* Oil saving
US combustion engine (personal) passenger cars use about 11 barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) per year, a motorcycle about 1 barrel, a Class 8 truck about 24 and a bus over 258 barrels per year.
When these vehicles start to run on electricity, the oil that their combustion engine counterparts would have used would no longer be needed, displacing the demand for oil with electricity.
Since 2015, two- and three-wheeled vehicles, such as scooters, motorcycles, and tuk-tuks, have accounted for most of the oil saved from electric vehicles on a global scale.
With widespread adoption in Asia specifically, these compounds displaced demand by nearly 675,000 barrels of oil per day in 2015.
By 2021, that number has grown rapidly to 1 million barrels per day.
Numbers of electric cars
While the commercial vehicle sector is in business today, there are very few large electric trucks on the road, and this is expected to change by 2025.
Medium electric passenger cars showed the largest growth in adoption since 2015.
The electric car market in 2022 also witnessed tremendous growth, as sales exceeded 10 million cars, and the market is expected to continue growing throughout 2023 and beyond, and will eventually lead to saving 886,700 barrels of oil per day in 2025.
From gas to electricity
As the world shifts from fossil fuels to electricity, Bloomberg expects that a decrease in oil demand does not necessarily mean lower oil prices, and in the event that investments in new supply capacity decline more quickly than demand, oil prices may remain unstable and high.
However, the shift towards electrification is likely to have other effects. The use of electric cars is associated with lower emissions, and they are as sustainable as the electricity used to charge them.
Electrification represents a great opportunity to meet the growing demand for electricity with clean energy sources, such as wind, solar and nuclear power. Shifting away from fossil fuels in road transport will also require expanded infrastructure, potentially electric vehicle charging stations, expanded transmission capacity, and storage. Batteries are all essential to support the widespread transition from gas to electricity.
