Does anyone doubt every drop of oil left in the ground is going to burned sooner or later?

[BrainGlutton]

This thread, (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=557920) about Obama's decision to open offshore drilling, got me thinking. The whole debate about global-warming policy is based on the idea that we have to limit greenhouse-gas emissions to halt or slow the process. But is that even possible? I'm sure we eventually will have to move to some non-petroleum-based energy sources to run industrial civilization, or else lose industrial civilization -- but that that is only because the petroleum will run out, there being only a finite amount of it buried in the Earth's crust. But is there any chance we can or will make the switch before the petroleum runs out? If not, isn't trying to limit greenhouse-gas emissions kind of futile? It seems to me inevitable that every drop of oil and every chunk of coal and even all the petroleum extractable from tar sands and oil shale is going to be burned, and release its waste-products into the air, sooner or later, possibly within our lifetimes; except for what is used to make plastics and fertilizers -- and we might even get hard up enough to start burning plastic or recycling it into fuel. What am I missing here?

[John Mace]

Pretty much.

Drill, baby, drill! Now, that's change you can believe in...

[Shagnasty]

A few of us have brought up that point before. If the U.S. doesn't use it, I am sure China and India will be more than happy to pick up the slack. It makes the whole exercise kind of futile from one perspective. The situation is a lot more complicated than that though. Most people focus their attention on the supply of certain types of crude oil which really isn't the point. We don't actually use crude oil, we use petroleum based products like gasoline and plastics. High quality crude oil is one of the easiest ways to create those but it certainly isn't the only way. The manufacturing process to make gasoline and plastics from tar sands and even coal are already well-developed. It is just a matter of building the right infrastructure to deal with a different type of raw material and that has already started to happen. The U.S. alone has such vast coal reserves that they might has well be considered infinite for our purposes. Some estimates suggest we have hundreds or maybe over a 1000 year supply known right now. Similarly, the Alberta Tar Sands in Canada may hold as much petroleum as the entire Middle-East.

That is all good news in terms of supply and bad news for certain environmental perspectives. There is no shortage of petroleum in the world and won't be in any reasonable time-frame. What will happen is that petroleum based products like gasoline will get somewhat more expensive and alternative energies will become more competitive with it as the technology and price-points improve.

[Mr. Excellent]

[url=http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=557920] What am I missing here?

[unhelpful snark] Economics. [/unhelpful snark]

No one is ever going to burn the very last drop of oil, or lump of coal - the supplies will never be wholly exhausted. The more of these resources we extract, the more difficult it will become to extract the remainder - we'll need to invest more resources, and develop new technologies, to extract them. As soon as alternative fuels become consistently less expensive to exploit than traditional fossil fuels, we'll switch - and that'll happen long, long before we actually run out of oil or coal.

[DCnDC]

No one is ever going to burn the very last drop of oil, or lump of coal - the supplies will never be wholly exhausted. The more of these resources we extract, the more difficult it will become to extract the remainder - we'll need to invest more resources, and develop new technologies, to extract them. As soon as alternative fuels become consistently less expensive to exploit than traditional fossil fuels, we'll switch - and that'll happen long, long before we actually run out of oil or coal.

Exactly. It's not feasible, even if possible, to get every last drop of oil out of the ground. The percentage of recoverable oil in a given well can be as much as 80% to as little as 10%, but it is never 100% due to depth, lack of pressure, and mostly unprofitability.

[John Mace]

Exactly. It's not feasible, even if possible, to get every last drop of oil out of the ground. The percentage of recoverable oil in a given well can be as much as 80% to as little as 10%, but it is never 100% due to depth, lack of pressure, and mostly unprofitability.

I think the OP didn't mean it literally.

[BrainGlutton]

I think the OP didn't mean it literally.

I meant, will we more or less stop burning fossil fuels soon enough to make a significant difference in the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere? Defining "significant" as significant to the pace of anthropogenic climate change. (And yes, I do believe that is real and that the products of fossil-fuel combustion are the main cause.)

[Strassia]

One thing missing is time. There is a big difference between burning all the oil in a hundred years and burning it all in a thousand years. It is not possible for us to stop climate change. The Earth will experience fluctuations in weather patterns for as long as there is an atmosphere. What we may be able to affect is the rate of change.

