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The world is learning to live with less oil. It may never look back.
The coronavirus pandemic has destroyed demand for gasoline and jet fuel as billions of people stay home, and there’s no guarantee it will ever fully recover despite rock-bottom prices.
The oil industry is bracing for the effects of the crisis to linger. Employees keep working from home. International travel stays scarce. And citizens in once polluted cities, having become accustomed to blue skies, demand tougher emissions controls, encouraging governments to redouble efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
Such changes would come on top of a push for investors to dump oil assets that had been gaining momentum before the recent price crash. Sustainable energy investments, by comparison, appear to have held up relatively well despite stock market volatility.
All this could mean that global demand never returns to its 2019 record high, a scary prospect for oil companies and their employees from Texas to Western Europe, and countries such as Russia, Nigeria or Iraq that depend heavily on selling crude.
