How much oil-market buffer is left?
depletion.org
depletion.org
I can slide in an 8’ board no problem when I’m too lazy to use the roof rack.
I haven’t upgraded the wheels or tires yet but the stock ones have had no problem going up and down the old logging and forest service roads of NW Oregon and SW Washington.
Most people have a relatively short commute where the modest range of PHEV still allows them to mostly be on electric.
This total cost of ownership calculator can be helpful:
Compared to a bmw i3, it’s price and (anecdotal) reliability are kind of comparable, but the annual cost is >2x more, and the carbon footprint is >4x.
(I had to pick a slightly older i3 to compare, since it’s discontinued).
As you point out, the rav4 is bigger. A lightning truck is bigger than the rav4 hybrid, but with lower purchase cost (2023, base for both). The lightning has higher per year costs though.
It’s pretty clearly game over for ICE/hybrids. Tariffs and bribed politicians can’t change the underlying price and performance advantage.
That's not to say I wouldn't buy an electric car tomorrow if I had the option. My somewhat frequent long drives make gas slightly preferable but these days I'd much prefer electric.
I can't see myself buying a new pure-ICE vehicle again right now. The mechanical advantages of the e-CVT are too nifty, the mileage benefits too great, for me to think of spending $40k on a car just to have more "fun horsepower".
Mazda/Toyota hybrids and the Ford Maverick are on my shortlist if the time comes for me to replace my paid-off car.
Oddly, since the Iranians (and Russians) have been selling their oil products at a discount, they were actually having the effect of holding down the price of petroleum prior to the war. No idea about how much in real terms, but...
The longer this stupid war continues, the worse off everyone will get (well, except oil executives and shareholders, I guess).
They should be sued by governments, they can only make more money if they artificially increase their margin, if they simply passed the cost down to the consumers they shouldn't have record profits
The Russians are losing refineries, not oil fields.
The Russian crude trade to countries like India pushes the price down globally, but limits Russian access to refined fuels and products.
It also limits their ability to fund the war.
Petroleum products are refined and consumed near the point of use because they're not very shelf stable. Petrol is not shipped internationally in any significant quantity, neither is diesel for these reasons.
Take down any production capacity anywhere and you'll have shortages locally but crude oil supplies will divert to other refining capacity and fall in price.
Conversely take down crude oil supply...
Diesel is shelf stable for 6-12 months, which is long enough to ship anywhere in the world.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russia-extends-diese...
Attacks on refineries also have impact on worlds petrol/diesel prices - one of biggest exporters turned into an importer at a time when there is world shortage of refining capacity and cracks spread is at or near all time high.
> It also limits their ability to fund the war.
It does but it also makes petrol and diesel more expensive around the world.
it is also cheaper than risking tankers
No, I did not, so I did not.
I don't think we are going cold turkey, but Trump probably couldn't have given the green movement a better gift.
Donald Trump's slogans were "Make America Great Again" and "Drill baby drill", and so of course he's been destroying America and kickstarting the green revolution through high oil prices.
Normal people no, but top ultra endurance cyclists can do 300 miles a day for two weeks straight. Especially if they are not self-supported and/or the course is not too hilly.
Trump supporters will tell you not to worry as he has a deal that almost done and oil will once again be cheap soon. (I didn't look up what he is saying, but he typically says things like that).
There are a number of pessimists that will tell you that things will never get better. Or maybe they get better for a short time but peak oil is here and things will get worse again soon.
My guess: Iran has every incentive to keep oil prices high in the US until after the election in November as the Democrats are yelling that much of high gas prices are caused by Trump attacking Iran; the higher fuel prices are the more likely it is Trump supporters in Congress lose their reelection bid and in turn hurt Trump. However I can't predict what happens after this - there are a lot of different force in the world (Both Iran and other countries) that are hurting and nobody know who will "blink" or "do something"; much less what what actions will be taken as a result.
If you can charge at home then trading in for an EV makes sense. Electric at home is vastly cheaper than fuel. If you can't charge at home, electric prices are all over, generally cheaper, but often not by enough to be worth the bother.
Better yet, demand your town put in good public transit. Good transit is expensive in the short run, but a good network means almost everybody in the city sells one car (most people live in a family situation with multiple cars so selling leaves one for whatever their objection is).
The much more noticeable factor will be reducing how many people even care about gas prices in the first place.