[DCnDC]

...isn't trying to limit greenhouse-gas emissions kind of futile? It seems to me inevitable that every drop of oil and every chunk of coal and even all the petroleum extractable from tar sands and oil shale is going to be burned, and release its waste-products into the air, sooner or later, possibly within our lifetimes; except for what is used to make plastics and fertilizers -- and we might even get hard up enough to start burning plastic or recycling it into fuel. What am I missing here?

You have a point. If not us someone is going to burn it. If we were smart we would invest as much capital as possible into biodiesel from algae or whatever, and screw trying to squeeze the last few drops of fossil fuel out of this lemon. "Clean coal" is total bullshit. We're polishing the brass on the Titanic, when we should be building a new boat.

[athelas]

Corollary: does anyone doubt that sooner or later, every last chunk of iron ore will be mined sooner or later? What does this imply for policy?

[billfish678]

One thing missing is time. There is a big difference between burning all the oil in a hundred years and burning it all in a thousand years.

Yes and no.

The CO2 we put in the atmosphere is going to be there awhile. Not long in geological terms, but IIRC its in the high hundreds to few thousand years.

So, if we end up burning nearly all we can dig up (coal,oil, natural gas, tar sands...) we better be doing it over many thousands of years for CO2 to not get "too" high.

[DCnDC]

Corollary: does anyone doubt that sooner or later, every last chunk of iron ore will be mined sooner or later? What does this imply for policy?

The obvious major difference is that iron is recyclable, and iron usage has been stable for 30 years in the US, as per this article (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=recycling-could-replace-m). I don't believe at those numbers iron is going to be an issue in the US for a while; fortunately the world's biggest consumer of iron is also it's biggest producer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_iron_production) by a large margin.

[Strassia]

Yes and no.

The CO2 we put in the atmosphere is going to be there awhile. Not long in geological terms, but IIRC its in the high hundreds to few thousand years.

So, if we end up burning nearly all we can dig up (coal,oil, natural gas, tar sands...) we better be doing it over many thousands of years for CO2 to not get "too" high.

True barring revolutionary technology to sequester existing CO2, but it misses my point. Say burning all fossil fuel reserves would increase levels X% leading to a new average temperature Y degrees higher than present. Unless Y is somehow too high to support life (which I doubt), we will be much better off if the change is gradual then if it is quick. Thinking of just one parameter, if sea level is going to rise a total of 20 meters before equilibrium is reached, would you rather it go up one meter every 400 years or every 4 years?

[billfish678]

True barring revolutionary technology to sequester existing CO2, but it misses my point. Say burning all fossil fuel reserves would increase levels X% leading to a new average temperature Y degrees higher than present. Unless Y is somehow too high to support life (which I doubt), we will be much better off if the change is gradual then if it is quick. Thinking of just one parameter, if sea level is going to rise a total of 20 meters before equilibrium is reached, would you rather it go up one meter every 400 years or every 4 years?

I agree with that. And you missed my point.

MY POINT was that what gets put in the atmosphere STAYS there awhile. So, if you want the PEAK to be 5 meters rather than say 20 meters in your example, you better be burning most of what we have much slower than a hundred years give or take. Nature will take the extra CO2 outa the atmosphere eventually but it takes a fair bit of time when measured in human terms.

Or to phrase it another way. Its how fast things get bad (your point), but its also how bad bad gets (my point).

[Wesley Clark]

For grid electricity we either recently entered or are soon entering a period where non-polluting technologies like wind, geothermal and solar are cheaper than coal. Wind is already cheaper and is supposed to be 20% of grid energy by 2030 and solar 10%. No idea about geothermal, or if nuclear will ever be cost effective.

With transportation, I don't know if anything is on the horizon that offers the convenience & safety of hydrocarbons with a lower price. The energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline from grid electricity costs about $0.70. But you are limited to a 40 mile range and you have to pay to buy and replace the batteries.

[Gangster Octopus]

For grid electricity we either recently entered or are soon entering a period where non-polluting technologies like wind, geothermal and solar are cheaper than coal. Wind is already cheaper and is supposed to be 20% of grid energy by 2030 and solar 10%. No idea about geothermal, or if nuclear will ever be cost effective.

