Gasoline turning into barley and oats?

Its said that a good way to make the wrong decisions in the public markets is to listen to the news. The concept of contrarian investing/trading is to do the opposite of what the news says.  To run in the opposite direction of the sheep and ignore where the media shepherds are leading them.

But the media isn't always wrong, sometimes they're telling it exactly as it is.  As Freud once famously said:  "Sometimes a banana is simply a banana".

I was listening to the radio yesterday and heard a report about a professor of economics at Stanford who put out a paper called "Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030".  Among predictions of driverless vehicles dominating the roads it has some chilling forecasts for the Oil/Gas sector.  Among them a suggestion that gas stations are going the way of the horse and carriage.  Cars and busses and other mass transit systems will be running almost entirely on electricity and battery power if this report is right.  

I have to admit that hearing that news item spurred me to check the story out on-line, and then today I disposed of my oil stocks.  There were only two, and neither was an especially large position, totalling less than $5K.  Both were down from where I'd bought them, but as the saying goes...Pride cometh before a fall.  The stocks were EGL and PWT both on the TSX, Eagle and Penn West respectively.

Oil bulls might see this as part of some conspiracy to convince them to part with their oil stocks at what they consider cheap prices. I've been guilty of that type of thinking many times myself. Sometimes I've been right and other times wrong.  I'm more willing to accept this paper though because it comes from academia as opposed to traditional media.  If this were an analyst providing this info, then I'd be less willing to weight it as strongly as I have.

I don't think its as urgent for players in major oil stocks like ExxonMobils, but for smaller and heavily leveraged companies like the two I owned, I think the worm will turn more quickly.  

100 years ago there were people who thought gasoline run cars would never replace horses, wagons and carriages.  We all know how that worked out.  Sometime last year I had an appointment with a consultant whose office was in a building that was once a thriving business, a carriage works.  

The paper says this will happen in just 8 years....that gas stations will be hard to find and that people will be zipping around in EVs that drive themselves.  Eight years is both a long and a short period of time, and if it does come to pass, no doubt the oil sector will have pops and drops during the run up to this brave new world.  But over the longer haul, whether its eight years or longer, I do think the days of big oil are numbered.  There will always be a need for oil, but if we're all using EVs, whether self driven or not, then predictions of oil at $25 per barrel going forward for the long term are probably close to the mark imo.