I hope that but is very doubtful. I've read an article yesterday about a 40% price rising from Saudi Arabia in the next months. Time will tell.
Edit:
Agence France-Presse on Twitter:
First off the energy to refine aluminum is not derived from fossil fuels at all. Most aluminum plants are located as near as possible to large hydro-electric dams to get electricity as cheap as possible. They separate the ore with electricity. So much that leukemia is a professional malady of people who smelt aluminum. Aluminum recycling does use natural gas to run the smelters, so they are a bit tied to the price of fossil fuels, though not oil.
Secondly this is way off topic, but is something I heard several years ago that I thought might be out there, but filed away as a possibility. It's the notion that the US, Saudi Arabia, and some other allies conspire to manipulate the price of oil as to hurt potential enemies as much as possible. They guy proposing this was a reporter who began to piece together a pattern after he interviewed the last Soviet foreign minister who said a major contributing factor to the fall of the Soviet Union was the low price of oil in the 1980s. He may or may not have been exaggerating, but the USSR was highly dependent on foreign sales of oil in the 1980s and the low price hurt them very badly.
The guy went on to say the price went up and stayed up even though US production had ramped up to huge numbers was to hurt the Chinese who have to import almost all their oil. It was true at the time that oil was not behaving by standard supply and demand rules, supply was way up, demand was down a bit, but prices were still quite high.
He made a prediction that it was only a matter of time until some oil producer became the primary target of the oil price war, and then we would see extremely low prices again. I noted that just after Putin took the Crimea and the world started making disapproving noises, the price of oil dropped and Russia is in a lot of financial trouble today. Additionally, the low oil prices really hurt Iran too.
I did a bit of research a month or two back and came across this opinion page article from the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/opinion/thomas-friedman-a-pump-war.html?_r=2
It was written a few months before the price of oil really tanked, but Thomas Friedman separately came to the same conclusion I had. It's quite possible oil is being used as a weapon to bring down Putin in Russia and the regime in Iran and it will likely stay low until they collapse, or some other world event happens.
What's interesting is that alternative energy things have lost some attention, for example sales of PHEVs and BEVs other than Tesla have declined in 2015, though some of it might be due to new models coming out, interest in alternatives has not gone as soft as it did in the 1980s when oil prices went down after the shock of the 70s. We have a new generation interested in moving away from fossil fuels, regardless of the price. Though there are plenty of politicians who believe in "drill baby drill" and would like to punish people for using alternatives. If they come to power, a lot of the incentives for alternatives will likely go away.
Back to the original point, the price of oil and the price of aluminum refining (the ore at least) are independent of one another.
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I'd rather oil prices go up so that BEVs look better from a fuel cost perspective. But my guess is that oil prices will stay low for at least the next year because the relatively slow world economy won't increase demand much relative to the current oversupply of oil. Barring some sort of unexpected event that causes a significant reduction in supply, that is.
Here in the USA, with low gas taxes, the cost of fuel for a decent mileage ICE car is at or below parity with electricity for a BEV in places with relatively high electric rates. Huge gas guzzling trucks and SUVs are selling as fast as auto companies can make them because buyers seem to think that gas prices will stay low for a long time (and they may be right). I view this as a negative development.
[The average price in my state is $1.86/gallon = $0.49/liter = €0.45/liter]
Washington state has close to the highest gas tax in the US and the lowest electricity rates. The gas tax alone on a gallon of gas is around $0.62 and the cost of electricity averages $0.08 a KWH. I live where it's almost exactly the state average. Washington also has seen one of the highest per capita adoptions of BEVs in the US. Most of that is in the Seattle area which is quite liberal and there are other incentives such as HOV lane access with only one occupant, but the combination of high gas taxes and low electricity rates is probably a contributing factor too.
Currently the best gas price in my area is $2.23 a gallon at Safeway. The local Chevron, Arco, and 76 are $2.39. It doesn't stop people from driving SUVs around here though. Every other car in this county is an SUV.