With transportation, I don't know if anything is on the horizon that offers the convenience & safety of hydrocarbons with a lower price. The energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline from grid electricity costs about $0.70. But you are limited to a 40 mile range and you have to pay to buy and replace the batteries.

Wind is already cheaper? Cite please. Of course wind doesn't provide energy when needed, to get that kind of flexibility requires pretty expensive and inefficent storage techologies.

[Strassia]

For grid electricity we either recently entered or are soon entering a period where non-polluting technologies like wind, geothermal and solar are cheaper than coal. Wind is already cheaper and is supposed to be 20% of grid energy by 2030 and solar 10%. No idea about geothermal, or if nuclear will ever be cost effective.

With transportation, I don't know if anything is on the horizon that offers the convenience & safety of hydrocarbons with a lower price. The energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline from grid electricity costs about $0.70. But you are limited to a 40 mile range and you have to pay to buy and replace the batteries.

This may be true now, but even with current technology it won't stay true for long. Tesla Motors (still a small player) is taking orders for $50k full electric sedan (http://www.teslamotors.com/models/) with a significantly longer range (they claim 300, I would believe at least 150). $50k is much higher than most people are willing to pay, but they are a still a custom shop. If they can start really mass producing, or if one of the big companies builds something similar, I would expect the prices to come down in a few years. I would still expect a price premium, but even with my Prius, I am spending about $1500 a year on fuel. If I could have full size sedan with lower fuel costs I would pay a premium over the $23k I paid for my Prius when next I go car shopping.

[Sam Stone]

For grid electricity we either recently entered or are soon entering a period where non-polluting technologies like wind, geothermal and solar are cheaper than coal. Wind is already cheaper and is supposed to be 20% of grid energy by 2030 and solar 10%. No idea about geothermal, or if nuclear will ever be cost effective.


I'd like to see a cite that says wind is cheaper than coal. And not just a cite for one particular wind farm that might be located in the best wind area in the country - a cite showing that large-scale use of wind is cheaper than coal. I like wind power, but the last time I looked it still wasn't that close.

Nonetheless, there's a clear trend that alternatives to oil are getting cheaper, while oil is getting more expensive. At some point, the curves will cross, and then you'll see a widespread shift to other energy sources. When exactly this happens is unpredictable - a breakthrough in alternative energy or a sudden dwindling of oil reserves could happen at almost any time, or perhaps not for fifty years.

With transportation, I don't know if anything is on the horizon that offers the convenience & safety of hydrocarbons with a lower price. The energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline from grid electricity costs about $0.70. But you are limited to a 40 mile range and you have to pay to buy and replace the batteries.

Plug-in hybrid would increase the fleet average fuel economy to at least 100mpg, and maybe even 200 mpg, because 80% of all trips take place within 20 miles of the vehicle's home base. However, you're not going to see plug-in hybrid make up more than a few percentage points of the vehicle market for at least a couple of decades.

But in terms of greenhouse gases, petroleum makes up only about 35% of our energy, and a slightly higher percentage of greenhouse gases. So even if oil use declined, it won't have as big an effect on greenhouse gases as you'd think.

[Evil Captor]

Waiting for the smooth talk and coverup when the first oil slick hits Florida shores ...

[Wesley Clark]

Wind is already cheaper? Cite please. Of course wind doesn't provide energy when needed, to get that kind of flexibility requires pretty expensive and inefficent storage techologies.

http://www.coldenergy.com/difference.htm

Coal - around 38% of the global electricity demand. 4.8 - 5.5 Cents/kW-h


Wind - Currently supplies approximately 1.4% of the global electricity demand. Wind is considered to be about 30% reliable. 4.0 - 6.0 Cents/kW-h


http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/news/news_detail.cfm?id=929

[Wesley Clark]

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/archive/ieo06/special_topics.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power

Cost per unit of energy produced was estimated in 2006 to be comparable to the cost of new generating capacity in the US for coal and natural gas: wind cost was estimated at $55.80 per MW·h, coal at $53.10/MW·h and natural gas at $52.50.[92]



Those were 2006 numbers. The costs should have come down. At the very least it is on parity with coal, and should be cheaper in areas with reliable high wind.

