from Hacker News

EVs Will Decimate Big Oil

by nreece on 7/7/25, 5:03 AM with 23 comments

• by jqpabc123 on 7/7/25, 5:29 AM

  Regressives are playing a losing hand for one simple and obvious reason --- economics.

  EVs and renewable energy are unstoppable and will win simply because they are a less expensive alternative.

  Until americans and american industry embrace this simple fact, we will be operating with an economic handicap and competitive disadvantage against the rest of the world and particularly the Chinese.

  Government support and mandates for fossil fuel is a regressive step away from free trade and toward technical inferiority and decline --- not "greatness".

• by audunw on 7/7/25, 7:26 AM

  I think this may cause a lot of other petroleum products to become more expensive, perhaps even uneconomical.

  Take bitumen. It hos already gotten progressively more expensive over the last few decades. It makes sense: car fuel economy has gotten better. So for every mile we drive we need to refine less fuel, which means we get less bitumen as a byproduct. So the amount of bitumen available per vehicle-mile is progressively less over time.

  This effect will become exponentially worse as EVs cause fuel consumption to fall off a cliff.

  It’s not just gonna be bitumen. The effect may be less pronounced for the lighter fractions, but in general we will have to do more processing, and the oil industry will lose a lot of its “economies of scale”. Fuels are a huge share of the output of oil distillation.

• by mynti on 7/7/25, 7:47 AM

  i wonder what the impact of the e-bike is on car traffic/sales. i guess in the us it is probably not noticable but here in the eu or in germany were i live i can definitely feel that there is more bike traffic and most are e-bikes now. with them coming down in price significantly this could be the second wave that kills ice cars (and hopefully reduces car traffic in general)

• by physicsguy on 7/7/25, 6:21 AM

  I recently had an interview with a 'big oil' company and they told me that their biggest profit making centre in the business was in oil trading, not in oil itself.

• by vrighter on 7/7/25, 10:26 AM

  Yeah decimating them isn't enough (decimating really means eliminating 10% of something)