Almost half the world’s lithium reserves are in Bolivia, which is run by Evo Morales, a close ally of Hugo Chavez.
So I’m sure they won’t begrudge us their lithium when the oil runs low.
Because building hundreds of plants to create enough synthetic oil from coal to replace drilled oil would cost trillions of dollars. It would also be hellaciously polluting (we’d have to start digging out a serious amount of coal). But if push comes to shove it’s quite doable. And it will be more expensive than the sweet crude we currently enjoy.
Of course, that’s another argument – our broken down bankrupt empire won’t be able to afford all these fancy new toys and we’ll collapse like the USSR attempting it. Which is possible, I guess, but that’s a different issue.
Will the end of cheap oil mean abandoning the suburbs?
Before WWII (and the freeways), people lived in the cities-and usually commuted to work via buses and streetcars and trains. That was the way my grandparents lived, and they did OK.
If this happens, real estate in the inner cities will soar in value-present-day ghetto areas migh become nice areas.
The real question: can businesses move back into the cities again? That would do more to revive the dying urban areas, than anything.
I’ve taken a big hurt in the past betting financially on peak oil scenarios.
If you believe peak oil is proximate, bet on it economically and make yourself a fortune.
I get a chuckle out of people who sit around and wring their hands but don’t bet economically on what their own dire predictions are, be it global warming or peak oil.
We ain’t gonna come anywhere near peak oil for a hundred years. Throw in cracking shale and add as many more years as you like. There may be other reasons we’ll switch off of oil, but peak oil is not one of them.
But if you disagree, just go bet on it. Put your money where your position is.
This is not to say prices won’t spike and decline. That’s called a market. Fool me once in the 70’s; shame on you. Fool me again, shame on me.
Are you serious? You think that if I had a method of making a gas substitute for $2.50 a gallon, I’d have trouble finding investors? Hell, I’d have a line of billionaires begging me to take their money.
This I agree with. I think we still have several decades of cheap oil ahead of us.
That’s why we have a military.
We will run out of light sweet crude in our lifetime. But we will not run out of other various grades of hydrocarbon for several hundred years. When that finally goes, we can still manufacture various fuels from plants, just not as much.
Unlocking all that carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2 may have adverse consequences, but not the “peak oil” stuff people are whining about.
http://news.mongabay.com/2006/0816-wsj.html
So to get 4 million barrels a day domestic oil would require 50 plants at $6 billion each. An investment of $300 billion is big, but not impossible. Done over 5 years that is $60 billion a year. We spend about $40 billion a year on ice cream & beer alone in the US. So its not like it’d break the bank if push came to shove to build 10 plants a year to produce 800k new barrels of oil each year to replace declining supplies.
However I hope we use peak oil to switch to renewables rather than just making coal into oil. That produces more pollution than oil alone.
Probably a lot cheaper to buy it on the open market than start a war for it. Bolivia has concentrations of lithium, but remember that you can refine it from sea water.
Those who can afford will always be able to fly wherever they want (they’ll just be less of them). Air travel will revert to what it was in the '60s. The rest of us will just drive or take the train and vacation closer to home and visit faraway relatives less. While it would be cool to see hybrid-airships become a viable mode of travel it’s more likely that they get restricted to stuff like sightseeing, dinnercruises, and very specialized cargo roles. Perhaps ocean liners make a comeback (not that it’ll help Americans much with our short vacations).
Actually it was a typo…I mean to make the figure higher. Like $4.50 a gallon. It was to illustrate that even if you had a process that you could scale up today (which there are several), you wouldn’t be able to get the capital investors to do it because for now you’d be losing money.
-XT
Would that mean economic ruin for any country/place (especially island ones) who make a lot of money in tourism? Remember, Hawaii is one, and as a state, we’d be “obliged” to help them out in such a case, more likely than not.
