Do you really believe that in a short period of time gasoline is going to cost a few orders of magnitude more... that's 1,000x the current cost?
Post-fracking that's unlikely to happen. Prices may return to previous levels, but they won't move much more than that. Alternative energy will reduce demand for oil and therefor depress the price of oil, not the other way around.
I also expect that a lot of pumps will be closed in cities because of pollution, smells and other factors.
As to fracking - the wheels have already fallen off, low oil prices forced a production hiatus, stop/start is inefficient and costly, and you need only look at the headlong rush in the UK that kinda petered out to get an idea of where fracking is going - nowhere.
The fossil sector is in big, big trouble - this chaotic oscillator will not stop until the market decouples from energy. The only question is whether they'll be allowed to collapse, or if we'll see state bailouts that keep them limping along.
As to reduced demand - that's also part of the problem. Oil prices are not purely demand driven, they have costs to meet, shareholders to appease, and massive capital investment needs that will not be met with a suppressed price, which will feed the death spiral they've been in for some five years now.
That's "order" of magnitude, not "orders."
In base 2, 2x = 1 order of magnitude 8x = 3 orders of magnitude. Worse both informal definitions are in common usage.
If the price goes up that much, fracking is viable and will happen. The only way fracking is out of the equation if when low prices keep it from being profitable. Fracking presently functions as a cap on the price.
If prices vary wildly, then there are strategies to deal with that, and the variation needs to be explained. How does it come down so rapidly? Assuming healthy economics, probably because of fracking.
It doesn't make sense to say that market prices aren't demand driven just because other costs and factors exist. If suppliers will lose money at a given low price because of costs, eventually supply decreases and prices rise, etc.
Re the demand driven bit - I explained that poorly. Oil is a very "special" commodity, in that it has spectacular investment costs, incredible levels of state funding (and debt), and a price determined by anticipated demand more than anything else I'm aware of - you need only look at the volume curve across futures to see this - and the fact that we are still in a contango market. This adds up to the price of oil being driven by overall economic growth forecasts, which are theoretically demand, but aren't. This results in expenditure (exploration and exploitation), which has a several year time lag. Fracking has been oh-jesus expensive and may never turn a profit. Investors (states) are getting shy.
I'm still explaining this poorly - I'd need to write an essay to convey what I'm trying to get at - there are a few dynamics at play and I will be amazed if we don't start seeing even more instability.
Confidence in the market is very, very low. Talk to traders, not what the press says. Of course the press says it's rosy - nobody wants a premature sell-off, even if there could be some tasty dead cats in it for the vultures. We still need oil for energy for the time being.
I used to deal with a guy in the oil business. Reselling valves pumps and misc plumbing. Nothing in that business is cheap. Just remembered, Shell? did a drilling project few years ago in northern Canada. Spent $2 billion to drill deep wells into what looked like a large reservoir of oil and it was dry. And that wasn't $2 billion in paper funny money, that was $2 billion spent on stuff.
Or not:
http://www.salon.com/2016/04/29/there_will_be_pandemonium_pa...