You think in 2025 we will be talking about children mining by hand in the Congo in horrible conditions to provide all those lithium batteries for that future? There is a price for everything.
Fun fact. Afghanistan has huge lithium resources.
How big oil will die
11–20 of 164 posts
Re: How big oil will die
#12Good. Bloomberg estimates the transition will be a $10 trillion upside for those upgrading and replacing fossils[1]. It remains to be seen who the winners will be. Incumbents (Excelon, Shell, SA, etc.) have market share, but will have to strand trillions of assets and reserves. Newcomers (Tesla, etc.) have to survive the energy boom-bust cycle that early fossil went through. My money is on the newcomers (my startup i…
can you link to or provide a little more info on the "boom-bust cycle that early fossil went through"?
Re: How big oil will die
#13First of all, over a quarter of oil is used for things other than transport; second, it's gonna take quite a bit longer than this article predicts for oil used in transport to ramp down.
> over a quarter of oil is used for things other than transport But doesn't transport have the biggest need for power density? Once renewable power density is solved for transport, I would expect the same applications will quickly be applied to the other places oil is used
Plastic production requires oil and improving power density of batteries doesn't help that.
Heating houses to a US standard requires astronomical amounts of energy that will be provided by fossil fuels because they are cheap per BTU. Sure we could design better houses and use more efficient heating technologies like heat pumps, but those are being adopted a couple orders of magnitude slower than electric cars are.
Re: How big oil will die
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
> over a quarter of oil is used for things other than transport But doesn't transport have the biggest need for power density? Once renewable power density is solved for transport, I would expect the same applications will quickly be applied to the other places oil is used
it is used as a precursor in chemical synthesis, plastics and a variety of other products. you're not going to replace that with solar.
Sure you will, but maybe later. Super cheap energy makes bio-plastics competitive.
Massive solar farms passively making carbon chains when the sun is up. The reason no one is talking about it is that the transportation transition is lower hanging fruit.
Re: How big oil will die
#15OP does not understand that he is far more enthusiastic about his Prius than the rest of the world.
Too much of this article is based on unsubstantiated, overly optimistic predictions, and the reasoning is regularly fallacious. Two examples:
1. OP lists expensive repairs for combustion vehicles, then suggests that because said parts do not exist in EVs, that EVs are cheaper to maintain. This is nonsense, first of all most of the parts listed almost never require repairs (how often do you spend >$1000 to replace a catalytic converter?) and secondly, it is (deliberately?) misleading to ignore that EVs have specialized parts of their own to repair. The fact that there are fewer parts is not enough data to suggest that an EV is cheaper automatically to maintain, or more reliable. Further, there is a risk that some people will spend more money on EV repair because they may require specialized equipment to maintain.
2. His "current estimates" sources are based on extrapolation of current tesla battery performance, which is an uncertain predictor of future performance given how little time the tested batteries have spent in use.
3. When OP leaps to self driving cars as another reason for the emergence of EVs, he also conveniently misses that there is utility and sentimental value in owning your own car.
tl;dr: Will EVs eventually supersede ICVs? Sure. But putting out an article which says with certainty, and a straight face, that no one will want oil in 8 years is just unnecessarily smug.
Re: How big oil will die
#16Talking to people behind self driving car companies the issue is not the self driving technology or laws it's more infrastructure around extremely low latency internet to make self driving cars work in the general wild. This article assumes mass adoption really quickly but who knows how quickly our general infrastructure will be updated to enable this especially in third world countries that are ramping up in traditional cars consumption but are notorious for bad mass scale infrastructure (Brazil/ India).
Re: How big oil will die
#17Not many people know the relationship between oil and the US dollar. The golden age of the US dollar was the Bretton Woods system, where every currency was backed in dollars and dollars were backed in gold. There was however no obligation for the Federal Reserve to accept audits of any kind to validate there was enough gold. Therefore the US could print money at will (and it did), until countries such as France start…
>the US will need to find another way to sustain its currency
The threat of the US economy collapsing is plenty enough reason to strike new deals to sustain its currency.
Re: How big oil will die
#18Discussion from a month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715405
Re: How big oil will die
#19Not many people know the relationship between oil and the US dollar. The golden age of the US dollar was the Bretton Woods system, where every currency was backed in dollars and dollars were backed in gold. There was however no obligation for the Federal Reserve to accept audits of any kind to validate there was enough gold. Therefore the US could print money at will (and it did), until countries such as France start…
> by having an exclusive deal with oil producers where oil is sold exclusively in US dollars.
I think you're overstating the role of oil here.
Other currencies without that exclusive deal, and backed by less economic and military power, have also preserved their value.
Re: How big oil will die
#20You think in 2025 we will be talking about children mining by hand in the Congo in horrible conditions to provide all those lithium batteries for that future? There is a price for everything.
Fun fact. Afghanistan has huge lithium resources. https://nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html
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