[Cat Whisperer]

I don't really dispute anything that's been said so far; the one point I think is missing is quality of life - the masses will not willingly reduce their quality of life for something so nebulous and future-based as don't crap up the planet so future humans can still live on it. That has to be factored into all of these discussions.

[billfish678]

Those were 2006 numbers. The costs should have come down. At the very least it is on parity with coal, and should be cheaper in areas with reliable high wind.

Your assuming the places they are putting the wind generators RIGHT now are the crappy wind places and they are saving the best for last.


A reasonable person might suspect the best places would be used first.

[BrainGlutton]

Your assuming the places they are putting the wind generators RIGHT now are the crappy wind places and they are saving the best for last.


A reasonable person might suspect the best places would be used first.

NIMBYism might get in the way of that.

[billfish678]

NIMBYism might get in the way of that.


And thats going to get BETTER near term?

[Sam Stone]

http://www.coldenergy.com/difference.htm

Coal - around 38% of the global electricity demand. 4.8 - 5.5 Cents/kW-h


Wind - Currently supplies approximately 1.4% of the global electricity demand. Wind is considered to be about 30% reliable. 4.0 - 6.0 Cents/kW-h


http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/news/news_detail.cfm?id=929

Your last link says wind energy contracts are pricing out at more than 11 cents per kwh.

Those were 2006 numbers. The costs should have come down. At the very least it is on parity with coal, and should be cheaper in areas with reliable high wind.

There's no reason to believe the cost will come down. Really, the main way in which wind power can be made cheaper is to locate in areas of high, steady wind, or to build gigantic wind turbines, as some of the offshore installations do. The turbines themselves are a relatively mature technology, with no anticipated breakthroughs in cost that I know of. There are some potential efficiency gains in the generator hardware using advanced materials, but nothing I know of that will seriously bend the cost curve.

The main driver of cost in wind installations is the capital investment. The last decade was a 'golden period' for capital investment, with artificially low interest rates and a glut of capital searching for investment opportunities. This is no longer the case. Capital isn't flowing well, and when it does, it will probably bring higher interest rates with it. In fact, the installed cost of wind went UP in 2007 in the UK as compared to 2006.

The other reason costs will probably go up is that right now, the current wind power stations are taking up the low-hanging fruit - the areas of best wind and best locations with respect to consumers of the power. The price of wind power increases steeply as you move into areas with lower average wind speeds or less stable wind speed, or move into more remote areas where transmission line losses are more substantial. Just a couple of mph less in average wind speed can double the cost of wind power, as can increases in wind speed variability.

I agree that the best wind sites can produce supplemental power that's reasonably competitive with fossil fuels. But if you ever want wind to be more than 2-5% of total power, you will have to start building in sub-optimal locations, and the price of wind power will go up dramatically.

In the end, we'll see some countries get maybe 10-20% of their power from wind - these would be the smaller countries with access to excellent offshore winds that can drive large turbines, or countries with plenty of natural areas of high constant wind. Denmark is the only country today which is close to 20%, and they've been building wind turbines frantically for decades. The world average for wind power will likely never go above 10%.

The real wild card in the bunch is solar. Unlike wind, there is still room for major breakthroughs in solar. With thin-film technology, nanomaterials and other experimental technologies on the horizon, there's potential for solar power that's cheap and ubiquitous. Solar shingles could replace regular shingles on homes and feed power to the grid. Nanomaterial films on car bodies could collect solar power by day and provide illumination at night. Theoretically, the windows of our homes could be coated with materials that absorb sunlight by day, and use the energy to become lighting panels at night, storing the power needed inside the window itself using nanotube capacitors. We could even see roadbeds with solar power generating materials embedded in them one day.

But no one knows where or when this will happen, so you can't plan for it.

[Sage Rat]

Even ignoring China, India, and Russia, eventually Africa and South America are going to have the same energy needs as the US and Europe. The only currently known and practical source of major grid energy that doesn't cause CO2 release is Nuclear Energy. But if you can develop nuclear power plants, you can essentially develop Nuclear Bombs. So when all of Africa and South America are using just as much energy as us in 50 to 100 years, it's a pretty good bet that they'll be burning coal because we'd rather people not have nuclear energy.

