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Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Electric buses were seen as a joke at an industry conference in Belgium seven years ago when the Chinese manufacturer BYD showed an early model. Suddenly, buses with battery-powered motors are a serious matter with the potential to revolutionize city transport -- and add to the forces reshaping the energy industry. With China leading the way, making the traditional smog-belching diesel behemoth run on electricity is starting to eat away at fossil fuel demand. The numbers are staggering. China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the country's entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transporters -- the equivalent of London's entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance. All this is starting to make an observable reduction in fuel demand. And because they consume 30 times more fuel than average sized cars, their impact on energy use so far has become much greater than the than the passenger sedans produced companies from Tesla to Toyota. For every 1,000 battery-powered buses on the road, about 500 barrels a day of diesel fuel will be displaced from the market, according to BNEF calculations. This year, the volume of fuel buses take off the market may rise 37 percent to 279,000 barrels a day, about as much oil as Greece consumes, according to BNEF.
The 'long tailpipe' thesis has been debunked for years.
Overhead wires are prohibitively expensive over long distances. For example if you use rail electrification costs as a benchmark, it works out to be about a million dollars per mile to install, and then there's ongoing maintenance of the catenary cable which does wear out from all that rubbing.
Apart from the poles and cabling above the road, there's also transformers, substations and etc that need to be spread along the route. In a city that's not really a problem, but long distance it starts to get difficult.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Given that world oil production is around 35 billion barrels a year, 279,000 barrels isn't even a blip on anyone's radar.
96 million/day
so about a third of a percent.
but if it's an accelerating trend (7 years to 1/3 percent, 8 years to .4 percent), and it's not a proven tech, so it may spread to other countries, I bet they're watching it with some nervousness.
If it can handle buses, local delivery is next (Tesla truck for example).
growth 2016-2017 was .7%, so this in theory is hitting growth significantly.
(growth sourced here, daily use 2016 on a google search)
https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/data/browser/#/?pa=000gfs0000000000000000000000000000vg&c=4100000002000060000000000000g000200000000000000001&tl_id=5-A&vs=INTL.53-1-AFRC-TBPD.A&vo=0&v=H&end=2017
Generalising "factories" is disingenius. You're right the vast problem is factories. However the long tail pipe is not a nearby factory, it's a distributed power network across the country.
By the way before you say it doesn't work like that you should consider that it's not only the factories that are incredibly sub par in China, the shitty old diesel busses are too (a typical replacement program isn't throwing out new Euro 4 busses). Don't underestimate just how much of a difference it makes getting these old belchers out of the city.
For all the problems that were still there after 2008 note that the air quality in China has steaily been improving over the past 5 years.