alt Hacker NewsOne 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.
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> 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...
(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!)
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
All those EVs but demand is higher than ever.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/271823/global-crude-oil-...
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
Meanwhile everyone is being confused with AI-slop.
What's good in electric cars? If a large power plant is destroyed how are you going to charge your electric car to escape?
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.
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.