America's Gasoline Demand Has Quietly Reached Record Levels
https://www.rigzone.com/news/americas_gasoline_demand_has_quietly_reached_record_levels-02-mar-2020-161242-article/March 02, 2020
Supplying nearly 20 percent of total U.S. energy needs, gasoline has been a hallmark of the American experience since Ford’s first Model T in 1908. At 9.5 million b/d, U.S. gasoline demand is now as high as it has ever been (see Figure). Looking forward, it is simply just assumed that gasoline and the internal combustion engine that it fuels will “go gentle into that good night†to be replaced by electric vehicles. Yet in reality, gasoline is an incumbent technology with entrenched large-scale infrastructure. Let us examine just a few of the reasons why the reports of the death of gasoline have been greatly exaggerated.
The sheer size of the U.S. gasoline fleet overwhelms. The country today has 255 million passenger cars that run on gasoline, compared to less than two million for electricity. This dominance is made even more staggering given how substantial the subsidies, tax breaks, and other political favoritism have been to support or even mandate the widespread adoption of electric cars.
Surveys from J.D. Power, PiplSay, and others signal that Americans are not as enthralled with electric cars as some suggest. A lack of charging infrastructure remains a major obstacle. There are 140,000 gasoline stations across the country, some seven times more than electric charging stations. The length of time to charge an electric car, and the miles range that charge brings, is a persistent complaint. Electric cars are far more expensive, with the average Tesla buyer, for instance, making $400,000 a year – seven times the national average....
