One guy’s notion

[sdholloway56]

The approx. 1.5mbd shortfall in daily US production is nearly half the entire global reduction from all sources.

There is no policy or change in policy keep those companies from getting drilling back to 2019 levels, immediately.

[erikjohnson61y]

You are right that a reduction in oil usage would balance the market, but that is the function of price. At the right price, supply and demand will balance. If demand is inelastic, prices can go much higher. If people conserve, not so much.

Covering Kansas with 2021-caliber solar panels would generate about 6.5e10 million MH-Hrs of electricity (20% efficiency). That's 7,514,000MW actual generating capacity. Global electricity use is about 1.6e11MW-Hrs, or 18,265,000MW of generating capacity (if none is ever shut down for maintenance or repairs). So you're in the ballpark, but would actually need about 2.4 Kansas' to make it work. Of course, covering Kansas, Oklahoma, and much of Arkansas takes away valuable crop ground, which was part of the point of getting off oil, wasn't it?   Yes, deserts are good for this sort of thing but then you need more panels to accommodate the transmission losses moving the juice to population centers.

At $1/watt for the panel cost, the panels alone will be about $17 trillion. For installed cost, double it to $34 trillion. Then there's the grid....  AND batteries or some other form of on-demand storage  AND of course this just provides the existing power from today's electric power plants - haven't touched hydrocarbon transportation fuels yet, so you'll need a lot more capacity than that to power the world off the sun. AOC may have been right about something - her $93 trillion figure wasn't that far off.

Current global solar module manufacturing capacity is about 180GW/year, so it would only take 101 years at current manufacturing rate to make that many panels (oops, panels have a useful life of 25-30 years so we need to triple global manufacturing capacity just to keep up with a 30-year cycle...). Of course, we do have hydro and nuclear in that total that (presumably) doesn't need to be replaced, but again we do need more if we're going to power EV's with solar cells. So if we can do it at $1500 billion per year over 100 years, that ought to be just about right!

[sdholloway56]

That is a global calculation, btw, although some come up with an area closer to Spain, approximately twice as large.

Anyway, here, there and everywhere, people who managed to snag  something due to inheritance, good judgement, luck, or whatever (or more importantly, will argue on behalf of people with money to pay them) will work furiously to make sh!it that ain’t true up.

Just the way it works. Get a hobby, enjoy your good luck.