Sadly, in CA, charging at home (minimum $0.26/kWh) isn't that much cheaper. Sure, maybe half the price of fueling up an efficient gas car, but not like 5x cheaper or anything..
Just get some solar panels. We live on a sailboat and charge the electric outboard of our dinghy (kind of our "car", this is what we use to go to stores etc) with the surplus on sunny days.
Solar panels are ridiculously cheap now.
The Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which is an alternative route used by the Saudis, is being closed by the Houthis. The Houthis are a close partner of Iran.
And the East-West pipeline, which was another alternative route owned by the Saudis, was blown up. They went for the pumping stations, so repairing it will take at least a month, and there is no way to repair it without it possibly being hit again anyway.
The oil infrastructure attacks by Ukraine are mainly targeting refineries, which would normally lower oil prices, since crude oil is an input to these refineries. These attacks are increasing diesel prices, though.
Iran is trying to break the world economy so the US packs up and leaves. Israel wants to keep the US there because the US is fighting one of their strongest enemies. Because Israel "is the US's greatest ally" (as many politicians have proclaimed over the years), they have a lot of sway as to what the US does. Not to mention, they seem to do whatever they can to derail any peace process.
Iran knows this, and therefore wants to make sure the US experiences enough pain to never come back and try to fight them again.
So, until the US is willing to stop, which rests heavily on when Israel is willing to stop, oil prices will remain high. (Or Iran folds, which they aren't going to do, they've been preparing for years and have seen how the US treated Venezuela - they stole all their oil, and left the regime intact)
Also, we've seen nothing yet, as the soft storage (the amount of oil that's normally floating through rhe global network) and the SPR's are all running dry. I would guess $150 oil in about a month.
There is now very strong incentive to develop alternatives that bypass what Iran can effect, which is exactly what’s happening. It will take a while for the infrastructure to come online, but as the months and eventually years go by, Iran will find its biggest lever for control rapidly diminishing even if the war was stopped now. Likewise, the move to EV’s will likely accelerate.
Americans have proven passive enough that I don’t expect political/military change unless the democrats pull their head out of their ass long enough to win the 2026 November elections and start impeaching and prosecuting the trump regime.
I am old enough to have lived through the oil shocks in New Zealand. It got so bad the government rolled out an alternative fuel system network of compressed natural gas. Many fuel stations had installed the tanks and pumps and many cars were converted to it. NZ has gas deposits enough to meet all its own demands.
As soon as the oil shock was over it was all ripped out and we all went back to oil.
Because that worked so well last time.
Time for some new ideas.
The U.S. was a power in decline before the Iran war, and the U.S. population was turning against Israel anyhow, so it made sense to get America to give it one last hurrah before they became useless to Israel.
Why would they want to change the regime in Iran? If the goal is to hold on to power in Israel.
A month or two ago they sent out an email asking common military members for ideas to deal with Iran. We've paid think tanks millions of dollars for plans like that. Guess they weren't worth anything in practice though.
All that money spent on plans and equipment and it sustains--what?--like 3 weeks of bombing Iranian children? (I mean, we did bomb a children's school on the first day, and nobody has been held accountable, so I'm still bitter about that. Let's be better please.)
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/03/politics/us-military-iran-war...
That rhetorical horse left the allegorical barn a long time ago.
We are governed by people who think the very idea of expertise is dumb. A system of pure id and grievance. Like children playing war in the bath tub.
What if they deploy hordes of those cheap Ukrainian anti-drone interceptors, near each station?
Another’s benefit to the US is that many consumers of Arab oil now has to sign years long contracts to buy oil from the US.
But sure, it’s Israel.
Edit: see US’s recent moves in the straight of Malaka and Gibraltar.
If these are the opening salvos of WW3 or even just a protracted regional Mideast war, yes you should get the EV. Experience in WW2 was that it became impossible to get petrol & diesel at any price. Supply lines would often be disrupted, and what petroleum products were available were usually allocated to the military.
If tensions die down after the midterms and eventually a peace accord or even stalemate is reached, you're looking at about 2-3 years of current prices. It'll take time to rebuild production in most Middle Eastern countries, many of which have had large oilfields, pipelines, and tanker loading facilities destroyed. You'll have to run the financials yourself of how much an EV costs, how much life you have left in your existing vehicle, and what local gas and electricity costs are, but I believe most EVs don't pencil out economically if it's just 2-3 years of current gas prices.
