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>replace all ICE with EV

I'm honestly not convinced this will happen. I think the ratio will get a lot more even but I highly doubt ICE will be replaced. Especially as the atmospheric CO2 concentration increases the economic viability of reducing it back into hydrocarbons increases. Already it's much easier to grow microalgae than it was during the first government experiments in the 60s. As these technologies improve there will be continued downward pressure on the price of petroleum products despite the state of oil drilling and the regulatory pressure against them will be gone because this makes them carbon neutral.

On top of that there are still applications where electric motors just don't make that much sense. Also transporting and storing energy in a fluid is far easier than transporting it in a battery.

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> highly doubt ICE will be replaced

I think it will. For cars and trucks, at least.

There is a massive recurring cost to maintaining the refining and distribution infrastructure for gasoline, to say nothing of developing, building and selling a new vehicle. All of these systems have been built for scale. When demand dips below the level to maintain them, they become obsolete. At that point, one must build new infrastructure at the smaller scale, which, why?

There will still be ICE cars for enthusiasts. But you’ll have to special order the fuel at expense, have replacement parts custom built, all of which makes it infeasible for general use. (I’m expecting within ten years to see gas stations closures stranding isolated communities, with the phenomenon becoming commonplace by 2040.)

> I’m expecting within ten years to see gas stations closures stranding isolated communities, with the phenomenon becoming commonplace by 2040.

Gas stations make most of their money as convenience stores, often selling gas at very narrow margins.

Additionally, the average age of the cars on the road is >10 years. The sales today are not supportive for your thesis unless the price of gas continues higher.

> Gas stations make most of their money as convenience stores, often selling gas at very narrow margins.

Right, which they increasingly won’t be able to do as demand for gas drops. The timeline might be longer than above, and it’ll be stretched out by the fact that so much infrastructure has already been built, but I think it will happen eventually.

The gas stations are not going away. As you say, gas was only part of what they sell. But they will offer charging and the other mobility services required, as coffee and food for the travelers. Look to Norway, where the first gas stations were already converted. At some point, maintenance costs don't justify selling gas any more.

If they don't sell gas, are they still "gas stations"?

I think you're right. ICE will remain, however niche most consumers think it is. Offroad, towing, agriculture, specialist/collector vehicles.

And thats after a 20+ year transition, based on the average vs maximum realistic lifetime of vehicles either on the road, or soon to be.

But for liquid energy transport, I think LNG with H2 injection, and Ammonia will fit the energy density niche. I don't see deep well petrochemicals as a sustaining model of energy shipment, if we move the economy away from them for transport.

All this is very much "after my lifetime" -Much as my parents lived through the transition of horse power to gas engines, and I was on the cusp of steam trains to diesel and electric, some things happen in timescales beyond my lifetime

Niche ICE run into a refueling logistical issues. It’s possible to get gas cheaply in large part because there is a vast amount of infrastructure devoted to extracting, refining, and distributing it. Gas prices in 1913 where the equivalent of $9.29/gallon without any special taxes and it gets worse the further back you go.

EV’s got to skip that growing pain because they could piggyback on electrical infrastructure.

The existing infrastructure of electricity, excluding building charging stations and the possibility of transmission upgrades, is why I believe in EVs instead of Hydrogen.

Wouldn't the cost of building a new Hydrogen setup equivalent to gasoline be insane? You can't retrofit gas stations that easily since the tanks weren't meant to hold a gas. I suppose they could add Hydrogen storage to existing gas stations but you still need central distributions and another set of trucks to bring it out.

Pure H2 is a nightmare. Hydrogen up converted to Ammonia is much easier to handle, comparable to LNG for the cost of management.

For volume shipment between economies, Ammonia is the way to go.

Can cars burn ammonia in the same way as hydrogen? Or are you saying that you convert to ammonia for shipping, then reconvert back to hydrogen just before it gets into the car?

You can run combustion engines on ammonia but I believe the most likely scenario is catalytic conversion back to H2 at high efficiency and use as hydrogen, supplementary to LNG or directly. It doesn't target cars very well at present.

Ammonia produces NOx when burned. You think CO2 is bad that stuff is absolutely nasty. I don't know why that would be an improvement.

You get NOx from burning most things including hydrogen. It’s can form from atmospheric Nitrogen and Oxygen combining at high temperatures such as found in flames. You do produce more or less with various types of fuel but production isn’t the issue it’s failing to get rid of them afterwards that’s the problem.

They are unstable breaking down either in the fire making complete combustion important, but a catalytic converter or at worse just the atmosphere works. They last just long enough to be a problem locally. But that also means people have local incentives to fix the issue unlike CO2 which has a much larger tragedy of the commons issue.

Keep in mind there are already states like Washington, which has mandated no new licenses for non-EV personal vehicles after 2030. This isn't to say that EV will completely replace ICE in that timeline (or even on a multi-decade timeline), especially for commercial and specialized industrial vehicles, but for Jane and John Q. Taxpayer, it certainly feels like the end of ICE vehicles as daily transportation is drawing to a foreseeable conclusion.

I'm willing to bet that 2030 is too soon and they'll kick out the deadline as it approaches and turns out to be impossible to meet. It's one thing to mandate a thing to happen, it's another when it collides with reality.

I suspect you are correct, but at the same time I think about 7 years ago what EV options were available. There could be a lot more options for car buyers 7 years from now. Realistically, the mandate is a starting point - it's just saying that new license plates go to EVs and the clock starts running on ICE. It's still a multi-decade switch over.

> Especially as the atmospheric CO2 concentration increases the economic viability of reducing it back into hydrocarbons increases

Even if the concentration were to hit 5,000ppm - not only beyond dangerous climate levels but directly dangerous to human breathing - that's still only 0.5%, which makes very little difference to the feasibility of extracting it from the air. There is also no natural market for doing so. It'll pretty much have to be mandated and subsidized if that's ever to happen outside of pilot plants and the US navy.

Oil drilling cannot be carbon neutral, you're inherently bringing carbon up into the atmosphere. Oil drilling plus CCS? Maaaybe.

I think it needs some external political shock like the invasion of Ukraine to trigger a big push against energy imports and towards local energy production.

I'm currently running a small scale project that's extracting and reducing CO2 from the air with the current concentration. You can do it now it's just a matter of doing it for less than the current price of gasoline which I haven't managed to do (yet.)

Interesting - what's the technology? Is that vs the wholesale price of gasoline or the retail post-tax price "at the pump"?

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