Shell Oil, the Future of Transportation, and Coal in the Grid-Mix

I’ve mentioned a few times that even Shell Oil believes the market for oil (gasoline and diesel – liquid hydrocarbons) is going away, and will be very small by the year 2060 – almost entirely replaced by electric vehicles – both battery and fuel cell.  Here’s an article that analyzes this “end-of-oil” phenomenon vis-à-vis the share price of Tesla Motors – something that I think is worth following.  At a bare minimum, it’s controversial; for everyone who thinks Tesla is far overvalued, there’s someone pointing out that they’re a leader in a market space that even the oil companies believe will dominate the world of transportation.

There’s also an alarming aspect of this report: though the percentage of the energy mix represented by coal is slated to fall, they predict the absolute tonnage of coal burned to rise to keep base with an exploding consumer population.  Insofar as this means ecological disaster of unimaginable proportion, I have to believe that humankind (somehow) will refuse to let this happen.