Sheikh Zaki Yamani, a Saudi Arabian who served as his country's oil minister five decades ago, quoted by the Economist in 2003 ("The End of the Oil Age").
[0] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2003/10/23/the-end-of-the-...
> Hydrogen fuel cells and other ways of storing and distributing energy are no longer a distant dream but a foreseeable reality.
And that was said at least 20 years earlier still.
I really hope we'll reach the end of the Oil Age, but as one gets older it becomes hard not to be sceptical of these claims. Seeing is believing.. more evidence.
In this thread so far only one comment mentioned geo-politics surrounding oil - a building block of global power - that needs to be dealt with. Hampering the transition to clean energy.
Tesla keeps outperforming other car makers, even in a difficult environment: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/tech/tesla-sales/index.html.
VW's electrics are about to hit: https://electrek.co/2020/07/13/volkswagen-vw-id-3-electric-c....
Electric semis are moving towards production, by Tesla, Daimler, and others.
Even electric bikes and scooters are still seeing massive sales growth. If you've not tried you, you should.
The change is happening. Long-haul plane flights will remain on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future but the rest of the world is changing, fast.
Also those energy packs, once no longer usable in a car, can still be used for years for domestic solar energy storage.
The world will be majority electric in probably 30 years... If we're lucky.
Not related to oil directly, but three California utilities did the math and showed peaker plants are no longer cost competitive against solar backed by batteries [1] [2]. The transition to electrify everything is in full swing.
Disclosure: TSLA investor/owner.
[1] https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/new-california-stu...
[2] https://library.sce.com/content/dam/sce-doclib/public/regula...
If I had two cars, electric is completely doable, but for one car, it needs to work everywhere, which isn't possible yet.
Our household is exclusively Teslas (Model S, X, Y) and we drive ~30k miles a year collectively across the country. It can be done without sacrifice.
[1] https://electrek.co/2019/09/06/tesla-donate-electric-car-cha...
Edit - take your extreme big bend example. I was able to map it. Try it out at https://abetterrouteplanner.com/. Had me stop at Fort Stockton, TX. You would need to top off in the park, perhaps at an RV site.
That said - how many trips to big bend per year do you do? For most people, you can rent an ICE car once a year for ~$150, and still satisfy 99% of your driving with other options
I appreciate your courage. 30 years is a short time when many cars have a far higher lifespan plus for you to win this bet it would mean that US car sales are 100% electric in probably something like 10 years.
#1 Price of EVs is going down fast and will continue to decline as the price and weight of batteries drops.
#2 As vehicles on the road shifts to EVs, gas stations will become less and less profitable and the number of gas stations will decline, slowly at first, then very quickly in areas where land values are high and there are more profitable uses for land.
#3 As the number of gas stations decline, the single biggest advantage of ICE vehicles melts away and the fact that EVs are charged at home will become increasingly appealing. Gas stations will be around for a long time, but they will be increasingly scarce.
Obviously, we're nowhere close to the above happening now, but if 50% of cars sold are EV, the economics around ICE vehicles will change massively. There are a lot of other bits here too, ICE vehicles require lots of maintenance and dealerships will start to struggle as well with lower sales.
This is going to happen slowly at first, then it is going to happen very quickly once the economics and benefits of owning gas powered cars starts to break down.
From what I can tell the idea of battery swapping stations seems to be dead in the water. And I seem to remember that 15 miles minute of charging is where we are (numbers might be old), meaning many more visits to third party charging stations and each visit taking longer than a liquid fuel pump.
I'd love an electric car, but without a private driveway for personal infrastructure, it just doesn't make sense until the third party infrastructure is ubiquitous or there are huge gains in charge speed, or both. I see the odd one in random places: private underground car parks, KFC, odd hotel car park, but these can only cater to the enthusiast who can also charge at home. Hopefully I'll be wrong sooner rather than later.
Gas stations also aren't going anywhere. The average age of a car in the US is 12 years old. That means that, even if today we switched to only selling 100% electric cars off the lots, we're looking at 12 years (!) before 50% (!) of the cars on the road are electric. Finally, the current trend of free-or-almost-free charging stations is going to go away very quickly once electric cars become more mainstream -- I wouldn't be surprised if a "charge" ended up costing about as much as a tank of gas. This kills one of the main arguments for going electric in the first place.
Whether the world is "majority" electric or not won't help the economies of these countries. One way or the other, demand for oil is on decline that is destroying the price of oil. All these countries that depend on fat oil profit margins are going to suffer as their margins decline to zero. In a few places, players are already dropping as margins for oil production have gone negative. (The cost to pump is greater than the price of crude) There are big surpluses now, even while electric cars are still a small percentage of vehicles sold as the mix shifts to electric, demand and prices of oil drop.
With that in mind, Tesla's semi-truck pre-orders (for Wal-mart et al), Amazon's Rivian pre-orders and USPS' announced mandate to partially electrify its fleet are far more impactful for energy markets.
I do agree that oil is on its way out though.
Tesla, with so little marketshare and so many fewer dollars in revenue, seems to have made incredible progress.
Toyota wants their cars to be able to last a million miles in extreme environments (-40 degrees Alaska, +120 degrees F deserts). You can't do that with today's off-the-shelf battery technology.
The difference? No hype, deliverers promises, no crashes on autopilot - at least widely known [2] vs [3]. Old fashion in this age of attention grabbers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=nissan+leaf+crash+&oq=nissan...
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+crash&oq=tesla+crash
Another factor is the general innovators dilemma where they have tremendous sunk costs in their old fuel burning ecosystem.
To be fair generally moving from a mature and high scaled to an untested and new approach is expensive and downright reckless looking levels of risk, only vindicated after a success when the unforseen or unbelieved shoe drops.