Study sees electric vehicles quickly cutting oil demand
the International Energy Agency forecasts that demand will peak in 2040.
But not all energy companies areas sanguine. In November, the chief financial officer of Royal Dutch Shell said during a conference call that thecompany expects that global demand for oil will peak long before supply, possibly within five to 15 years. A month earlier, Stat oil CEO Eldar Saetre said at a London energy conference that his company expect soil demand to peak sometime in the decade that begins in 2020.
The Grantham study predicts that demand for oil, coal and natural gas will peak by 2020. As more electric vehicles hit the road, demand for crude oil will plunge by 2 million barrels per day by 2025, the study projected. The decline will accelerate to 16 million barrels a day by 2040 and 25 million by2050, the study predicts. The study also predicts that global demand for coal will be gone by2050.
Meanwhile, the spread of electric vehicles and solar power is only expected to grow. Grant ham study predicts that electric ve- hicles will account for about one-third of all those onthe road. Solar power could supply nearly a fourth of the world’ s power by 2020, an extremely optimistic projection since the IEA reported that solar accounted for only 4percent of global power in 2015.
Exxon Mobil and B P, two of the world’s biggest oil companies, project that fossil fuels will remain dominant well into the future, according tothe study and the companies’ energy outlooks. Exxon Mobil has said it expects all renewables to supply only 11 percent of the world’ s power by 2020; BP’s 2017 outlook expects electric cars to account for only 6 percent of the market by2035.