There will be a loss of business in the oil & gas industry but they won't all go bankwupt for a long time. Right now, EV sales are less than 10% overall worldwide, and EVs are less than 5% of vehicles on the road. Even when EVs get to be 90% of sales 5-15 years from now, gasoline vehicles will still be in the majority and will still need gas stations. Oil refineries produce
- gasoline/petrol
- diesel
- chemicals
- fertilizer
- plastics
- [pollution]
and their gasoline+diesel business is around 60% of product output (I'm too lazy to look this up. Somebody else can give better numbers... calling
@Fact Checking...). Some refineries will close and producers will go out of business but the industry will not collapse (at least not due to existence of EVs). Even if the gasoline + diesel business went to zero (it won't), the O&G business would continue to exist for the remaining products.
Making predictions in this area is difficult.
My recollection is gasoline + diesel is 70%, take that component out and oil companies are making less money, but their overheads haven't dropped.
Same applies to lower levels of sales, in both cases fixed overheads are constant, for lower volumes they need higher margins. For example, is is hard to predict the price of plastic when the gasoline + diesel business goes to zero
Even hybrids used as an EV for daily driving can have a large effect, most driving is daily driving, road trips are relatively rare.
At a certain tipping point, gas stations start closing, used EVs are increasingly available, more car makers start making EVs in volume, the change accelerates.
Where we are now, the most likely accelerators are Tesla and the Chinese, with Battery Investor Day likely to give us some indication of the rate of change. A key point is EVs achieving price parity with ICE.
That is a long term aim for Tesla, short term they need margins to be sufficient to fund expansion and be profitable.
IMO price parity for EVs will not be hard to achieve, Telsa will get there first with perhaps the Chinese not far behind, but Tesla will still have a significantly better product.
When a new Tesla is the same price as a similarly sized ICE car, what are people going to buy?
