I’ll note that several oil majors have made big bets in the past few weeks to the effect that oil and gas consumption will continue to rise for decades to come. If we succeed in maintaining a civilization-supporting planet, people who have not divested from fossil fuels industry will lose a lot of money.
If that all came to pass, oil and gas demand would most likely plateau [around 2030] at slightly above today’s levels for the next three decades, […]
Yikes. If we want a livable planet, not only is 2030 really late, but 30 extra years at the current level of consumption until we exit the plateau is a really long time.
people who have not divested from fossil fuels industry will lose a lot of money.
I’ve read half a dozen books on investing and as much content online. Fossil fuels isn’t that great of a long term investment. Forget recent numbers. There is a lot of regulatory risk, a lot of falling out of favor with the general public, and alternatives to the product. Even worse, the more of it that is removed, the higher the capital and R&D costs there are to continue to extract it. Even worse, with the exception of coal mining, there isn’t an obvious transition to a new business model. Even cars (electrics) and airlines (trains can’t cross water, ships slow, sustainable jet fuel in the works) have a better long term outlook.
There are a good number of possible transitions of fossil fuel assets, but they need to be done right. Refining is just chemistry and a lot of the products can also be refined from plant based oils and biogas. So manufacturing plastics, lubricants, biofuels and so forth. The intressting term is biorefinery. Also refineries are good places for hydrogen based chemical process. They have a wonderfull grid connection already and quite a lot of great equipment for that kind of work. Then drilling is actually a usefull skill for geothermal energy, which is a wonderfull renewable energy form especially for heating. A lot of offshore wind technology comes from offshore oil rigs as well, so that is a usefull skill. Petrol stations are mostly stores anyway and can easily be converted to be charging stations with a store. A good bit of gas infrastructure can be used for hydrogen, if it becomes availbale in a green form at scale.
So they absolutly could turn around, but there is more money in fossil fuels right now, so they do that instead.
Thanks for all the info! Sounds like they need the right incentive. If only governments had ways to nudge businesses to do or not do things…
Hmm, looking briefly at IEA exec-sum plots for ‘stated policies’, only coal really peaks and that’s about now (and in reality, imho, this depends mainly on the chinese construction bubble bursting, rather than intentional policy ). Oil and gas barely peak, just shift towards developing countries. Anyway trying to predict these things doesn’t make sense, the question should be where do we want to go, not where are we going. So, time to update the IEA data in my own model…
Several oil majors bought US oil assets. Looking at the Biden administrations actions recently, it looks to me as the US wanting to have its close alliance be able to sustain itself on fossil fuels. Right now Russia is in a war and Ukraine is targeting their energy infrastructure. The US is basicly the only country, which can break up wars in the Middle East and the US does not want to do it, due to focusing on China. That is besides most of the oil from the region going to China anyway. Europe is decreasing oil and gas consumption already for obvious reasons.
It almost feels like the US thinks there will be a war in the Middle East disrupting oil supplies. Given the regions history and the current cold war between Iran and the Saudis, that is certainly a reasonable bet. If that were to happen, this would likely be an underestimating the oil savings.
