What Should Oil Refiners Sell in the Age of Electric Vehicles?

S-OIL’s GooDoil has become giant.

The cute and familiar character that once greeted consumers at gas stations now appears as a figure larger than the city itself. A giant shadow falls across the urban skyline at dawn. Then GooDoil appears, moving through the city, the sea and industrial complexes. On the palm of his hand sit semiconductors, aerospace and shipbuilding.

At the end of the video, one sentence appears.

SHINING TOMORROW.

It is S-OIL’s new advertising campaign for its 50th anniversary. In the advertisement, which began airing on September 15, S-OIL places GooDoil at the center of the message: “S-OIL’s 50th anniversary, now the real beginning.” The company says the campaign is intended to show its next 50 years of future energy and the vision that will follow the completion of the Shaheen Project.

The first thought that came to me when I saw the advertisement was simple.

Why did GooDoil have to become this big?

Nothing in corporate advertising is accidental. The size of a character, the background of a scene and a single line of copy all carry messages. If GooDoil was made larger than the city, there must be an intention behind it.

Of course, one could say simply that the scale was enlarged because this is a 50th anniversary advertisement.

But the more one watches the advertisement, the more something else becomes visible. It is not only GooDoil’s size that has changed. The world he is looking at has changed too.

In the past, the most representative place where GooDoil met consumers was the gas station. Cars drove in, filled up with fuel and returned to the road. There, GooDoil was the familiar face connecting a refining company with consumers.

But in this advertisement, GooDoil no longer stays at the gas station. He passes through cities, crosses the sea and looks across industrial complexes. In his hand are Korea’s advanced manufacturing industries: semiconductors, aerospace and shipbuilding.

It feels almost as if S-OIL is saying that it now wants to tell a story larger than gas stations.

That leads to another question.

Why now?

Following that question leads beyond one company’s advertising campaign and into a more fundamental transformation now facing the entire refining industry.

The Next 50 Years of a Company That Once Fueled Cars

For a long time, the way to explain an oil refiner was relatively simple.

It imported crude oil, refined it at a refinery, and supplied petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuel to the market. As the number of cars increased and logistics expanded, fuel consumption rose, and refiners grew along with that flow.

The automotive industry and the refining industry grew together for a long time.

Cars had internal combustion engines. Internal combustion engines needed gasoline or diesel. More cars on the road meant more fuel demand.

But that old growth formula is now beginning to shake.

The easiest change to feel is the rise of electric vehicles.

According to the International Energy Agency, the global fleet of electric vehicles displaced around 1.7 million barrels of oil per day in 2025. The IEA’s Global EV Outlook 2026 projects that, under both the Current Policies Scenario and the Stated Policies Scenario, oil demand displaced by EVs will rise to around 5 million barrels per day by 2030.

The rise of electric vehicles is a shift in the automotive industry. But for the refining industry, it also means that one of its most stable demand bases over several decades is changing.

At the same time, renewable energy such as solar and wind power is expanding, and carbon-emissions reduction and carbon neutrality have become important management issues for companies.

For refiners, this naturally leads to one question.

Can oil companies continue to grow in the same way in an age when electric vehicles are spreading?

Put more fundamentally, the question becomes this:

If the growth rate of the era in which energy is obtained by burning fuel begins to change, what kind of company should an oil refiner become?

Of course, oil will not disappear overnight. Aviation, shipping, logistics and countless industrial sites still require vast amounts of energy. The global economy is likely to depend on oil for a considerable period. The energy transition will not move at the same speed in every industry.

That is why the important question is not simply whether oil will disappear.

The more important question is where oil can be used to create higher value.

The IEA also expects growth in global oil demand to slow sharply toward 2030, while alternative technologies such as electric vehicles increasingly affect the transport sector. At the same time, petrochemicals are expected to remain an important area supporting oil demand. For refiners, this means the way oil is used must be reconsidered.

If past competition focused on how efficiently crude oil could be converted into gasoline and diesel, future competition may increasingly depend on how much high value can be created from the same crude oil and industrial infrastructure.

Put simply, oil must be seen not only as a fuel to be burned, but also as a feedstock for building industry.

Why Petrochemicals Still Matter in the Age of Electric Vehicles

This is where petrochemicals become more important.

Just because cars become electric does not mean the materials needed to make cars disappear. In fact, as cars become more like giant electronic devices, lightweight materials, insulation materials, films and high-performance chemical products may become even more important.

