Something that's gone somewhat under the radar is just how much China, the world's largest oil importer, has slashed their oil consumption by nearly half, without resorting to demand destruction,...
Something that's gone somewhat under the radar is just how much China, the world's largest oil importer, has slashed their oil consumption by nearly half, without resorting to demand destruction, which is kind of a ridiculous concept, and no one is entirely sure how they're doing it.
Maybe Donald Trump is secretly a environmentalist* champion?
some of the oil reduction is undoubtably replacing oil with coal, however it's still electrification, since coal, these days, is only useful as an energy source for power plants, and electrificated infrastructure can be taken over by renewables in a way that oil usage from ICEs can't.
Coal isn’t just useful for electricity generation, it can serve as a feedstock for chemical and fuel production (typically using the Fischer-Tropsch process). Even pre-war, China had a...
Coal isn’t just useful for electricity generation, it can serve as a feedstock for chemical and fuel production (typically using the Fischer-Tropsch process). Even pre-war, China had a coal-to-chemicals sector due to their massive reserves, and since February those firms have been doing well. More expensive than normal petrochemicals? Yes. But it’s fantastic from their energy security standpoint, and a useful bridge into the medium term (after you’ve seen a shift to renewables and nuclear for power, but you still need to produce chemicals and don’t have a zero-carbon process yet).
Something that's gone somewhat under the radar is just how much China, the world's largest oil importer, has slashed their oil consumption by nearly half, without resorting to demand destruction, which is kind of a ridiculous concept, and no one is entirely sure how they're doing it.
Maybe Donald Trump is secretly a environmentalist* champion?
Coal isn’t just useful for electricity generation, it can serve as a feedstock for chemical and fuel production (typically using the Fischer-Tropsch process). Even pre-war, China had a coal-to-chemicals sector due to their massive reserves, and since February those firms have been doing well. More expensive than normal petrochemicals? Yes. But it’s fantastic from their energy security standpoint, and a useful bridge into the medium term (after you’ve seen a shift to renewables and nuclear for power, but you still need to produce chemicals and don’t have a zero-carbon process yet).
Here’s a video that went into this topic recently. In short, China may have amassed very large quantities of oil in their stockpiles.