Originally written in 2011, this article imagined a future where technological change might collapse gasoline demand and prices. In 2025, the reality is more complicated: demand is evolving, but prices remain high due to taxes, global supply pressures, and energy transition policies.
How can I make this outlandish a statement? First, a lot of Canada’s gasoline price is actually TAX, so we only really need to cut the price of Gasoline in half to reach this lofty goal, but that is not the only reason.
Let me secondly tell you a quick story about my days at Nortel. When I started working there in the mid-80’s, we had Vision 2000, with the goal of being the Number 1 Telecommunications company in the World by the year 2000. Surprisingly, Nortel reached that goal; however, by then it no longer mattered, as the Internet and Data networks had changed the world so much that no one was buying as much telecommunications equipment anymore. We kind of ended up like being “The Smartest Man in the WWE” ™, who cares?
This is where my $2 per gallon and 50 cent per litre argument is actually based, in the next 20 years or so, there will either be technological breakthroughs and changes so drastic that the price of Gasoline (and Oil in general) will no longer matter anymore, or, we will be completely f*cked, it’s that simple. Given the way gasoline and Oil prices are being manipulated and the fact that oil is a dwindling resource (depending on the model you look at), something must change in 20 years, or the world economy will fall over (as opposed to this year’s version of the great economic implosion).
My guess (and hope), is that thanks to technology in general, computers in specific, that model will take over in terms of the use of energy and gasoline, and there will be a dramatic drop in the demand for Oil and Gasoline thus driving the price through the floor. This sudden, dramatic drop will not do Canada any favours, so hopefully we won’t be the Gas Can for North America by then (but I suspect we will be).
The major thing stopping the widespread use of electric power for cars and transport is the battery and its ability to store energy (and how long it takes to recharge). Each year, there are new(er) ideas coming forward, which hopefully will cause a version of Moore's Law for battery lifetime (doubling capacity every two years) or something close to that, and once that happens, gasoline will no longer be as important.
Am I completely off my nut? Maybe I have been wrong before (remember Bill Gates saying, "Who could need more than 640K of memory in a computer"), but my guess is something will change, and the ludicrous promise of Gasoline at $2 per gallon is possible, but maybe not in the next few years, and by that time, no one will care!
Any nay-sayers?
Follow On in 2025
Back in 2011, the idea was simple: either technology would save us, or things would go sideways. Turns out… both happened.
Gas didn’t get dramatically cheaper. Instead, we adapted. Cars got more efficient. Some folks stopped driving. Others bought EVs. And the rest of us just stared at the pump and muttered things not suitable for polite company.
The big shift wasn’t price, it was behaviour. The world didn’t eliminate gasoline. It just made us think harder about when and how we use it.
Now, did I foresee a Gulf War and all the associated fun, leading to a spike in prices with repercussions nobody could have foreseen? No, but ain't politics grand?
I don’t see any technological advances on the horizon that will significantly alter the equation on personal transport.