A third option is that everybody else (notably China and India) switches to EVs. If this happens gas will go down in price through reduced competition for it, and so you may be able to enjoy cheap gas for the remainder of your vehicle's lifetime. But note that in this scenario, you probably want to switch to an EV yourself, as eventually parts, repairs, and infrastructure for gas cars will become impossible to find.
Note that it is now outside of the control of the POTUS or U.S. military whether this conflict continues. They can prolong it, but they can't stop it. Recent aggression has been driven by Iran and its proxies, who are demonstrating that there is nothing the U.S. can do about it.
This is one of those cases where the only winning move is not to play, and both belligerents have proven stupendously bad at not playing.
It remains to be seen for Iran. I wouldn't be surprised if Iran gets out of this with the sanctions removed (to say the least).
Which often aren't as visible as paying $82.00 to fill up your ICE vehicle, but add up to much more of an impact.
First, the site isn't bullshit. The underlying inventory problem it's tracking is very real. The IEA's September 11 report says global observed oil inventories have fallen *507 million barrels since February*, more than *10 million barrels/day of Gulf production was still shut in* during August, and global refinery throughput was 4.2 million b/d lower than a year earlier. That's pretty freaking ugly.
However, there is a pretty important distinction between the site's data and the scary probability numbers it puts on the scenarios. The site itself says the probabilities are assigned using judgment, and it specifically warns that the model "wasn't developed by an energy analyst." So I'd regard it as a really useful stress dashboard and not interpret "50% corridor lapse" as if the IEA just announced a 50% probability of catastrophe.
What I found more concerning is that some actual energy experts are now describing basically the same physical problem, just without going nearly as far on the probabilities.
Columbia's Center on Global Energy Policy put out a discussion today estimating the world is currently short roughly *5 million barrels/day* of crude and petroleum products relative to demand. Their point was that the reason this didn't immediately turn into an enormous price spike months ago is because we had buffers everywhere - excess oil, oil sitting on tankers, strategic reserve releases, spare refinery capacity in some places, etc. We're now burning through those buffers. At some point price has to do the work.
And I think "price has to do the work" is the key distinction here.
When economists talk about *rationing through price*, they don't mean somebody is handing you a little card allowing you eight gallons of gas this week. They mean gasoline goes to $5, $6, whatever it takes until enough people decide not to take the road trip, companies consolidate deliveries, airlines cut marginal routes, factories use less diesel, weaker economies consume less, etc.
That's much more likely than literal nationwide American gasoline rationing.
The other thing that surprised me is that *diesel and refined products actually look scarier than gasoline*. This isn't just a shortage of crude. Gulf refining capacity is also disrupted, Russian products are constrained, and refinery margins have gone nuts. So you can theoretically have crude available somewhere on Earth and still have a shortage of the exact petroleum product somebody needs in the exact place they need it. The IEA specifically says the global refining system is stretched extremely tight.
That said, the EIA is still nowhere close to forecasting "welcome to Mad Max."
Their September 9 forecast has Brent averaging *$74/barrel in 2027* and U.S. regular gasoline averaging *$3.35/gallon*, with Middle Eastern production gradually recovering and getting back near pre-conflict levels around Q2 2027.
There is a catch there, though. Their forecast was actually completed September 3, so some of the latest deterioration isn't in it. That's probably why I wouldn't just shrug and say the whole thing is temporary either. The newer IEA report is substantially uglier. Still, even the IEA forecasts an enormous *8 million b/d rebound in global production in 2027*.
So if you're literally asking:
> should I trade my car in for an EV because I might not be able to buy gasoline?
I wouldn't.
If you were already going to replace the car anyway, though, I think this absolutely moves the needle towards an EV, especially if you can charge at home.
You're basically buying yourself some insurance against this entire category of bullshit. Strait gets closed? Iran attacks tankers? Saudi pipeline gets blown up? Russia stops exporting diesel? Oil hits $150? You care considerably less.
Wood Mackenzie actually published something on September 11 making essentially that broader argument - that persistent oil-price volatility could accelerate EV adoption because the advantage isn't merely a lower average fuel cost. You're also removing most of your exposure to oil-market shocks.
But if you've already got a perfectly good paid-off gasoline car, dumping it and buying a brand-new $40,000 EV solely because you're scared gasoline will be rationed seems like exactly the kind of panic trade where you somehow manage to lose more money avoiding the crisis than the crisis would have cost you.
