Electric vehicles have displaced about 3 percent of total oil consumption growth since 2011, a larger share than ever before. And so far, more than three-quarters of that oil displacement has come from electric buses, Bloomberg reports.
The report estimates that “for every 1,000 electric buses on the road, 500 barrels of diesel are displaced each day.” The same number of battery-powered electric vehicles only displaces 15 barrels of oil a day, by comparison.
Most of this is occurring in China, Bloombergnotes. A report last year found that of about 385,000 electric buses in the world in 2017, about 99 percent of them were in China, with rapid growth still taking place. The city of Shenzhen alone announced in 2017 that it had completely electrified its fleet of 16,000 buses.
Bloomberg estimates that gas and diesel displacement will increase 96,000 barrels a day this year due to EVs, making the lost cumulative demand 352,000 barrels a day since 2011. But global oil demand is also on the rise, growing 12 million barrels a day over the same period.
Future estimates see a much larger impact, as EVs could displace 6.4 million barrels of demand each day by 2040.