Oil & Energy

The Future May Not Be As Electric As We Think

Published

1 year ago

July 15, 2024

Virtually every single forecast about the future of transport focuses on its electrification – on the idea that Electric Vehicles will take over roads, displacing the internal combustion engine Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) and making it history.
Not everyone agrees, however, and that includes Renault, China’s Geely and, as of last month, Saudi Aramco. The three are investing in a company that develops powertrain technology for internal combustion engine vehicles. The future may not be as electric as we may expect.
Horse Powertrain came into existence at the end of May as a 50:50 joint venture between Renault and Geely. At the time, Renault’s Chief Executive said the company would aim to become a leader in “ultra-low emission internal combustion engines and high economy hybrid technologies”.
Decarbonisation, then, remains the top priority. Yet Renault and Geely are opting for an alternative way to achieve it, through fuel efficiency and other tech advancements in internal combustion rather than through total electrification.
It is no wonder Aramco is joining the party, especially in light of the recent performance of its EV darling, Lucid Motors.
Lucid has seen its share price plummet from over $50 apiece to less than $9 in three years and has missed its own delivery target for the first half of this year even though it boasted record deliveries of 2,394 cars.
The Saudi oil giant likes to spread its eggs across several baskets, and it looks like the ICE basket is still quite popular. People are still buying a lot more internal combustion engine cars than electric vehicles.
A lot of EV drivers want to go back to their internal combustion engine car. Things are not looking good for the electrification of transport, with the normal glitches of new technology still being sorted out. However, they are looking as robust as ever for internal combustion.
“It will be incredibly expensive for the world to completely stamp out, or do without internal combustion engines”, Yasser Mufti, Executive Vice-President at Saudi Aramco, who was in charge of the Horse Powertrain deal, told the Financial Times.
“If you look at affordability and a lot of other factors, I do think they will be around for a very, very long time”, he stated.
Affordability is indeed one of the factors that make drivers loyal to the ICE technology. For all the efforts EV makers have been putting into lowering the price of their electric vehicles, and for all the government support of the technology, EVs remain costlier than comparable internal combustion engine vehicles.
Of course, affordability is only part of the car equation. Another is fueling or charging time and on this, the ICE car once again beats the EV.
For all the talk about how convenient it was to charge your EV overnight in the comfort of your own garage, it has been dawning on forecasting EV bulls that globally, only a minority of drivers have a garage to charge an EV in, while most would need to rely on public chargers.
Also, only a minority of drivers would be willing to spend hours charging their car overnight or not.
Perhaps the best testimonial to the enduring power of the internal combustion engine were the latest car sales figures from China.
The world’s biggest market, China, has been breaking records in EV sales. This seems to have created a perception that half of all cars in China are electric. In fact, the reality is quite different.
Xinhua reported earlier this week that the total number of cars on Chinese roads had reached 440 million at the end of June. Of these, the data showed, new energy vehicles had a share of 24.72 million. Of these, 18.13 million were plug-in electric vehicles — what we commonly call EVs, and the rest were hybrids.
In percentage terms, then, EVs represent barely a 4.1% of the Chinese market. In other words, even in the world’s biggest EV market, with billions spent on charging infrastructure and making EVs dirt cheap, most drivers still prefer internal combustion vehicles.
“We believe that as far out as 2035, 2040 and even beyond 2040 we still see a significant number of ICE vehicles”, Matias Giannini, Chief Executive of Horse Powertrain, told the FT.
“More than half for sure, and up to 60 per cent of the population will still have some sort of an engine, whether it is pure ICE, a full hybrid or a plug-in hybrid”, he added.
The internal combustion engine has survived so long and remained the overwhelmingly dominant transportation technology for one simple reason: it has been superior to alternatives and its benefits have outweighed the costs consistently.
It is at the cost-benefit analysis state that the EV revolution tripped and fell — because it seems that no one bothered to do that analysis.
So, the market made it for them, with the EV surge celebrated loudly last year slowing down before the year was even over. Horse Powertrain may yet acquire new shareholders.
Slav writes for Oilprice.com.

By: Irina Slav

Oil & Energy

Hysteria Clashes with Missing Oil Barrels

Published

5 days ago

October 27, 2025

The Tide

A looming oil glut has taken over the energy commodities market as the dominating sentiment among traders and analysts. Everyone is predicting a glut—the only difference is in its size. But there is a fly in the bearish ointment. The IEA admitted this week that it was unable to account for 1.47 million barrels of supply.

The International Energy Agency deepened the glut mood last week, when it predicted a supply overhang of 2.35 million barrels daily for this year, and an all-time high surplus of 4 million barrels daily for 2026. In the same report, however, the IEA admitted it cannot place some 1.47 million barrels daily in global supply for August.

This is nothing abnormal in oil supply estimation, Reuters’ Ron Bousso noted in a report on the matter, but the size of the barrels that are unaccounted for casts a shadow over the accuracy of the IEA’s predictions. It suggests that in August, the global supply overhang may have been 1.47 million barrels daily larger than the IEA estimated or, then again, 1.47 million barrels daily smaller. The number for August gains even more significance in light of the fact that it is a sizable increase on earlier “missing barrel” estimates: 850,000 bpd for July and 370,000 bpd for the second quarter of the year, per Bousso, who cited IEA data.