Basically, my read is:
*Expensive and unusually volatile gasoline for a while? Very plausible.*
*Diesel/refined-product shortages getting seriously nasty? More plausible than I realized.*
*Localized shortages if things get worse? Definitely possible.*
*America running gasoline ration books for years? I couldn't find any serious institution treating that as the expected outcome.*
The part of this I'd actually keep watching isn't even the price of oil by itself. It's whether Hormuz tanker traffic recovers, whether the Saudi bypass pipeline comes back, whether Gulf production starts returning, and most importantly whether inventories finally stop falling.
If those things start improving, this probably looks like a brutal but temporary energy shock.
If another few months go by and we're still draining hundreds of millions of barrels out of inventories while the physical routes remain screwed up, then I think the depletion.org people start looking considerably less alarmist.
My mom won't get rid of her 2014 Leaf and won't go back to gas after a recent electric VW pickup. It's the only way to go (if you can afford it).
Of course most of it is, but it looks like the author put some care into this. It doesn't seem like a one off slop from Astra or anything.
Actually my favorite part is on the very bottom. The author attributes Qwen running on his local computer.
"Built with help from a local AI (Qwen 3.8-27b) running on an HP Omen 30L (RTX 3090) in my office."
This feels more like an "e-bike for the mind" and less of a chauffeur.
That’s not to say they haven’t done a phenomenal job with demand destruction it’s just their own domestic usage is still very high and they have to import unlike other heavy users.
And they for _sure_ are pulling from reserves since the US attacked Iran. The volume of imports and usage figures can only be explained that way. The impressive thing is the numbers suggest their reserves were massive and probably bigger than anyone thought.
They are for sure electrifying fast. In many ways the envy of the world on this. But they are oil import dependent and likely going to be more so soon if their reserves draw down too far.
China is showing the world they have reached the lofty ideal of being a functional society, and I hate that an authoritarian Communist government was how they did it. I don't want to live under such a government, but I can't deny it's looking like a stronger form of government right now.
For the rest of us, if we want democracy to be better than authoritarian Communism, then we actually have to do the "be better" part.
Only problem is that the current reality of authoritarian capitalism in the US isn't helping democracy at all.
They will, just not as much as everyone was predicting a two decades ago. The fact that China isn't really feeling any pressure at all here should be a wake up call (they depend on oil, just less and less as time goes on). It isn't just that though, they basically took Nepal off oil completely, a bit of a special case since they had to import via India, which was always really expensive (and Nepal has lots of hydro). And the rest of the third world which simply can't afford much oil anyways now has a convenient other option.
Likewise, I don't see why ICE lovers are up in arms about people buying EVs. Shouldn't that just mean more oil (and less pricing pressure) for them?
Many uses for oil are based on existing infrastructure, build different infrastructure and demand falls.
E.g., recessions, etc. Morbid would be if demand destruction came from deaths of many humans, but GP clearly did not mean that.
But the storage is too limited. The surplus during the summer doesn't translate to the winter months so other types of electricity generation is still required.
And what's great about EVs is that they are also storage. In winter you can buy electricity from places that do have solar potential - it's not far from Switzerland.
Somehow many societies are able to power a huge amount of transportation via electrified rail and bus systems. That's an existing solution that requires zero new technology.
And of course there are EVs for places that somehow can't figure out how to do electrified mass transit.
This is often called diversification in finance. When you have a lot of money tied into one thing it is good to sell some now for that reason even though everybody knows you won't deliver for months.
I’ve known plenty of farmers & co-ops. Big, medium, small, family. None used derivatives, at least not after trying them. A lot tried but never worked out like the finance people sold it to them.
It’s always finance people selling them, talking about the need.
It’s great there’s a market for it. You don’t need finance people mucking things up when actual delivery is the problem.
Yes US produces mostly light crude and production of refined products requires also inputs of heavy one, but it's not produced in the Middle East anyway, so current situation can't impact that, either.
I am not confident that the Democrats would even implement such a ban, as they get pretty big campaign donations from the oil industry as well.
The US produces oil which goes to foreign refineries for the same reason.
The effect of "banning exports" is non obvious.
Conversely not starting a war with Iran had some really obvious benefits that every previous administration recognized.
