, wind, geo, nuclear), how do we solve the other 97%? Oil really isn't going anywhere. It will be a slow tail, perhaps too slow to stop emissions. https://www.iea.org/world/oil https://www.iea.org/world/oil

chabska 2mo ago
We knew how to make synthetic hydrocarbon one hundred years ago. Nazi Germany used the Fischer Tropsch process to make synthetic fuel after the Royal Navy blockaded their oil import. The only reason we're still digging up fossil fuel is because it's cheap. According to some calculation, green hydrocarbon from atmospheric CO2 and electrolytic hydrogen could be commercially viable when fossil petroleum reaches $200/barrel , which is really not that far off.
Al-Khwarizmi 2mo ago
Around 50% is used for road transport, though, which is poised to be replaced and was one of the parent poster's main points.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]

csomar 2mo ago

https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-explorer https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e... Meanwhile everyone is being confused with AI-slop.

chaostheory 2mo ago

EVs don’t need renewables. What makes them attractive despite the bad marketing in the West is that they can be powered by anything that can create electricity, like coal; which is something China has a lot of The transition to EVs is key to the national security of many countries that currently do not have energy security like China and even most if not all member countries in the EU.

nradov 2mo ago
China doesn't have a lot of coal, at least not relevant to their energy requirements. They still have to import a huge amount and remain vulnerable from an energy security perspective. https://www.iea.org/countries/china/coal https://www.iea.org/countries/china/coal
- FpUser 2mo ago
  >"remain vulnerable from an energy security perspective" - not while having Russia close by.
  - nradov 2mo ago
    Russia is a big place with limited internal transportation. Land routes from Russia can only supply a fraction of China's fossil fuel import requirements. Much of it still has to come via vulnerable merchant ships. China still lacks the capability to protect their sea lines of communication, although that might change in a few years.
    - Sabinus 2mo ago
      The other thing to keep in mind is the Chinese, quite reasonably, don't have a lot of faith that the Russian government they make deals with and invest in now will be the same one honouring those deals and investments next decade. Russia has a lot of risk, a lot of problems and not a lot of cash.

jmyeet 2mo ago

There's a lot of rosy or false assumptions here. For example, if every road vehicle became an EV tomorrow, global oil demand would drop from 100M barrels per day ("Mbpd") to... ~60M. And that assumes EV replacements for things we don't have EV replacements for yet, like long haul trucking. We also have avgas, for which there's no replacement, and global shipping. But beyond fuel there's a significant range of non-fuel usages (eg industrial, plastics, construction). There's another factor here too and that is that the oil economy props up the weapons economy. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [1]. That sounds like a good thing (and it is) but you have to realize there are forces who like that oil drives war became war is a huge profit opportunity. [1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar-panel/ https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...

0xbadcafebee 2mo ago

> One consequence of the transition to renewable energy and electrified transport, is that oil imports will start to decline Unless Jevons Paradox. Cheaper energy might mean more oil use. 1) Never underestimate the world's hunger for energy; renewables and electrification have huge disadvantages (you can't get close to the energy density of gas/diesel). 2) Oil is used for most products. 3) Even if its use declined, that would raise the price without making it less important.

balderdash 2mo ago

I think what's missing here is the second order effects. refiners will adjust their crack, use blending etc but that's just a rounding error. you're still going to have demand for the other ~60% of the barrel, so refiners are going to have ~40% of the barrel to find a market for, EV's are going to look a lot less appealing when gallon of gas is <$1 (or ~$8 an mmbtu), and when its that price, people will find all sorts of uses for it (that's like ~1/2 the price of europe/parts of asia), all of a sudden people are going to be burning gasoline for power etc. it'll be a roller coaster for sure, but i think there are going to a lot of interesting substations and knock on effects.

jillesvangurp 2mo ago
A lot of especially the US market needs high oil prices to justify production cost. Some refiners might actually reduce capacity rather than sell below cost levels or at lower margins. The reality is probably going to be lots of price uncertainty (even more than today) and increasingly flaky supply chains as refiners and oil producers gradually reduce capacity to keep prices high enough to stay in business. As that happens, investments in refineries become more risky as well. Because if you can't rely on lucrative fuel sales anymore, that's a big problem for long term viability of a refinery. Before cars started burning petrol at scale, refiners were occasionally dumping fuel in rivers. It was just a worthless by product. All the money was in things like kerosene.

CraigJPerry 2mo ago

>> They still import a lot I don't think it's common knowledge how much they dropped imports since the Iran / straight of hormuz crisis. Back at the start of that conflict there were a lot of breathless takes about what catastrophe was in store in a few weeks time, and what materialised was bad but not in anything like the same league as what was predicted. The thing that wasn't accounted for in the analysis at the time was just how rapidly and by how much China could suppress its appetite for oil imports.

greycol 2mo ago
They had basically been planning for this shortfall for ever as a likely outcome of sanctions/blockades during an invasion of Taiwan. Curtailing imports so much is a smart soft power move in not only does it ingratiate countries that would suffer most from the price spike but it could soften the resolve of Taiwan in showing that one of the largest penalties that would result from the invasion isn't nearly as punishing which in turn makes Taiwan's porcupine strategy less viable. Along with US own goals like the thoroughly bungled and unplanned invasion, tariffs, corruption (both business crimes and more moral crimes like pedophilia or disregard for following legal process) it's made most of the west rate China above USA in favourability [latest Pew research poll].

marcus_holmes 2mo ago

ICE use will drop slowly, and then all at once. Because gas stations will go out of business and it'll get harder and harder to refuel them.