Great point but we’ll also have to see a change of migration. In the 50s a migration to the Sunbelt started. Ironically a city like Phoenix is fast growing and went from over 100,000 people in the early 50s to 1.5 million now. Texas now has three cities over 1 million people.
But cities like Detroit, Toledo, Duluth, Cleveland and especially Buffalo are being abandoned, even though they have huge amounts of water and cheap electricity. Why? Because people don’t want to live where it’s cold
It isn’t no co-incidence the rise of Phoenix and Texas cities as well as Florida came with the application of A/C. It’d be hard for the same numbers of people that live there now to do so in the future without cheap levels of water and A/C.
So you may also have to have a migration back to cooler climates in areas with cheap electricity as well.
So right now nobody’s doing it because it’s way too expensive. But in the future, when we need to do it, it’ll be really cheap.
Which is why I’m into buggy whips big time!
There seems to be such a confusion around markets and how they work here.
Currently, estimates are that shale oil and oil from tar sands–with essentially unlimited reserves–is profitable at well under $50 per barrel over the long term. So what the markets do is make sure there will be a market, and then implement the infrastructure to make the oil efficiently.
Ditto w/ coal.
We are not going to run out of oil. Period. Oil is never going to zoom to some astronomically high price and stay there. Period.
We’ll make decisions about what fuels to burn, and how to manage the ecological consequences. I’m one of the skeptics that thinks by the time current sources create a scarcity, the AGW scare will be over. If it’s not, we’ll just figure out how to sequester the carbon, or swap over to alternative sources, or whatever.
But one thing that will NOT happen is that we’ll run out of oil or that oil will become too expensive to provide. Those economics are already settled in favor of indefinite long-term oil at well under $100 per barrel to produce. The market will decide, but it won’t be based on a (long-term) short supply.
Never? We’ll never run out of oil?
We produce about thirty billion barrels of oil a year. You’re saying that a thousand years from now, we’ll still be producing thirty billion barrles a year at under a hundred dollars a barrel?
I’m not sure you have a grasp on economics. We will not run out of oil because as it gets more expensive alternatives will be used instead and more expensive extraction technology becomes feasible. Will we always have oil at the price it is now? No. No more than we can wander in the stream beds and find gold nuggets. As the demand for gold rose recently, mines that were once not profitable were re-opened because they were now profitable. The same will happen with oil as we exploit oil shales and tar sands. That doesn’t mean we have an infinite supply of oil… As it becomes more expensive we will use less of it and as ut becomes more expensive we will find new deposits of it that are profitable to exploit. This will reach equilibrium. The idea that there is a “cliff” is just preposterous. Don’t you think that as oil becomes more scarce the price will gradually rise? Why would prices stay low until a crisis?
Life will change, as it has in the past. Not everyone expects to have a few acres to grow crops on any more. We don’t allow people to hunt or fish without restriction any longer. In the future the idea of flying thousands of miles for a few days business or vacation will seem silly. Building a factory 10s of miles from public transportation won’t work and we will return to the pattern we had in the past of work being near where people lived, or people living near their work.
When I was a kid I on;y got in a car once a week to visit my grandparents. I walked to school, and the library, and church, and the grocery store. In that same neighborhood the local groceries have been replaced by a more central one that requires people to drive there. Maybe we’ll go back to that model. Maybe milk delivery will come back.
I’m not saying there will be utopia, but the idea that we will wake up one morning, realize that we have gone past the peak of oil production, and the world will go haywire is as silly as the Y2K and 2012 fears.
The problem is that global demand is 80 million barrels a day. It will take time to develop alternative sources or alternative fuels. That isn’t to say it’ll ‘never’ happen, but you cannot flip a switch and start producing an extra 2 million barrels a day of tar sand oil overnight. The talk about opening up arctic reserves for oil brought up the fact that it’d take 10+ years to start getting the oil.
Why would the threat of AGW go away? A potential risk is a runaway positive feedback loop involving melting of reflective glaciers or release of methane from permafrost.