The same applies to semiconductors, aerospace and shipbuilding. Data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities also require countless chemical feedstocks and materials. When we look only at finished products, this is not always visible. But if we move down the industrial value chain, petrochemicals are connected to far more areas than one might expect. From tires, synthetic fibers, detergents and packaging to industrial plastics and high-performance materials, the range of petrochemical uses is broad.

Seen in that light, the meaning of the semiconductors, aerospace and shipbuilding industries placed on GooDoil’s palm changes.

This does not need to be interpreted as S-OIL saying it will make semiconductors or build spacecraft. Rather, the message is that energy and materials exist at the foundation of these advanced industries too. This also suggests that the consumer touchpoints of refining companies may change.

Until now, the most direct place where consumers encountered oil companies was the gas station. They saw the company logo, checked the price of fuel and filled their cars with gasoline or diesel.

In the future, however, consumers may increasingly use products that began with a refining company without even knowing it.

They may encounter those products as materials in cars, chemical feedstocks used in semiconductors and advanced manufacturing, fuel for aircraft and ships, or raw materials for countless industrial and consumer goods.

In other words, the presence of refining companies is moving from the gas pump to the foundation of industry.

And that is exactly where S-OIL’s Shaheen Project stands.

Why Is Shaheen a Falcon?

The name “Shaheen” is interesting in itself.

S-OIL explains that Shaheen means “falcon” in Arabic, more specifically the peregrine falcon. Considering that S-OIL’s largest shareholder is Saudi Aramco, the name naturally evokes a Middle Eastern cultural background.

S-OIL has also connected the name Shaheen to the image of a brave falcon taking flight in its own content.

But it is also interesting to view the name from the perspective of business strategy.

A falcon is not an animal that moves only on the ground. It flies high and looks across a wider territory.

S-OIL grew on the foundation of refining. Now it is expanding the horizon of its business into petrochemicals through a large-scale project named Shaheen. Whether intended or not, the name feels well suited to the company’s current direction.

This does not mean abandoning the ground of the existing refining business. It is closer to looking toward broader industries and higher added value on top of that foundation.

The Shaheen Project is a large-scale petrochemical project in which S-OIL is investing roughly KRW 9.26 trillion. One of its core facilities is a steam cracker with annual ethylene production capacity of 1.8 million tons. S-OIL describes Shaheen as the largest petrochemical investment project in Korea’s history.

There is another technology worth noting.

TC2C.

TC2C stands for Thermal Crude-to-Chemicals. In simple terms, it is a technology that converts crude oil and low-value streams from the refining process into petrochemical feedstocks such as naphtha and LPG through a simplified separation and catalytic process. These feedstocks are then sent to a steam cracker, where they become basic chemicals such as ethylene and propylene, and later lead to products such as polyethylene and other petrochemical materials.

What matters is yield.

According to S-OIL, TC2C can increase the yield of streams used as petrochemical feedstock by three to four times compared with existing facilities. In other words, the same crude oil can be used not only to produce fuels such as gasoline and diesel, but also to redirect more of it into petrochemical feedstocks. That is why the Shaheen Project is seen not simply as a factory expansion, but as a project that broadens S-OIL’s business structure from refining to chemicals.

S-OIL expects the share of petrochemical products in its total production to rise from the existing 12% to around 25% after the Shaheen Project.

That makes the name TC2C itself feel symbolic.

Crude to Chemicals.

In just three words, it compresses the direction in which the business structure of a refining company is moving.

In the past, the important question was how efficiently crude oil could be converted into fuels such as gasoline and diesel. Now the question is how much more petrochemical feedstock and high-value products can be made from the same raw material.

In that sense, the Shaheen Project is difficult to view merely as an investment that adds one large factory. It is closer to a strategic choice showing where S-OIL intends to find its next engine of growth.

But How Can This Be Explained to Consumers?

This is where the challenge begins.

How can stories such as the Shaheen Project and TC2C be explained to ordinary consumers?

For S-OIL employees and industry insiders, this may not be difficult. It can be explained through numbers: an investment of more than KRW 9 trillion, production capacity, process efficiency, cost competitiveness and the share of petrochemical products. For investors, numbers matter. For industry participants, technology and facilities matter.

But a TV advertisement marking the 50th anniversary cannot show the structure of a steam cracker or a process diagram of TC2C. If it starts explaining ethylene and propylene production volumes with graphs, it becomes closer to an investor-relations presentation than an advertisement.

That is why translation is needed.

The language of corporate strategy must be translated into language consumers can understand.

In this advertisement, I think GooDoil plays the role of that translator.

GooDoil is familiar, but the Shaheen Project is unfamiliar.

GooDoil is easy, but petrochemicals are difficult.

GooDoil is friendly, but a large-scale industrial facility requiring more than KRW 9 trillion in investment is vast and complex.

