Demand for oil will peak just before then, according to Royal Dutch Shell Plc projections, as alternative fuels and electric cars gain popularity, putting Middle East energy producers on shakier footing.
The minute Tesla and others get electric vehicles to have sufficient range and low enough costs, we're going to see demand for oil go into structural decline. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13039490)
Furthermore, the demand for plastics and hydrocarbons for other uses will only increase with global income levels rising.
I think, if EV prices keep falling like they have been, developing nations may skip ICE cars and jump straight to EVs (similar to how many nations 'skipped' landline phones and went straight to cellular)
One thing we know about ICE cars is they can be produced cheaply (think moped, not sedan) and there's an endless supply of used copies.
So EV's are not that far behind conventional cars, so the higher energy density of gasoline makes less and less of a difference... especially for commuters since they can refuel at home instead of seeking out a gas station, so they only need enough range to get to work and back (plus a cushion for detours and errands). Our commuter car hasn't made it more than 100 miles from home in its 5 year lifetime.
One charges in 5 minutes, the other in a night or so.
> So EV's are not that far behind conventional cars, so the higher energy density of gasoline makes less and less of a difference...
I've been told that filling a petrol tank means transferring energy at a rate of about 20MW. This is where it makes a huge difference.
> especially for commuters since they can refuel at home
This may be true for US suburbia. In Europe a lot more people live in flats and park somewhere in the street. Unless we install power sockets in every streetlight, charging remains an unsolved problem for considerable swaths of the population (driving to a charging station is prohibitive -- I don't want to spend an hour+ just passing time).
EV owners often report that charging is more convenient, because you wake up with a full charge every morning. Plugging in to a charging point takes just a few seconds. A rapid charge will get you to 80% capacity in 30 minutes with most cars, but overnight charging allows you to take advantage of cheaper off-peak electricity.
>Unless we install power sockets in every streetlight
Lamp posts with built-in EV charge points are commercially available. A stand-alone charging point takes up no more space than a parking meter. If there's space to park a car, there's space to fit a charge point. Charging is a solved problem, it just requires investment.
https://www.zap-map.com/lamp-post-ev-charge-points-launched-...
Well, this plug-in hybrid owner disagrees. I find it very tedious to have to fiddle with the cable twice on every drive.
>> Unless we install power sockets in every streetlight
> Lamp posts with built-in EV charge points are commercially available. A stand-alone charging point takes up no more space than a parking meter. If there's space to park a car, there's space to fit a charge point. Charging is a solved problem, it just requires investment.
True, which is why I mentioned lampposts. But they need to be absolutely ubiquitous. "Some" lampposts don't cut it -- charging needs to be possible literally everywhere, or there will be perpetual fights over the coveted charging parking spots. In my city the curbs are completely full of parked cars at night -- if they all are electric, there'll be a spider web of charging cables. (Also, the charging port on my car is actually on the street side of the car :'-( ).
Depending on your commute. And the weather -- cold weather essentially halves my range.
Also you need to be more careful with your charge. Because if you run out at an inconvenient time, you're stuck charging for at least 30 minutes -- if a reachable charging station is not occupied.
My BIL was recently stuck in Zürich for a few hours, waiting for a charging station to become available for his Tesla so he could drive home.
Don't get me wrong -- I'd love to have an EV. And I really enjoy my hybrid. My next car will definitely also have electric drive.
But the fact is that dinosaur juice is just far, far more convenient and practical. Certainly now, but probably even in a hypothetical future with vastly improved charging infrastructure.
20% is still nothing to scoff at, but probably acceptable.
That seems the likely solution. Here's a map of points in the UK, many are simply a post next to the street: https://www.zap-map.com/live/
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-bolt-ev-drive...
Car and Driver got 238 miles with range to spare:
http://blog.caranddriver.com/how-i-drove-238-miles-in-the-ch...
Leading image from the article article taken in Monterrey neither foggy nor cool looking, instead appears as what would pass for summer in many parts of Europe and Canada.
If you don't believe they saw fog, the video included with the article shows the fog when he's crossing Bixby Bridge, about 30 minutes south of Monterey - skip to the 30 second mark.
Whether the mileage is 240, 200, or 180, that's still more than enough for most people to commute multiple days. Around 70% of US drivers have a one way commute of 15 miles or less.
http://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/mark-phelan/2016/12/17...
Great car btw. After all incentives and dealer rebates you can get one for ~21k. Has 50 miles of electric range and it's backup generator gets 42 mpg. And unlike the i3 rex it can travel at full speed on gas.
A Volt's battery is less than 20 kWh, and it has to last several hours, so it probably consumes around 5 kW.
Now take the phone's 5W a base; Even adding 10W to charge two devices, 10W for the bigger display, and 20W for the speakers, I doubt that electronics and in-car entertainment consumes more than 2-3% (150W) of the overall energy needed by the car.
Air conditioning is much more expensive, and the effect on ICE fuel usage is there but practically impossible to measure.
Taking car rides in my buddy's Volt will only get us from SF to Mountain View, and then it will switch to using gasoline.
How you accelerate/brake/etc, city vs. highway driving, and following distance from other cars ("drafting") can really affect the range...
*edit:
Okay found it myself through realizing that these two are related.
Internal Combustion Engine = ICE
Electric Vehicle = EV
These are not common terms, though. And googling something that looks to google like "icecream" is hard. Please keep that in mind when using abbreviations.
No, sorry.
People have been predicted 'peak oil' and 'peak demand' since the 1970's.
Even a large number of Tesla's wont change that.
