Too valuable to burn? Chemical and plastic industries will rely on oil far longer than motorists
- Written by Mehdi Seyedmahmoudian, Professor of Electrical Engineering, School of Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology
Jan Zakelj/Pexels, CC BY-NC-SAEvery year, the world uses roughly 37 billion barrels of oil. Most is burned to power cars, trucks, planes, ships and other types of transport. For more than a century, this energy-dense hydrocarbon has shaped the modern world, from geopolitics to electricity systems.
But this dependence on oil for transport comes...