So S-OIL ultimately enlarged GooDoil in order to connect these two worlds. It kept the character’s familiarity, but expanded the size of the world through which he moves.

If GooDoil in the past stayed at the consumer touchpoint of the gas station, this GooDoil now encompasses the city, the sea and industry as a whole.

As the character’s body grows, the scope of the business the company wants to explain has grown as well.

When Shaheen Takes Flight, Tomorrow Shines

From this perspective, the campaign slogan “SHINING TOMORROW” is also interesting. S-OIL explains that it used the slogan as an expression evoking the Shaheen Project.

SHAHEEN and SHINING.

The sounds are strangely similar. But as one follows the advertisement as a whole, it does not feel like a simple wordplay.

In the name Shaheen, there is a falcon taking flight. In SHINING TOMORROW, there is the bright future toward which that falcon flies. And between them stands a giant GooDoil holding future industries in his palm.

This is the moment when the language of industry turns into the language of the brand.

Inside the company, the project may be explained through investment size, production volume, cost competitiveness and process efficiency. To consumers, it is delivered as images: a rising falcon, a shining tomorrow and a giant GooDoil.

This, to me, is the most interesting point in the campaign. It does not force complicated technology into a simplified explanation. Instead, it changes the direction of that technology and investment into a single image.

Shaheen contains flight.

SHINING TOMORROW contains light.

And on the hand of the enlarged GooDoil sit future industries.

Three different images ultimately look in the same direction.

What Kind of Company Should an Oil Refiner Become?

Of course, this is not a question only for S-OIL. The entire energy industry is moving through a complex transition.

On one side, electric vehicles are spreading quickly. On the other, renewable energy such as solar and wind is expanding. Companies must reduce carbon emissions. In industries where electrification is difficult, such as aviation and shipping, new energies that can replace existing fuels must be found.

Hydrogen, ammonia, biofuels, sustainable aviation fuel and circular-economy technologies that reuse waste plastics as feedstock are also emerging as new business areas.

As these changes continue, future energy companies will become harder to explain through a single product.

Refining companies are expanding into petrochemicals and high-value materials. Chemical companies are aiming to become advanced-materials companies. Power companies are expanding into hydrogen and energy solutions. Even automakers now describe themselves not simply as car manufacturers, but as mobility companies.

As industrial boundaries blur, corporate identity must change too.

That is why many traditional companies now stand before a similar question.

What kind of company are we going to be?

For refiners, this question is especially difficult.

If they speak too strongly about the energy transition, it may look as if they are denying their current core business. If they speak only about the existing oil business, they may look like companies falling behind future change.

The real strategy is far more complicated than choosing one of the two.

Refiners must maintain the competitiveness of their current refining businesses while expanding into petrochemicals and high-value materials. At the same time, they must prepare for low-carbon energy and new fuel markets.

In the end, this is not a choice between oil and green energy. It is closer to redesigning the entire business portfolio.

That is why it may be necessary to be cautious about explaining the future of the refining industry simply as “post-oil.”

The Shaheen Project, for example, is not a strategy of abandoning oil. It is a strategy of drawing higher value out of oil and existing refining infrastructure. Rather than ending with the conversion of crude oil into fuel to be burned, it seeks to turn crude into chemical feedstocks and high-value products that can be supplied across industry.

Refiners also already possess considerable assets. Large refineries, ports, storage facilities, global feedstock procurement networks, logistics systems and decades of accumulated process-operation capabilities cannot be built overnight.

Future competitiveness may therefore not come only from abandoning everything from the past and starting anew. It may come instead from reconnecting and reconfiguring existing assets for a new industrial environment.

In that sense, the question for refiners must also change.

Not “What comes after oil?”

But “Into what kind of value-production platform can the vast industrial infrastructure built around oil be transformed?”

The Shaheen Project can be seen as one answer S-OIL has offered to that question.

Advertising Does Not Prove the Future

Of course, there is a clear boundary here.

An advertisement does not prove a company’s future competitiveness.

No matter how giant GooDoil becomes, the image will not last if actual business competitiveness does not follow.

How much the Shaheen Project will change S-OIL’s profit structure, and how much competitiveness it can secure in the fiercely competitive global petrochemical market, will have to be confirmed after actual operation begins.

Petrochemicals are not an industry where growth is guaranteed. There are many variables, including capacity expansion and oversupply concerns in China and elsewhere, economic cycles, feedstock prices and environmental regulation.

The plan to increase petrochemical feedstock yield by three to four times through TC2C technology and significantly expand the share of petrochemicals in the