We’re just entering into a cycle which will vastly reduce the importance of the oil market. If the price goes up more people switch irretrievably to electric vehicles, if the price goes down investment suffers. And every year the cost of batteries falls by 20%. BNP Paribas recently estimated that over 25 years oil will have to come down to $9 per barrel to compete with the cost of delivering the same amount of energy to vehicles using batteries and electricity. Oil is just going to become one chemical feedstock amongst many, important but no more so than other major commodities.

Until we figure out better alternatives to plastic (or rather are more incentivised to use alternatives), and other by-products, then we will be stuck with our total dependence on petrochemicals.

True, more use of EVs will reduce oil demand somewhat and lower prices. Though that again just means less investment in exploration and research, and temporarily seal low yield oil fields, we will still pump more or less the same enormous amount of oil we do today, if not more due to ever-increasing Earth population.

Petrochemical feedstock only makes up 10-20% of oil demand, and road transportation 50%. And there are multiple different sources for those feedstocks. As I say, oil will remain an important commodity, but its days as the pre-eminent commodity, and a key driver of geopolitics, are already numbered.

As long as there is cheap production in the Middle East and elsewhere, a large decrease in the demand for gas due to electric cars or any other reason will result in lower priced gas and thus more disruption during a price spike.

Supply and demand: lower demand, lower prices.

To use a more specific economic law, the price of a commodity is the cost of the marginal unit. Right now there is so much demand that the world uses all the $10 Saudi oil it can, all the Norwegian oil, all the fracked oil, but not all of the Canadian tar sands oil. That costs about $60 per barrel to extract and transport. Thus the current price.

It's coming, electric cars are going to murder oil profits.

This is why all the clever oil companies have been pivoting investment into renewables.

They seem to be shifting more into energy in general, so grids, storage, charging, and energy production.

Then you will be dependant on whatever country helps first world countries to make batteries or whatever is involved in electric cars.

This shitshow is actually widely supported and created by US and Europe, btw.

> This shitshow is actually widely supported and created by US and Europe, btw.

True but incomplete: In Europe we also finance the Russian shitshow by buying their natural gas.