Oil production and consumption is higher than ever and projected to keep increasing to 2030 (though I do not personally believe this).
The demand growth is driven by the transportation sector, particularly in the developing countries.
Despite the recent successes of electrical cars, auto fuel consumption is still rising, and the absolute growth in conventional auto sales is, incredibly, almost one hundred* times larger than growth in electric car sales (an extra 3.1 million conventional cars were sold worldwide in 2016 cf 2015).
And even though you could argue that we can see the beginning of the end for petrol powered cars, industries such as construction, mining and agriculture - not to mention air travel - are much harder to convert to electricity.
Sooo... I expect we will be reliant on oil for a while to come yet.
*edit: sorry that is probably wrong, according to some sources the electric vehicle market grew by almost 300,000 vehicles per year... although that depends just what is counted as "electric". In any case, electric cars have a huge gap to close just to arrest the climb in conventional vehicle sales.
But not before that.
It's still 1/300th of all cars sold, so it's not mainstream, but the tremendous growth is there (see the graph on the first article). It's actually the U.S. that's lagging behind.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/mind-the-shock-as-auto-investing...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/russellflannery/2016/08/30/warre...
Hope that will be true soon.
Locally-generated solar electric power to charge the batteries is also easier in a farm environment, and makes direct financial sense.
The same dismounted tractor batteries, when not in heavy use, e.g. during winter, can work as a "power wall" to supplement the solar power during dusk when days are shorter.
Doesn't that run into the same problem as biofuels? In a farm, most places where you could put a solar panel are also places where you could be growing more food.
Alternative feedstocks like Miscanthus don't have this issue, and neither does solar. It can use marginal land that is not otherwise profitable to farm.
Ahem: that's because of "political issues". You should remain very worried (and vigilant) about the direction of energy policy under the incoming administration.
You don't need paying customers to be profitable, just a friendly government.
Here in the uk we subsidise fossil fuels far more heavily than renewables and there are no plans to change that picture - actually, oil and gas subsidies are increasing, to "help maintain profitability for an important British values industry".
Never underestimate the power of wealth transfer. Volkswagen, thyssen krupps, Hugo boss, ford - none would exist today without vast piles of state gifts - and that's the tiny readily visible tip of the iceberg.
No, oil is here to stay for as long as is convenient. Renewables will continue to be kicked into the long grass because policymakers will be rich and dead by the time it gets truly awful. Oil makes them rich today.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2016...
And it's cheaper than ever for the government to do.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GLYubON4v7A/UPTBpQUr8eI/AAAAAAAAE...
As long as we never try to pay it back.
The wise investor knows that what government giveth, government can take away after the next election, and when is that election due? Before or after the break-even date for the investment?
Here's a recently announced coal plant closure: http://www.cortezjournal.com/article/20161001/News05/1610099...
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the local job options could be pretty limited in far-western Montrose County once two of its major employers close their doors, eliminating what are currently 55 jobs at the plant and 28 at the mine.
...
According to the EIA, the Nucla plant generated 416,150 MWh in 2015 for an average annual power of 47.5 megawatts: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/527 That's an abysmal productivity per employee (or a fabulous job source, depending on your perspective): 0.86 real annualized megawatts per employee at the plant ; 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs.
A well-sited utility scale solar farm like Desert Sunlight can produce an average annualized power of 147 megawatts with just 15 full time employees, for a ratio of 9.8 megawatts per plant employee.
Replacing old coal plant generation with equal MWh from favorably sited solar requires only ~9% of the number of permanent employees, if Nucla is a typical case for an older coal plant. That's a nightmare number if you're relying on the coal industry for your livelihood, or a great opportunity if you're looking for cost reductions in a competitive electricity market. The fixed O&M costs for solar are already the lowest of any utility scale electricity source; once the capital costs get low enough it has winning costs across the board in any reasonably sunny area. That's for instantaneous cost of generation, anyway, which still has plenty of competitive opportunities in most regions before storage has to be considered.
Every industry loves to brag about "creating jobs" when beseeching governments but that's another way of admitting to "creating costs" (that are then passed on to buyers). The explosion in solar and wind jobs is a temporary effect of rapid expansion; most of that employment is in installation rather than running installed plants, manufacturing equipment from raw materials, or mining the raw materials. There's a lot less work in operating a solar plant than building it and the operational phase is a lot longer. If the American solar industry had already reached steady state (just enough construction to keep new capacity matched with retirements), I believe that the full life cycle labor intensity per MWh would be significantly lower than that of a steady state coal electricity system. And the labor intensity is declining further because a few major trends in PV tech (higher module efficiency, longer module life, longer inverter life), though not explicitly about reducing labor inputs, imply significant further labor reductions.
I can't imagine anywhere people would accept going back into living inside a smog, dying earlier due to respiratory problems, and forgetting that the sky is blue.
The only trend around is on the other direction: people pressing their governments into cleaning coal plants on the less developed countries.
Having said that, I believe there are several billion dollar funds looking to invest in solar and their main problem is a lack of projects to invest in, so solar is doing okay from an ROI perspective at the moment.
You can't make plastic from coal. More and more items are being manufactured from plastic, which comes from oil. There is more to this narrative than what you put in your gas tank.
(The methanol could come from renewable electricity and CO2 extracted from seawater, instead of coal, if renewables get cheap enough. Or you can make methanol from waste wood, corn stover, all kinds of biomass.)