China has been going all in on energy independence, moving the country to become the leading “Electrostate”.
Peak oil demand in China, whether it happens this year, next year or the next – signals the end of fossil dominance.
BEIJING—China’s thirst for oil drove global demand for decades. Now a government campaign to curb that addiction is nearing a milestone, with national consumption expected to peak by 2027, then begin to fall.
Chinese officials have long worried that the U.S. and its allies could hamstring the nation’s economy by choking off its supply of foreign oil. So China has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into weaning itself off the imported stuff by reviving domestic production and swiftly building the world’s leading electric-vehicle industry.
“The energy rice bowl must be held in our own hands,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said.
Across China, fleets of gas-guzzling Volkswagen and Hyundai taxicabs are being replaced by electric models designed and produced locally. Last year, nearly half of passenger vehicles sold in the country were either all-electrics or plug-in hybrids, compared with 6% in 2020.
In a remote corner of China called the “sea of death” for its harsh conditions, oil workers are trying to coax more crude out of the ground by drilling holes as deep as Mt. Everest is high. State-owned PetroChina reported $38 billion of capital expenditures last year, nearly as much as Exxon Mobil’s and Chevron’s combined.
China boosted oil output by 13% from 2018 to 2024, to around 4.3 million barrels a day. Crude imports fell nearly 2% last year, though they have rebounded slightly this year as some Chinese companies built stockpiles.
Video above makes good point. What will the prospective resale value of an expensive ICE car be in ’26,’27 time frame?
Meanwhile, US Government doing its best to hobble our own automakers in their race to catch up.
General Motors said on Tuesday that its profit in the second quarter fell by more than a third, after President Trump’s tariffs cost the company more than $1 billion.
G.M. was the second automaker this week to show the toll that the Trump administration’s trade policies are taking on the industry. Stellantis, the maker of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram vehicles, said on Monday that it lost 2.3 billion euros ($2.7 billion) in the first half of the year partly because of tariffs and other Republican policies.
Automakers are an important pillar of the U.S. economy and the industry employs about one million manufacturing workers. Eroding profits will make it harder for them to invest in new technologies to withstand growing competition from Chinese automakers that have been expanding abroad.
G.M.’s profit for the quarter was $1.9 billion, the company said, down from $2.9 billion in the same quarter last year. Sales fell 2 percent, to $47 billion.
Why is the road-trip charging time an issue if you’ve already bought a hybrid because of range anxiety? That was the whole point of pushing hybrids for some market segments.
My niece, who does a lot of back roads trips, got a hybrid because it was more efficient use of gasoline, and the nature of the places she visited were likely to be late adopters in terms of fast charging.
To me, more people would be attracted to the lower maintenance cost (and lower probability of vehicle fire) of pure EVs over hybrids. After all, new models of plug-in hybrids would have faster charging type batteries, too.
It is great news as China reach peak oil. It is the biggest polluter in the world so there is very much to gain in term of lees CO2 emissions.
China is the greatest GHG polluter in absolute terms, with its population of 1.4 billion.
It’s ~#34 in terms of emissions per capita, and a lot of it includes industrial emissions for products sent around the world.
Too many parts of China still depend on coal for income and employment. The world’s largest wind farm is located in such a province.
The World’s Largest Wind Farm has a Tiny Problem