Wind has had a hard time competing with cheap heavy fuel oil—the toxic sludge that refineries have no other use for.
What will happen to that fuel if they stop buying it?
That's why even the article is telling that sail cargo ship projects are betting on regulation. If the adopted regulation is a cargo tax, we will use less and less oil. Of course, today we still need it and oil will be used to create new green solution. Even with a very high carbon tax, I assume there will still be use cases for oil because it is a really incredible material and energy source.
"The most versatile substance on the planet and they used it to make a frisbee. Typical of humans." Helen Cho - not very scientific but so truly mind-blowing.
Edit : layout for readability
The other scenario is interesting too btw: given that demand for combustion cars will be going down dramatically over the coming decades as countries regulate against them, the demand for petrol and diesel will also fall. Eventually, some refineries will shut down as there is no longer sufficient demand. That will also reduce the availability of these byproducts of refining and might eventually force shipping onto cleaner fuels as a side effect.
Open cycle gas turbines will increasingly being use to generate electricity because it can quickly come online when solar and wind power is insufficient. They burn diesel in many parts of the world.
The real loser is coal.
I suspect the last cracking reactors will be powered by abundant solar energy.
Phasing out oil as rapidly as possible is considered a victory
Not with that attitude it won't!
Dramatic change can happen faster than you think! The 3 social examples I use are smoking, fur coats, and social acceptance of LGBT people.
Fur coats went from consensus glamorous to shameful in about 10 years. Support for gay rights and marriage flipped like a startup hockey stick graph over about 5 years, and smoking went from everywhere to nowhere in about maybe 15 years.
These all happened almost as if by magic after decades of effort and for people working on the causes, the goals achieved still seemed like a lifetime away before they happened.
I understand we're talking global infrastructure, but I'm not going to discount the idea of a rapid transition happening.
For technology, look at the CRT -> flat screen transition. Now any CRT display is so rare that it will fetch a price immediately. Look at landline -> smartphone. Incandescent -> LED. Look at the disappearance of newspapers. In the sci-fi movies of the 20th century, not even fantastic fantasies of far off futures imagined a world without newspapers and now they are actually notable if you see one; you stop and briefly look as if it's some monarch butterfly fluttering by.
All these technological transitions happened in about a decade, from "only speculative people predicting it" to the previous dominant form being considered vintage
These changes, both social and technological are frequent and fairly common. I'm not foolish enough to put a date on energy transition but I'm not pessimistic enough to claim it won't happen in this decade.
Energy is bigger then everything I listed, no kidding. I'm arguing that train has already started and greenhouse emitting energy will become as rare as a landline, newspaper, fur coat, CRT, incandescent, or after dinner smoker within some number of not so many years.
It's okay if you don't feel like it will. If everyone could predict the future, we'd all be billionaires. I acknowledge I might be wrong and my opinion is fairly unique, but this is how I see things. No disrespect to you over our differences
Your personal enrichment isn't my responsibility and I feel as much obligation to defend this body of work as I have to defend Maxwell's equations or the Pythagorean theorem - that's kinda on you at this point. You're free to be a crank and I'm free to decline to engage. I do however, wish you success in your pursuit.
Your objection is equivalent to saying in 1998, "LCD panels don't currently constitute 75% of the market so it's unfeasible that it will ever occupy that position" or in 2005, "nobody has demonstrated large scale rollout of 3G networks so landlines aren't going away"
This style of argument is the same creationists use when they point to something like blood clotting and say "aha, there isn't yet evolutionary evidence for this so therefore Jesus!" And then evolutionary evidence came forth and they gish galloped onward to the next goalpost.
So, #1, golf clap for that rhetorical gambit and #2, please excuse me for ending this here.
We could see the end of the petrochemical industry in 10 minutes.