As a society we're going to have to have a come to Jesus moment about all of these estrogenic chemicals that make up the plastics we consume.
A single stainless steel one has to be better, unless I'm just off on the math.
We make so many things that, even if they're not disposable they are "disposable" when they do not have to be.
Finding a good without plastic in it is actually one of my criteria for kitchenware. Glass, metal, wood... nothing else should touch food if I can help it (some exceptions when truly warranted, silicone can be useful).
We can make any oil from the basic atoms (mostly carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen - but some molecules may want something else). However this process costs a lot more energy (read $) vs pumping oil from the ground and so it is rarely done. This is how synthetic oils are made so if you know the cost of car oil you can get a good picture of the difference in costs.
Car industry obviously helped to build the infrastructure but I think now that it’s there, fair chance there’s going to be a lot of oil supply looking for a use. Infrastructure won’t disappear overnight.
1) Halve demand
2) Price plummets
3) Sources shut off
4) Prices climb again, _but at lower volume_
Plastification requires $x/barrel oil _at insane volume_ to work.
But also, plastics can pay much more for oil and gas than fuel can. It's currently not scarce at all, and the economic restrictions are all around using the plastic in some way. So don't expect the plastic industry to suffer like your last paragraph implies.
If they’re going to turn ALL the oil into plastics, at the very least they have to have more processing steps. It’s not hard but it will require bigger refineries, in other words, more expensive plastics.
Also, they will be competing with bio-plastics and other alternatives, that will probably get more favourable regulations in many countries.
Plastics won’t go away. Even if we don’t pump for oil it’s not very hard to make the same plastics from biological hydrocarbons.
Which is to say oil wells don't shutdown when the profit goes negative because that never happens. Oil wells do shutdown (or more likely produce less because the pump is slowed) if the owner decides they want to control supply to bring the price up - but you have to have a lot of wells to even think about that. During the pandemic oil wells shutdown, but that was because there was no place to put store the oil - if you could store it there was plenty of value in pumping it (though it was an investment).
Refineries don't shutdown when the profit goes negative. Again, because the sunk cost in machinery is a large part of the cost. If the profit goes down they will often not remodel and eventually shutdown because the equipment it wore out. Many have shutdown because the right crude wasn't available (and they didn't want to invest in machinery to handle crude they can get) - and then reopened a decade later when someone started pumping the right crude again.
Yes of course if profit goes negative they will both shutdown. However long before profits go negative they will be managing things and so in practice they are shutdown for other reasons first.
By the time it gets that low, I agree, they're done. We're a very long way from that. 85% of cars being sold globally are still ICE, and the population of vehicles on the road lags sales figures by a couple of decades. And even with the increase in EV sales figures, oil demand is not dropping, because the total demand for cars is increasing.
But if demand for oil starts to drop due to EV adoption, OPEC is for sure going to make sure it's cheap as hell to operate an oil burning car, and people in the majority of the world where it's still legal will have a huge incentive to keep buying them.