Clearly you haven't been paying attention to oil and gas prices
It's a global commodity. The reason there likely won't be a shortage in the U.S. has little to do with our production volumes, and has more to do with the fact that we're rich enough to be able to afford the higher prices when many other countries will have to forgeo using oil.
But if we weren't a rich country and we couldn't afford to pay a higher price for oil than many other nations on earth, we would produce and export oil to people that can pay more.
Ireland during the famine produced enough food to feed every person. But much of it was exported to other places, that could afford to pay a higher dollar amount to survive.
The US is also sovereign and if things would become really bad the government would just ban exports.
Ireland wasn't sovereign and it turns out, as much as other countries act brotherly (not that the UK really did), nobody really cares about you like you care.
Tariffs are mostly just politics and pretty heavily partisan. Banning oil exports would be objectively evil.
> It’s silly to blame the current generation for something their ancestors did.
As silly as it is, it's a widespread practice around the world.
> possessing supreme or ultimate power: in modern democracies the people's will is in theory sovereign.
For example, in the UK Parliament is sovereign, not the people. That's effectively how it is in representative democracies or republics where there is no fast representative recall mechanism.
The U.S. Constitution doesn't say that Congress is sovereign, but the effect is the same. For that matter, the U.S. President has a great deal of power.
To the benefit of those on the political left, an oil shortage shows itself almost exclusively in poor countries (because they actually don't have money to pay), and these tend to not have automotive industries of their own, thus have no reservations about switching to electric cars, which means that any oil consumption decline these days tends to be sticky - when the oil flow resumes, these people won't need it anymore. No one is going to get back to driving an ICE car once they tried electric, even if they initially did it under duress.
That's the best case. Worst case (for Venezuelan oil) is that the Republicans lose the House and Senate in November, then the new Congress starts investigating the Venezuela deal, and court cases start flying, and oil companies back out, and the date for the impact of the deal becomes "never".
Venezuela oil also need a lot of refinement in any case, and this is where the US made a mistake, because they could just have insisted on refining Venezualan oil rather than directly taking a cut, which will be seen worse by the locals. Basically help more venezualan crude oil to get out of the field than their refinment capacity can afford, and loan them tankers to sell the crude to US refineries. US corpos could have profited a lot more (and if the US could tax them, the US government could have taken a cut) than this weird, dumb and aggressive position of taking a cut.
I appreciate the sentiment but order of magnitude is thrown around to the point of meaninglessness. What is the 'order of magnitude' of 3 years in this case? 1-9? How is 3 years roughly the same as 1 or 9 years? Same order of magnitude, off by a factor of 3 to 9, in years is not close enough I'm afraid.
There's also the fact that Venezuelan crude oil is basically among the worst grades of crude oil, the sort of stuff that the refineries don't want to use unless they have no other options. Which also means that as global oil demand hits its maximum (likely within decades), this is also going to be some of the first oil production to be permanently mothballed. With massive necessary investment to get anything running, subpar product, and a very uncertain political situation for the necessary long-term investment, most oil companies are reluctant to invest.
As a result, the only major oil company to have really been contemplating investing in Venezuela is Chevron (which itself appears to be mostly hedging its bets); Trump more recently announced another deal with a supposed major investment in an unnamed operator to extract oil from Venezuela, but without any companies being named, I'm skeptical of how real it is as opposed to merely being a vehicle for graft.
As AnimalMuppet says, if anything does get built, it's on the order of years before anything starts flowing.
https://www.newsweek.com/costco-starts-rationing-motor-oil-w...
Costco is the only one rationing right now.
Also, the U.S. is currently prosecuting a trade war against Canada that has, thanks to Trump, become a question of sovereignty for Canadians. The U.S.'s largest source of foreign oil is, potentially, one outburst from Trump away from Canada placing export duties on oil. It has been discussed in Canada, and it's viewed as an extreme option, but an option nonetheless. Trump would have to say or do something truly outrageous for that to happen, but his ability to turn allies into enemies should not be underestimated.
Bottom line, fuel could become a lot more expensive, quickly. Even if there's still gasoline to be had, it still qualifies as a shortage if it becomes unaffordable. Fuel prices affect food production, delivery of goods to markets, and pretty much every aspect of the economy.
Oil tankers travel at about the speed of a bicyle. If a price shock does happen it will last for months. If the war with Iran is not resolved promptly, this is precisely what will happen.