While the IEA looks for the lost barrels, other agencies are updating their supply and demand forecasts for 2026—and prices just inched up because apparently some traders got fed up with the glut hysteria.

BloombergNEF, for instance, not known for its bullish tendencies, has revised its supply growth prediction for 2026 by 200,000 barrels daily for an oversupply size of 3.3 million barrels daily. For this year, the agency sees oversupply at 1.16 million barrels daily, which raises the question of how the prediction for 2026 would come true when gluts tend to push prices and drilling down, curbing output instead of boosting it twofold.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects a supply overhang of 1.9 million barrels daily this year, growing to 2.1 million barrels daily in 2026. The numbers are an upward revision of earlier forecasts for a 1.7-million-bpd surplus this year and a 1.6-million-bpd overhang for 2026.

Bloomberg, meanwhile, stoked the glut fire by reporting there were 1 billion barrels of crude oil on tankers at sea. The report noted this was oil in transit, meaning some of it, at least, is en route from seller to buyer, but the implication was that a lot of the oil was actually looking for a buyer in an oversupplied market.

“Crude cargoes from the Middle East are starting to go unsold and key price gauges signal that supply scarcity is ending,” Bloomberg wrote, which is an interesting point to make, seeing as there has not been talk about any sort of supply scarcity for months.

“For the last 12 months we’ve all known that there’s this surplus that’s coming,” Trafigura’s global head for oil, Ben Luckock, said earlier this month as quoted by Bloomberg. “I think it really is just about here now.”

“The most straightforward of economic concepts is driving this decline: There’s simply too much supply relative to how much the world is consuming,” analyst Rory Johnston from Commodity Context told the Financial Post.

The IEA, meanwhile, reported in its latest monthly update that in August, oil on water declined by 8 million bpd. It followed up with preliminary estimates that oil on water surged to 102 million over the next month. That would be quite a sudden buildup in oil in floating storage over a very short period of time and would perfectly justify preparations for a glut.

Oil prices, in the meantime, however, have ticked higher. One of the reasons seems to be that some market observers have developed something of a glut fatigue and are starting to doubt the predictions. As UBS’ Giovanni Staunovo wrote this week in a note, “While supply concerns have increased in recent weeks again, we believe the oil market is oversupplied but not in a glut.”

Concern about supply security from Russia also contributed to the latest in oil, suggesting that the supply overhang is not large enough, indeed, to leave traders cold to the news that a peace summit between the presidents of Russia and the United States had been put on hold. According to Reuters, U.S. pressure on Asian oil buyers from Russia had also contributed to the shift in oil supply sentiment.

Now, if the supply excess was as large as the IEA, the EIA, BloombergNEF, and Bloomberg proper, plus dozens of other forecasters have suggested, then the above developments in geopolitics would not have really mattered much for oil prices. The fact that they do suggests still existent sensitivity to supply disruptions, meaning the perception of a glut is a fragile one.

By: Irina Slav

Oil & Energy

Proffer Solutions To Energy Crisis, PTI Urges FG. Stakeholders

Published

5 days ago

October 27, 2025

The Tide

The Petroleum Training Institute (PTI), has urged stakeholders in the energy sector to proffer solutions to the country’s energy crisis.

PTI gave the urge at its 4th Biennial International Conference on Hydrocarbon Science and Technology (ICHST), organized in partnership with the Ministry of Petroleum Resources (MPR), Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF), Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC), Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Authority (NMDPRA), NNPC Academy, Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB), and CypherCrescent Ltd, held in Abuja, at the Weekend.

In a Communique issued shortly after the conference, by the Director, Research and Development, PTI, Dr. Tina Isichie, urged the nation to address its energy crisis with a sustainable solution.

The stakeholders noted that Nigeria is endowed with 207 trillion cubic feet reserves of gas aside from oil reserves that is sufficient to support development.

Isichie said, “Nigeria has been blessed with natural gas resources (currently a reserve of 207 TCF) in addition to oil. This is enough to support developments by leveraging digitalization, innovation, and technology across the board.

“It is projected that by the year 2050, Nigeria will be the 3rd most populous country on earth, necessitating an urgent need to think outside the box and proffer sustainable solutions to the country’s energy crisis.”

She said considering the government policy of 2020-2030 as the Decade of Gas, the government should speed up CNG investment and ensure all LPG importers set up processing plants in Nigeria so that the commodity will be readily available and at an affordable price.

According to her, despite the PIA 2021, persistent issues including under-utilized refineries, capacity gaps in the workforce, and challenges with technology transfer and environmental obligations have plaqued the sector.

The conference recommended that there should be a strong mandate for all Ministry of Petroleum Resources agencies to partner and collaborate on generating solutions and evolving the required technology for local production issues.

The conference, according to the communique, emphasised maximizing Nigeria’s 207 TCF gas reserves to drive national development, urging the acceleration of CNG investment and sector liberalization to diversify the economy into agriculture and ICT.

Isichie said there was a resolution to establish centres of excellence and foster collaboration between industry and academia to build a talented workforce prepared for the energy transition.

