Batteries bite into oil: Demand slows in China and drops in Norway

There’s a predator — no small one — on the loose in the energy savanna. Batteries, in all their forms, are poised to deliver a severe bite to fossil fuel demand: coal and gas, because their intensive use for storing megawatt-hours will drastically reduce the operating hours of thermal power plants; and, even more sharply, oil, as vehicle electrification becomes widespread.

The world is still in the early days of the electric vehicle, but the leading countries offer a powerful lesson with two common takeaways: the transition — whether fast or slow — is irreversible and has almost immediate effects on fuel consumption. In short, it is a powerful destroyer of demand and, therefore, a depressor of prices.

In Norway, a global leader in this field — and many others — with an electric vehicle sales share approaching 100% of total car sales, fuel consumption has already begun to fall: gasoline and diesel use has dropped by 12% between 2021 and 2024. In China, the world’s largest crude importer, where electric vehicles — mostly cheaper than their combustion counterparts — already make up half the market, demand is also showing clear signs of weakness: it has either already peaked, according to CNPC, or is about to do so. Electrification, as an indisputable — and nearly sole, apart from demographics — driver of demand destruction, will reduce crude oil consumption by almost 600,000 barrels per day this year alone.

The global oil consumption pie can roughly be divided into four slices. The first corresponds to light transport — cars and vans — the easiest to electrify and the first to feel the bite. The second slice is heavy transport: airplanes, ships, and especially trucks. Decarbonizing these will be slower, particularly in aviation, but the process has already begun. Although still considerably more expensive than their fossil counterparts, sustainable fuels — SAF for planes, methanol or ammonia for ships — are technically mature solutions. Many passenger ships and regional aircraft are also fully electrifiable, as are trucks, which are essential for freight transport in countries like Spain. In China, electric heavy vehicles are no longer anecdotal, forcing analysts to lower their diesel consumption forecasts — and signaling to the rest of the world that the future is already here.

The last two quarters of the pie will lag the most in the inevitable shift toward cleaner alternatives to crude oil: petrochemical industry demand — which continues to grow rather than stabilize or decline — and, finally, a catch-all segment that includes almost everything else, from bitumen for road construction and repair to electricity generation in countries such as those in the Middle East, where, despite photovoltaic solar being incomparably cheaper, fuel oil still dominates.

The rest will follow

“The reduction in consumption clearly begins in the first two quarters, where in some countries we are already beginning to see the impact of electrification on fuel demand, and a few years later, the rest will follow,” predicts Jorge León of the consulting firm Rystad Energy.

Luisa Palacios, from Columbia University, agrees: “China has been the most dynamic part of the oil market in recent years, and the reality is that, there, the electrification of road transport is proceeding very rapidly, more than many expected.”

For the major oil importers, many of them European, the incentive to accelerate this transition is huge, growing, and threefold: they reduce their carbon footprint, save billions of euros annually on imports, and increase strategic autonomy by cutting ties with regimes like Russia’s.

“If we’re going to see a surprise, it will undoubtedly be in the direction of greater electrification, not less,” says Palacios. Even if U.S. President Donald Trump — a supporter of the fossil fuel sector, defender of coal and oil, and critic of renewables — succeeds in trying to derail the rise of electric vehicles in the U.S., the rest of the world is taking a different path.

Not just China or Northern Europe, but much of the unstoppable emerging world. In India (nearly 1.5 billion people, the most populous country in the world), 20% of the popular new urban mopeds are already electric. In Vietnam (over 100 million people, almost as many as Spain and Italy combined), one in three new vehicles runs solely on batteries. In Turkey (85 million), one in seven is already electric, many of which are domestically produced.

With the expected sharp drop in prices and improvements in range over the coming years, those numbers can only grow. Oil, by contrast, can only decline.

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