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Originally Posted by Hack&Lube
I'm no expert but China is currently adding 30+ million conventional new cars every year. Maybe we can hope for emerging and new markets to sustain the global demand for oil if the mature ones are moving onto other forms of energy.
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There's alot of uncertainty in the air. First the best hope is not to hope for expanded oil consumption and production. That's basically robbing your grandchildren of a habitable world we've enjoyed, or a world with significantly less resources and more hardship.
More specifically on China: Chinese demand for personal transportation is indeed interesting, most analysts lazily predict that Chinese preferences for personal transport will simply mirror the trajectory in North America over the past 70 years. But, what seems to be unfolding is a much different personal transport driver for Chinese people. They drive way less and their urban areas are being built now meaning that the infrastructure that enables various modes of transport can have a huge impact over the next 20 years. Instead of building say car dependent suburbs, Chinese officials have been prioritizing smart growth communities with transit nodes. So a) they are trying to dampen the demand for personal vehicle transport. The other thing that they're doign is emphasizing natural gas vehicles, there are 1.6 million NG vehicles in China today, there were 6000 ten years ago.
Anyway, all this is to say that China is not a black hole of oil demand as some make it out to be.