while driving home from work this morning musing on the absurdity of existence.. ....I thought, wouldn't it be nice never to have to pull into one of these gas stations again. But powerful vested interests are unlikely to let it happen without a fight.......
This won't be a problem Eddie, for a couple of reasons. Firstly the timescale to get enough infrastructure to supply electric cars to replace all IC engined ones, secondly the way the oil market works.
It's going to take at least 50 years to get that infrastructure, allowing plenty of time for the oil companies to gradually adjust, and the oil market works by restricting supplies when income drops, forcing the price up. That supply restriction will be aided over that 50 years by the diminishing reserves anyway.
What this means is a gradual transition from bulk supplying at low prices for vehicle use to very much smaller volume supplies to the chemical and plastics industries at very high prices, no longer up to around $100 dollars a barrel but to probably over $1000. This will maintain healthy revenues from consumers for somewhat smaller oil companies.
We have an example of this already. Many years ago ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) was a world giant in the chemical industry, but they found themselves increasingly under pressure from third world countries bulk producing cheap chemicals like soda and those for fertilisers. Instead of stupidly fighting this, they took a far more intelligent decision, they sold off their bulk production sites and bought back in large volumes of shares, massively downsizing the company. But that didn't mean poor income, for what they then did was specialise in the difficult to produce high tech chemicals which the third world couldn't produce, and which sold at very high prices. Thus they had a smaller number of still very satisfied shareholders and an easier company to run.
I'm sure that's the model the oil companies will follow, effectively forced into it by the way the market is run by OPEC and others.
Large dominant companies can have their businesses crushed, and there's no better example of this than Eastman Kodak. For over half a century they absolutely dominated the worldwide photographic trade, acting in very dictatorial ways with retailers who couldn't survive without Kodak products. There was nothing any politician, businessman or financier could do about their dominance. But then the digital camera was invented and Kodak saw their massive and very lucrative worldwide consumable business collapse well within a decade, leaving them a small fish in a rapidly drying out pond.
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and the Smart only available @ £450 a month on lease (presumably because the price is horrific) Our only hope is the Chinese for a practical spec'ed car 