The Director stressed that transparency is the “currency of trust” needed to propel the sector, advocating for domestic participation and leveraging divestment to demonstrate local technical and financial capability.

Oil & Energy

Monarchs Task FG On Host Communities’ Welfare ………As PINL Targets 2000 Women For Empowerment

Published

5 days ago

October 27, 2025

The Tide

Monarchs of Host Communities have called on the federal government to place premium on the welfare of communities hosting oil pipelines.

This is even as the government records continuous increase in crude oil production output.

They lamented that the increase has not affected the lives of host communities

insisting that the deliberate consideration of the welfare of the communities would further enhance the safety of the oil pipelines and production output.

The monarchs, along the Eastern Corridor of the Trans Niger Pipeline ((TNP), made the call at the Stakeholders Engagement Meeting organised by the Pipeline Infrastructure Nigeria Limited (PINL) for its host communities of Rivers, Abia and Imo States, held in Port Harcourt, noted that lately the ……………

The Paramount Ruler of Emohua in Rivers State, His Majesty, Eze Sergeant Awuse, who led the call said “You have been announcing increased in production but are there improvement in the welfares of the people of the areas? How much improvement do we have?

“No amount of dramatisation here will give us peace if the government don’t look into the welfare of the area where these incomes are taken from. The well-being of our people are more important. This oil is our own.

“Every community would say those who are going to break the pipelines are from your community. How much more ability do we have as traditional rulers? How much power do we think we have?

“Pass our message to the government. Tell them it is time to not only put it into law and give authority to the traditional rulers but it’s time to implement it because if you don’t implement it nothing will happen”.

Also speaking, the Coordinator, Supreme Council of Ogoni Traditional Rulers, King Samuel Nnee, said people of the host communities deserve better dividends from the resources on their soil.

He decried the notion that traditional rulers are usually aware of the activities of suspected vandals in communities, urging the government and security agencies to level up in ensuring peace in the host communities.

In his words, “It has not been easy with traditional rulers because in our respective communities when you have bad boys they say we are responsible. When government want to confront traditional rulers or the evil deeds of our people, they say traditional rulers know all the people that are bad without thinking that the children- most of them, who are well educated; deserve the good things of life which government has refused to provide for them. So I want to say that the government should help our communities”.

On the responsibility to protect the pipelines and other critical assets, the monarch said Niger Delta kings need improved empowerment from the government at all levels to better perform that responsibility.

“I want to call on the agencies of government to care for the kings because we mean well for them. We’ll join you in this battle but if we are hungry we might not be able to do it more effectively.

” I want to urge the companies and government that the kings of the Niger Delta need a push to work better and then government will make progress, ” he added.

Nnee who commended the PINL for the recognition of traditional institution in their operations further called on the monarchs in the Niger Delta step up their primary function of protecting lives and all critical assets in their domain.

Speaking on behalf of the youths, the spokesperson, Coalition of Niger Delta Ethnic Youth Leaders, Comrade Legborsi Yamaabana, said lauded PINL’s mode of operations particularly in the monthly engagement of communities and relevant stakeholders.

Yamaabana attributed the company’s successes to its people oriented strategies, urging the government to give the company more responsibility.

“You are aware that production has surged, it didn’t happen as a mere coincidence, it happened as a result of concerted effort.

” So because this company has done well thus far, we’ll be calling on the government to give PINL more responsibilities because they have performed so that we’ll continue to enjoy the environmental protection we now have, ” Yamaabana said.

The Eze Ekpeye Logbo, King Kevin Anugwo, described as ‘competent’ the operations of PINL pointing out that the company has identified with the host communities which has resulted in maximum production output.

Represented by Dr Patricia Ogbonnaya, King Anugwo appealed to the Federal Government to retain the services of PINL saying “We want to appeal to the Federal Government that if they want these areas to grow, don’t replace PINL with another company.

” We are calling on the Federal Government that you (PINL) has delivered on the job and so it’s only natural and moral that you give more to them so that they can render more services”.

Earlier in his address, the General Manager, Community Relations and Stakeholders Engagement, PINL, Dr Akpos Mezeh, disclosed that the company has finalised plans to kick start the empowerment of 2000 women from the host communities.

Mezeh, said the program was focused on small business development, financial literacy, and skills training for women and girls in the host communities.

“Through the PINL Women’s Skills Development and Enterprise Program, 2,000 women are being targeted for empowerment before the year’s end.

“The PINL Women Entrepreneurs & Empowerment Initiative has completed data capturing, conducted in Port Harcourt for host communities in Abia, Imo, and Rivers States, and Yenagoa for Bayelsa communities. This program focuses on small business development, financial literacy, and skills training for women and girls. Verification of data had just been completed beneficiaries would soon be contacted”, he said.

Mezeh further revealed that scholarship programme for youths were being processed for payment, with beneficiaries expected to receive disbursements adding that new entries from underrepresented communities have also been added to the list.

On environmental and social impact support, Mezeh stated that PINL is partnering relevant government agencies and environmental experts on joint assessments to identify priority areas for remediation and social investment in the host communities.