You do realize that there are a few billion 'carless' people in the world who are soon going to become 'cared'?
And they live in places that won't care about CO2, either from a policy or populist perspective?
And that there are a million other uses for oil other than family transportation?
The most salient issues in Aramco's valuation are:
1) Regime volatility: taxes etc. - not only will they change, they could change a lot.
2) Production and price volatility: a lot of geopolitical things go into how much they product, and there are massive shifts in prices over time. Booms and busts - not like most products (think Windows OS, or cars - they don't change that much in price)
3) Horizon: we're having to predict so far out into the future, there's considerable volatility just in that.
4) Cost of Capital leverage volatility: in a world of low interest rates, small changes in cost of capital tend to be amplified. Going from 5% to 10% is similar to 1% to 2%. Since we're in an era of very low interest rates, everything gets magnified and ballooned up.
I actually don't believe that alternative forms of energy production or transportation will make a dent in any of it.
There's so many ways to use Oil, that any drop in price introduces those mechanisms and it ends up becoming valuable again.
Then the world realized that oil demand will peak before oil production does. It's still hard to predict exactly when this will happen, but it's very different from peak production. Peak oil relied on us not finding new reserves and technology not improving. Peak oil demand on the other hand is based on technology continuing to improve so that the cost of generating and storing electricity will shift a lot of demand away from oil. I think this second prediction is a lot more likely than the first, and it's the reason I never worried about peak oil in the first place. People are really good at coming up with new technologies and lowering the cost of alternative energy sources. So I never bought into the doom and gloom stories of what would happen when we run out of oil.
Plastic, commercial oil use, energy production, cosmetics, etc.
Oil has many uses beyond powering cars.
http://www.airbusgroup.com/int/en/corporate-social-responsib...
Early days yet, of course, but the groundwork is underway.
(Meaning less than 8% of all American petroleum consumption, given the other poster's 70% figure.)
Same for Europe.
EU + US are about 1 Billion of 7.5 Billion people on the planet, many of whom don't have cars, but are about to be able to afford them ...
I thought they were already pretty Sheikhy.
If we take the US, which consumes 21% of all petroleum, to understand oil usage pattern, we can see that 47% of US consumption is from petrol (gasoline). Second is Distillate fuel (diesel and heating oil), which accounts for 21%; this is used for industrial machines and heavy motor vehicles, trains, boats etc (diesel) and for industrial heating (heating oil) [1].
These two accounts for the vast majority of consumption (47 +21 = 68%).
The percentage used by transport sector has been increasing [2] over the years:
2013 63.8
2004 57.7
1973 45.4
Source: [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=oil_use [2] https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/oecdoi...
About 6% each aviation and shipping.
About 8% plastics and manufacturing, plus more to non-energy uses.
Some generation, residential, and commercial use (much of it heating).
About half to all road transport (1865 Mtoe of 3744 Mtoe). I belive that's about 2:1 private autos vs. lorries.
Oil as chemical feedstocks is fairly substitutable -- an alternative hydrocarbon source, or carbon from, say, limestone, might substitute. Oil as long-distance transport fuel, most especially in aviation, not so much. Shipping once moved by wind, and might again. Overland electrically-sourced rail and possibly trucks might work.
I've got my doubts on the scalability of battery-operated vehicles, though progress to date has been fairly impressive.
Rocketry is another hard-to-substitute option. RP-1 is highly-refined kerosene, and by volume, your best bet. (Hydrogen packs a bigger punch by weight, but requires far larger tanks and cryogenics.) Solid rocket motors tend toward hydrocarbon sources. SpaceX relies on RP-1.
http://www.iea.org/sankey/#?c=World&s=Final consumption
Actually, much worse: 46 MJ/kg for kero, 19.6 MJ/kg for methanol.
Presumably liquefied. 53.6 MJ/kg at your link.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/3161/why-is-spacex...
2004 technical paper out of Germany:
Too much blood in my caffeine system.
Worse by volume, even liquified: 22.2 KJ/l vs. 37.4 KJ/l kero. Though the mass savings should trade that off some as well.
Limestone offers that.
I'm not particularly versed in what the chemistry would look like, but if the interest is in, say, providing carbon to coking processes (allowing a non-energy carbon source to be combined with, say, direct solar thermal or electrically-provided heat), which accounts for about 15% of all present coal usage, then you're onto something.
I'm aware that limestone was considered for Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis based on nuclear-generated electricity, at Brookhaven National Labs in the 1960s (Meyer Steinberg, I believe, I've written on this and documented much of the literature at https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius).
For plastics, etc., the situation's largely similar.
I suspect limestone, based on fossilised shellfish, is more abundant than coal, based on fossilised plant matter, given that conditions for limestone formation are probably easier to come by. For non-energy use, this might be a viable long-term option.
And, yes, burning limestone-originated carbon, in the synfuel instance, would be similarly problematic as burning coal is in terms of increasing atmospheric and oceanic CO2 (and carbonate/bicarbonate) levels. I'm mentioning the research interest, not endorsing it. More recent research along those lines looks at carbon recovery from seawater, or possibly atmospheric carbon, though the latter is vastly more energy intensive.
Note: cargo ships don't use gasoline.
Of course such material doesn't exist etc
It occurred to me driving home today that if Elon screws up and suddenly all of the Supercharger stations go away at once, its going to really put a pinch on owning an electric car. And yet, if he can get to the point where others are building super charger stations because they can make some money at it, then the market flips to electric cars by default.
http://www.globalpetrolprices.com/articles/39/
That's a worldwide figure. US oil consumption is even more concentrated on transportation.