Having worked for the upstream research arm of a major US oil company, I can confidently say this is no longer the case regardless of what the industry may have looked like when Esso was still a business.

Modern oil companies are extremely proud of the additional revenue streams they have invested to consume oil byproducts. The most disgusting of which, in my opinion, was the humble bragging that Hershey's chocolate includes petroleum products in the chocolate bars.

If we stopped consuming oil for gasoline today massive industries would collapse, both due to the loss of byproduct inputs and the transportation required to move products across the country. It wouldn't be the world returning back to a nineteenth century era where trains all ran on coal and lamps were fueled by whale blubber.

I wasn't claiming that there wouldn't be a large economic upset. There obviously would. I was only claiming that oil refining would remain as an industry. Probably a much smaller industry.

But all of that would only be for the good.