We'll still need oil, not for energy, but as a raw material for production of plastics and many other products.

> We'll still need oil

Sure, but not nearly in as large of quantities.

If the value of saudi arabian oil plummets to 1/4th its value, then they are still screwed, even though "oil is still used as raw materials" and it has non-zero value.

Owning something that is almost worthless isn't really much better than owning something that is literally worthless.

Perhaps, but that won’t save KSA.

First, most plastics are now made from natural gas, something KSA doesn’t produce a huge amount of. They’ve got decent reserves, but their production lags. Qatar produced 70% more LNG last year than KSA. LNG is also kind of a pain to transit by sea, which advantages countries that can produce natural gas closer to the factories (e.g. The United States and Russia, among others).

And second, plastic production consumes a relatively small part of the world petroleum production. Here in the US it’s estimated that about 2.7% of our yearly petroleum consumption. World wide only 4% of world petroleum went into plastics (2012 figure).

So even if plastics continue to be made of oil, plastic consumption remains constant, and there is no major shift in who produces the feedstocks for plastic (all wildly optimistic assumptions), then KSA can expect to keep about 2.7-4% of their current oil export budgets. That is catastrophic for a country like KSA, who needs all the oil money they can get.

And plastic does not turn into CO2.

Plastic has its own issues, as does the production of plastic.

I hope so, but then I look around at all the less developed countries out there and all I see is a massive demand for oil. :/

As per the article, renewables will be significantly cheaper than oil.

Why would a poor country not purchase the cheaper option?

You tell me why poor countries wouldn’t invest in solar, wind, hydro, or geothermal. (Hint: you have to build the infrastructure first, and not all of these are even practical everywhere.) Hydrogen isn’t all that practical as a fuel, and biomass just puts CO2 back into the atmosphere.

Can you think of a renewable source of energy that’s both attractive to poor and developing countries, and also practical?

Oil is easy. You put it in a tank, then pump it through an atomizer, and set it on fire. You can transport it easily, it works anywhere, and you can run a car on it. I know, electric cars are a thing, but not in the places I’m talking about here.

Electrical transmission across long distances, and, especially between different countries with different power grids is a nightmare.

What am I missing here?

You’re massively underestimating the infrastructure needed to take oil and put it in the consumers’ hands.

Biomass puts CO2 back in the atmosphere, but at least it’s not increasing the total CO2 in the biosphere.

Most of that infrastructure is in the extraction and transport to the destination country. Once the oil is there, all you really need is a storage system, and a way for consumers to buy it.

There's no need to pump it around, at all. You can transport it by truck. Growing up, my family had a fuel oil heater. We'd have the tank filled periodically, and that was all there was. Likewise, gas pumps are just storage tanks hooked up to pumps. There's practically nothing to it; it's all basically 19th century technology that's easy to build, and doesn't require any sophisticated engineering.

That only works for relatively small amounts of fossil fuels for a relatively short distance. Once you start to consume a lot of oil, you really need to start piping it around and only depending on trucks for last mile work. America[0] and Europe[1] are covered in pipelines to move both oil and natural gas. Trucks are only used to cover the distance between where the pipe stops and the gas station is.

0 - https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/n...

1 - https://theodora.com/pipelines/europe_oil_and_gas_pipelines_...

From everything I have read, it is already the case that building a new PV plant is cheaper in most of the world than building a new coal plant, and soon it will be cheaper than building a new oil power plant.

Similar to how much of the developed world skipped landline phones, and went straight to cellphones, because they didn't have to build as much connection infrastructure.

You are missong that it's the large fossil fuel plants that need long distance transmission.

Wind and solar (the ones getting cheaper) need storage, not transmission.

Fair enough, but then you're just substituting gigantic batteries, such as the Tesla Megapack, for the vast transmission networks necessary to make oil, coal, and nuclear practical. These are also not trivial problems to solve for a poor country, without assistance from more developed nations.

So, the question is: is there the political will in the developed world to help the developing world bootstrap renewable energy? History suggests not, unfortunately, but I would love to be wrong on this.

Edit: I forgot to mention, as well: lithium batteries eventually lose capacity and need to be replaced. So, storage is essentially an ongoing maintenance cost in this scenario. Google tells me that the Megapack costs ~$300/kW, all in, so, add that to the cost of your renewable energy. [0] Once you do that, if you're thinking short term, fossil fuels start looking really, really good.

Not to mention that lithium is a limited resource, and the mining of lithium is absolutely terrible for the local environment.

Google also tells me that the Tesla Megapack comes with a 15 year "energy retention" warranty. [1] So, you need to make this investment every 15 years. And, unless the prices of batteries go way down per kWh, that can add up real quick.

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[0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2020/10/05/tesla-megapack-powerpac...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Megapack

Here is a commercial installation of solar + storage at $0.04/kWh[1]. And it’s not unique, that article links to the cheapest solar + storage in the US at $0.025/kWh.

Additionally, these are today’s prices, as per this OP article the price for renewables is dropping exponentially every year. And if Elon Musk is to be believed (which I do) the price for storage is also dropping exponentially.

Given these trends it seems a no brainer that the developing world will skip fossil fuel entirely. Barring air travel, the entire worlds air and space travel will likely continue to use fossil fuels for the next decade or two.

[1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commissio...

> These are also not trivial problems to solve for a poor country, without assistance from more developed nations.

Hum? You buy some batteries and install them.

You don't need geographic stability, you don't need stable property rights, you don't need widespread law enforcement. One can even solve it one house at a time, at a (not much) larger price.

What kinds of problems do you expect developed countries to go help poor ones with?

Lithium is vastly abundant though. Lots of lithium in the land itself, and even more in the sea.

But not so much whale oil.