Cuba is struggling with devastating nationwide blackouts as the United States’ effective oil blockade strangles fuel supplies. But this crisis may also be accelerating a China-backed clean energy revolution that’s been quietly unfolding in the Caribbean nation.
Both heavy and light oil will still be needed for other processes and products that can’t be replaced/way more difficult to replace than fuels. But decoupling oil from energy and transportation will have a huge impact on the market and be better for everyone in general.
Hopefully the quantities will be small enough to make the USA irrelevant for a century, until they catch up again.
It won’t just make the USA irrelevant in the oil domain: it’ll impact the entirety of the OPEC group who’ll have to massively scale back production to keep the price high enough to sustain their economies.
The petro-dollar will be replaced with the electro-dollar (that is if the US dollar remains the world currency). So a different group of rare earth rich countries will emerge that’ll become more relevant than OPEC in the energy domain but not quite to the same extent as countries that are both gifted with geography to make them major energy exporters and have neighbouring countries/super-grid connections/renewable storage export capabilities will emerge as big players as well.