Even if the US starts to convert its coal plants to nuclear, that's a process that will still take 50 years, and none of Russia, China, India, nor Europe is going to be on a particular faster schedule than us to make that transition.

For at least the next 50 to 100 years, the amount of CO2 being released will continue to rise. That's a decently safe bet. If we truly want to curb the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we'd be better to work on massive air scrubbers than in trying to move to alternate energy sources.

[XT]

Weird...I posted to this thread from my phone earlier and it vanished. Ah well, I think most of what I said has already been covered better by other posters.

Does anyone doubt every drop of oil left in the ground is going to burned sooner or later?

It depends...if you mean in the next several billion years, they yeah...it will eventually all get burned up. If you mean in the next few thousand, then no...not a chance. What will happen is that eventually oil will be scarce enough that it will price itself out of the market as a general all purpose energy source, and we'll move on to something else. At that point, there will still be plenty of oil left, but it won't really be worth the cost to exploit it anymore, and so it will just sit there, untapped.

So, I guess the answer (assuming you aren't talking about when the sun starts to expand after all the hydrogen is used up) is, yeah...I doubt every drop will be burned up.

I meant, will we more or less stop burning fossil fuels soon enough to make a significant difference in the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere? Defining "significant" as significant to the pace of anthropogenic climate change. (And yes, I do believe that is real and that the products of fossil-fuel combustion are the main cause.)

Well...that's a totally different question. I'd have to say the answer is probably 'no', since I seriously doubt we'll be able to significantly stop using coal (I realize your OP was about oil, but coal is the real CO2 producer, IMHO, and will be with us much longer than oil IMHO) in any kind of near term time frame...especially since nuclear is pretty much off the table in the near term in the US, and China (the current leader in CO2 production as of, IIRC, 2007) is building coal plants like mad (so is India for that matter). Wind? Solar? They aren't happening in the short or medium term (maybe not ever anything but bit players)...if the technology was ready for prime time then China and India who are ramping up their energy infrastructure right now would be building those instead of cheap coal plants...and Europe would be moving to a large percentage of their current energy mix to wind/solar (instead of a few percentage points).

-XT

[Ludovic]

Does anyone doubt every drop of oil left in the ground is going to burned sooner or later? Nope, mi a pretty cool guy, I drill holes in the ground and doesn't afraid of anything!

[Lumpy]

So when all of Africa and South America are using just as much energy as us in 50 to 100 years, it's a pretty good bet that they'll be burning coal because we'd rather people not have nuclear energy.In 50 to 100 years "we" will have little to say about it because there will be third or fourth-generation nuclear powers willing to sell nuclear technology to anyone who isn't their direct enemy and can pay for it. So for example the Congo will get the technical assistance to build nuclear plants from Vietnam, which will have gotten it from Bangladesh, which will have gotten it from Syria... you get the idea.

[Wesley Clark]

Your assuming the places they are putting the wind generators RIGHT now are the crappy wind places and they are saving the best for last.


A reasonable person might suspect the best places would be used first.

Yep, that is what I was getting at. I think people should put windmills where there is no wind. Why don't you tell me what else a reasonable person might suspect.

[Shagnasty]

Yep, that is what I was getting at. I think people should put windmills where there is no wind. Why don't you tell me what else a reasonable person might suspect.

If the late Ted Kennedy were still around, he could have used that line in a debate and maybe even pulled it off. He hated the idea of windmills off the coast of Cape Cod because it would spoil the view.

[Sage Rat]

In 50 to 100 years "we" will have little to say about it because there will be third or fourth-generation nuclear powers willing to sell nuclear technology to anyone who isn't their direct enemy and can pay for it. So for example the Congo will get the technical assistance to build nuclear plants from Vietnam, which will have gotten it from Bangladesh, which will have gotten it from Syria... you get the idea.
Possible. But the question is whether you really want to bank on that compared to solving the problem directly. And if you create scrubbers that can deal with the excess, that gives us some amount of control over the weather. Take for example that even if we deal with CO2 we discover that the amount of heat produced by humanity is raising the Earth's temperature as well. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to lower the CO2 to below where it was? Or say that we want to cool Africa so that it's not as arid, then we could put all our scrubbers on the African continent, figuring that it will create a localized pocket of cooler air. I'd put that down as a handy thing to be able to do.

