From Tesla chargers in the ancient alleys that surround the Forbidden City in Beijing to lonely highway rest stops with charging posts in the western deserts, signs of the electrification of China’s transport fleet – and the demise of petrol – are everywhere.
Chinese sales of electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrids have reached a tipping point this year in their tug-of-war with internal combustion engines. They have accounted for more than half of retail passenger vehicle sales in the four months from July, according to the China Passenger Car Association, a trend that’s poised to send appetite for transport fuels into a decline that will have a major impact on the oil market.
The more rapid-than-expected uptake of EVs has shifted views among oil forecasters at energy majors, banks and academics in recent months. Unlike in the US and Europe – where peaks in consumption were followed by long plateaus – the drop in demand in the world’s top crude importer is expected to be more pronounced. Brokerage Citic Futures sees Chinese petrol consumption dropping by 4 to 5 per cent a year to 2030.
“The future is coming faster in China,” said Ciaran Healy, an oil analyst at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris. “What we’re seeing now is the medium-term expectations coming ahead of schedule, and that has implications for the shape of Chinese and global demand growth through the rest of the decade.”
For a global oil market, which has come to rely on China as its main growth driver for most of this century, that will erode a major pillar of consumption. The country accounts for almost a fifth of worldwide oil demand, and petrol makes up about a quarter of that. The prospect of a sharp drop from transport is also coming on top of tepid industrial consumption due to slowing economic growth.
The growing popularity of electric trucks, as well as those that run on liquefied natural gas, is also weighing on demand for diesel. Chinese consumption of the fuel peaked in 2019 and will drop by 3 to 5 per cent a year to 2030, UBS Securities said this month.
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There are still a lot of unknowns about how China’s uptake of EVs will play out, such as whether full electrification can ever be achieved, and what that will mean for fuel demand. Another question mark surrounds plug-in hybrid vehicles, which can be powered by electricity or back-up petrol engines. They have accounted for much of the sales growth over the the past few years, but there’s little data on the extent to which the drivers of these cars still rely on motor fuel.
The IEA sees “rampant, mass-market electrification” potentially pushing Chinese petrol demand into decline from 2025. That will result in an average annual drop of 2.1 per cent from 2023 to 2030. Others, such as Citic, see a more rapid retreat. Improvements in fuel efficiency and a peak in car ownership would help drive the declines, along with the uptake of EVs, the brokerage said in a note in late October.
This year may be a “turning point for China’s refined oil market, with petrol consumption peaking before declining rapidly”, Luo Yantuo, a senior engineer with the PetroChina Planning & Engineering Institute, part of China’s biggest oil company, wrote this month in an analysis piece on PetroChina’s website. The amount of petrol-powered cars on the road would peak as early as next year, she said.
Beijing planted the seeds for the transition to EVs more than a decade ago, offering subsidies that gave auto-makers time to scale up output and lower costs. It began to pay off in 2021 when output of new energy vehicle shipments nearly tripled from the previous year, and they are now primed to surpass the 10 million mark for the first time in 2024.
New energy vehicles make up about 10 per cent of all cars on the road now, and that’s expected to exceed 20 per cent by 2027 and could approach 100 per cent by the 2040s, said Anders Hove, a China researcher at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. The country’s oil demand from light vehicles will fall from around 3.5 million barrels a day at the moment to one million by 2040, he said.
China’s path towards electrification is faster than in other economies. In the US, EV’s still represent only about 10 per cent of total car sales, and BloombergNEF sharply scaled back its forecasts for growth after the Republican election sweep.
Petrol consumption there has fallen just 12 per cent from a peak in 2004 to last year, according to IEA data. In Europe, where cars running on petrol and diesel are common, transport sector consumption is down only 6 per cent from a high in 2007.
China’s likely drop in petrol demand due to its aggressive electric car rollout “is completely unique in some respects”, the IEA’s Healy said. “I don’t think there’s a country that has the same, the comparable profile.” BLOOMBERG
