Oil is here for a long time19 Jul 2020 18:00
Someone posted this as a comment in Daily Telegraph.
In 14 years we won't be able to buy new ICE vehicles, no. But those vehicles will still run for another 15 years at least, and replacing them with electric alternatives will require the sort of investment that poorer nations won't have. The upshot is that ICE vehicles will still dominate personal transportation globally for decades yet, and given that transport isn't even the largest consumer of energy anyway, the global market for oil and gas will therefore remain dominant for decades yet. The only technology that might have the ability to actually displace oil and gas is nuclear power, but we seem intent on not doing that.
This is why the 5 largest fossil fuel companies have spent over a billion dollars since 2016 promoting renewables. They know that as long as public policy supports renewables as the preferred replacements for oil and gas, they'll stay in business.
Also, here's a snippet from a report I read recently on the practicalities of this mass-conversion of our transport and energty systems:
"Lithium batteries have finally enabled EVs to become reasonably practical. Tesla, which now sells more cars in the top price category in America than does Mercedes-Benz, has inspired a rush of the world’s manufacturers to produce appealing battery-powered vehicles.This has emboldened bureaucratic aspirations for outright bans on the sale of internal combustion engines, notably in Germany, France, Britain, and, unsurprisingly, California.
Such a ban is not easy to imagine. Optimists forecast that the number of EVs in the world will rise from today’s nearly 4 million to 400 million in two decades.A world with 400 million EVs by 2040 would decrease global oil demand by barely 6%. This sounds counterintuitive, but the numbers are straightforward. There are about 1 billion automobiles today, and they use about 30% of the world’s oil.(Heavy trucks, aviation, petrochemicals, heat, etc. use the rest.) By 2040, there would be an estimated 2 billion cars in the world. Four hundred million EVs would amount to 20% of all the cars on the road—which would thus replace about 6% of petroleum demand."
Keep in mind that the replacement rate described is the most optimistic of scenarios, requiring massive state-backed investment, the wholehearted participation of industry, and a mass-conversion of consumer behaviour. The real adoption rate for EVs will almost certainly be smaller.
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