[netsharc]

I wonder if there's already a paper, or a fictional book, about what happens if someone invents something that makes fossil fuels obsolete within, say, a year. The OPEC countries would suddenly be faced with losing one of their biggest income streams. It would be interesting to speculate...

Of course there are different levels of obsolence, all the petrol cars won't disappear, unless someone invents a magic liquid to replace petrol/diesel with something that works identically but without the pollution.

[pantalaimon]

You still need fossil fuels for the chemical industry, transportation, etc.

Even if electricity becomes cheap (we can already do that with wind and solar) changing everything else is a huge task.

[DennisP]

Well you need hydrocarbons, but cheap scalable fusion would make it a lot easier to source the hydrogen from water, the carbon from ambient CO2, and mush them together.

[WorldMaker]

Transportation is already in the process of shifting. EV cars and trains, obviously, are the present. EV cargo vans are "days away" from the present (especially looking at things like Walmart's massive uptake in EV logistics, but also Amazon and UPS and FedEx's various deals). EV semitrucks are "months away" from the present. Air and sea have the longest lead times and are indeed the furthest behind, but are seeing a lot of pressure to explore cheaper alternatives (and are talking about very interesting electrification ideas and are seeing prototypes and early adopters).

[WorldMaker]

I heard a rumor once, and it may be more fictional speculation than reality, that OPEC shows most of the signs of a "going out of business" sale. That they know the market window is shrinking and are doing their best to make the most of it in an "everything must go" fashion.

(The rumor suggested that's why there was a weird sudden drop in oil and gas prices several years back and then prices nearly "flatlined" for a few years there rather than sticking to a slow inflation-locked climb as it had been. The rumor was that OPEC had started to liquidate its reserves as fast as possible without crashing the market.)

If that was the case, one would hope that OPEC members were also smart enough to plan for after the "going out of business sale" and smartly socking away the money into long term investments. (Further speculation: given the real estate booms in UAE and Qatar, especially, and attempts to spin some of those cities as world tourism destinations there may even be evidence that that is what they have been trying to do.)

> Of course there are different levels of obsolence, all the petrol cars won't disappear, unless someone invents a magic liquid to replace petrol/diesel with something that works identically but without the pollution.

I don't think it will need "magic", I think the feedback loops between supply-side and demand-side economics can handle it all on their own, and possibly (probably, IMO) surprisingly quickly once things start to snowball: gas pumps are already low margin "loss leaders" for convenience stores and supermarkets. As prices get higher the usefulness as "loss leaders" shrinks. As EVs spread, demand drops which could drop prices (temporarily) but that also lowers the usefulness as a "loss leader". Any such price drops are almost guaranteed to be temporary because as demand drops, production should drop. Production is capital heavy and much of production once it shuts down, in theory shuts down for good (especially if demand isn't expected to go back up) because the costs for restarts become increasingly too expensive. As the usefulness for gas as a "loss leader" drops below certain thresholds, consumer gas pumps start to disappear. As gas pumps start to disappear, demand for EVs increases, furthering the drop in demand for gas, exacerbating the disappearance of gas pumps. Eventually, as that cycle snowballs, ICE range anxiety returns with a vengeance and petrol cars become museum pieces too expensive to drive.

Because it is a feedback snowball, it could happen seemingly abruptly, almost like magic.