[billfish678]

Yep, that is what I was getting at. I think people should put windmills where there is no wind. Why don't you tell me what else a reasonable person might suspect.

You said wind power should get cheaper if they put it in reliable wind areas.

WTF wouldnt they be doing that NOW? Either they are already doing that and its not gonna get much cheaper (at least due to location considerations), or they are saving the better locations for later (which sounds pretty stupid/unlikely to me).

Of course Sam Stone made the same point much better earlier.

[R. P. McMurphy]

There's plenty of oil out there, just like there is plenty of water out there.

The question becomes at what cost can it be made usable? A lot of oil is locked in shale, sand and coal. It can be extracted but the cost is prohibitive. Likewise, there is a lot of water out there but it is saline and not useful for human consumption and irrigation of crops. Yes, it can be recovered but at what cost? "Water, water everywhere but nary a drop to drink."

The problem is that we seem to be reaching the point that the "easy oil" has been used at a level that is not sustainable in the long run. The cost of going after the more costly oil will have serious economic effects. As with water, if you use up all of your easy, apparent resources then you have to find a source that is much more expensive. Do we want to get to the point that our food supply is being grown from desalinated water from the Pacific Ocean instead of clean water from the Colorado River? Consider the cost.

It's not conceivable that the last drop of oil will be extracted. There are trillions of barrels in the Rockies shale. There is probably more in the Alberta oil sands. However, based on current technology the cost is prohibitive. Right now it is more efficient to bore deep into the ocean with highly sophisticated and very expensive rigs than to extract from the shale and the sands. That tell you a lot about the economics.

Those with foresight aren't predicting the day when oil will be tapped out. They are planning for the day when enough alternative sources have diminished the need for oil that the increased cost of obtaining it will not have a major impact on the economy.

[pancakes3]

some thoughts before i address the OP:
1)there is a huge difference between coal and oil. coal reserves mean about as much as uranium deposits when compared to oil.
2)ditto for wind
3)the energy dilemma is so diverse. are we talking about oil dependency? global warming? ecological preservation? sustainability? there are different answers to each individual problem and no panacea that will address all issues.
4)Europe and China are actually pretty good about implementing new-gen nuclear technology. They've actually got pebble bed test reactors up and running whereas the US hasn't broken ground on a new nuclear site since TMI, though licenses are being passed recently.

ok.

we drill for oil because it's there. until it runs out, we're going to keep on drilling. as the supply dwindles, prices will go up. when that cost outweighs having an electric car, people will stop using oil unless absolutely necessary. most likely oil plants would be the first to go. cars would be phased out. plastics after that. however there ARE/WILL BE ALTERNATIVES for all things oil-based. they will be integrated. it's not like we'll be drilling and simultaneously and suddenly all the oil reserves dry up. there will be signs, and there will be adjustments. don't worry yourself over the pending oil-pocolypse. the invisible hand will take care of it all.

[Really Not All That Bright]

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/archive/ieo06/special_topics.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power

Cost per unit of energy produced was estimated in 2006 to be comparable to the cost of new generating capacity in the US for coal and natural gas: wind cost was estimated at $55.80 per MW·h, coal at $53.10/MW·h and natural gas at $52.50.[92]

Those were 2006 numbers. The costs should have come down. At the very least it is on parity with coal, and should be cheaper in areas with reliable high wind.
Those numbers take into account current federal subsidies for power generation, which is a bit unfair since the subsidies aren't the same for each form of power generation.

This (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_generated_by_different_sources) table shows the cost as calculated by Australian government, independent of subsidies.

The upshot is that conventional coal fired stations cost $(AU)28-38 per megawatt-hour; gasified coal costs $53-98; carbon sequestered production costs $64-106.

Wind costs $75.

Bear in mind that Australia is the world's largest exporter of coal (and fifth-largest producer overall) so coal prices are significantly lower there.