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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

Gasoline might be on decline (but the gas car fleet will take decades to turn over), but for literally everything else there is no viable alternative. Trucks, ships, airplanes, freight trains, even heating for older buildings.

So no, we need our refineries for a good part of this century. Likely we will keep just the integrated ones (chemical + fuels).

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In several countries their freight trains are electric today. Trucks can be electric too, and a lot of shipping needn't run on fossil fuels although we're further off widespread commercial offerings than we are for trains or trucks which you can just buy today.

The main obstacle is aeroplanes, so that's Jet-A aka Kerosene as fuel, but even then if the numbers get nasty the airlines will kill a lot of services rather than try to pass on unaffordable prices and eat the fuel cost when there aren't enough buyers.

Given the rapid expansion of solar, and that it keeps accellerating, we're less than 10 years away from seeing a massive decline in demand for gasoline.

I don't know the chemistry, and whether that'll make more hydrocarbons available for creating Jet-A, but I do expect that there will be massive overproduction of gasoline - and if price is left to market demand, it'll drop.

It won't get cheaper than solar though.

Oil is processed using fractional distillation, we're not making the kerosene, in some sense a fraction of the oil "was" kerosene and we just split that out from the rest.

It's not important that the kerosene was once a dead organism, we can technically just make it with energy, carbon and water, it's basically a narrow range of hydrocarbons so you synthesize a suitable mixture of CxHx chains and that'll work for e.g. the turbines in a passenger aeroplane. Today that's not economically sensible because you can just buy oil, but when the oil runs out, or we aren't processing nearly enough for other reasons already it could in principle make sense to literally do solar power + CO2 + water => kerosene.

As long as thermodynamics allow, everything is possible.

The question always is who is gonna pay for it?

Societies have other priorities much higher on their list compared to energy cleanness.

"Natural" Oil is literally finite, we're currently burning everything which died over millions of years, when we say it isn't "renewable" that's not some vague idea about the planet not overheating (though to be sure if we heat the planet up and make it uninhabitable that would suck for us) but that literally it's running out.

So "who is gonna pay for it" is everybody, eventually.

We can literally build complex hydrocarbons from thin air. The problem is again cost (energy).

Whether we need them will be a function if they are financially sustainable. No profit, and they will close (as is the case with the Valero Benicia refinery in Northern California, shuttering April 2026). That is the linchpin to push fossil fuels to failure faster, find economically vulnerable and/or unsustainable fossil infrastructure and push it to failure (fossil supply chain death spiral). Because if no one will pay for it, it will not continue to exist, and the demand base to spread fixed costs across will only shrink into the future, pushing prices to unaffordability compared to non fossil alternatives.

(think in systems)

India has effectively electrified almost all of its rail transit. USA or other countries do not need to electrify all lines and the long tail is too long but even the major ones can bring in big benefits. No need to even get China in this equation.

To note, India also has three times domestic PV demand (~50GW/year) manufacturing capacity (~150GW/year) live.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-...

India's Solar Manufacturing Excesses Turn a Boom into a Glut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050286 - February 2025

In December EV trucks outsold diesel in china

https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/23/year-end-surge-electric...

Trains are one of the easiest forms of transport to electrify. Yes, the US is going to drag its heels on doing so, but the rest of the world is already moving on.

Maritime shipping is targeting synfuels or ammonia. Hydrogen is not dense enough for ocean crossing voyages, too much cargo space is lost. They see the writing on the wall.

Approximately 40% of global maritime trade by volume consists of transporting fossil fuels [1] [2], which will be less necessary as renewables and storage scale globally, replacing this consumption and the transportation needed.

[1] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2022/01/12/almost-40-...

[2] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2019_en...

Out of the stupid ideas for energy transition, ammonia takes the top spot as the stupidest.

The whole point of transitioning away from fossils is to protect human life, not to eradicate it in seconds.

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