That is, assuming that someone is able to determine more-or-less precisely when 1) the current supply of oil will run out and 2) when it’s likely that any amount of exploration will not uncover any more oil reserves of significance, how long would it take for alternate energy strategies to be set in place?
Of course, the answer depends on the length of time between the determination is made and when the oil runs out (i.e. ten years, 50 years, 200 years, etc.), but my questions are
Is it possible to convert the world’s production from oil-based to something-else based (that is, can we find substitutes for plastics or cars?)?
What would the most likely replacement for these things be? Going back to paper bags? Biodesiel/soy-based fuel? Solar/Wind-generated electricity (I understand that most of the electrical power produced in the US today is from coal-fired plants, so no oil probably wouldn’t affect this).
How long would this replacement take? Could it be accomplished in less than a decade? Would it take several generations and during the meantime everyone would be severely inconvienenced?
This topic has been discussed many times, mostly in GD. Your question has one flawed premise, that oil will just run out suddenly and that will mark an instant shift from an oil based economy to whatever replaces it. Oil won’t run out all at once and it’s a moot point if it ever runs out at all. What is already happening is that as oil reserves dwindle it will be more expensive to extract it. The era of cheap oil is going to end but it will happen gradually. How long it takes is still a subject of debate. Alternative energy sources which seem too expensive now will be competetive with expensive oil. There may reach a point where oil requires more energy to extract than it provides so technically it may never run out, we’ll just stop trying to get it.
Padeye has it; what will happen is oil will slowly become more and more expensive, and at the same time alternative energy sources, like biomass fuels or hydrogen fuel cells, will slowly look more and more attractive. Eventually, oil will be too expensive for the general public to bother with it.
I recently read somewhere about an analogy between oil and pistachio nuts. It goes something like this:
Suppose you are in a large closed room that is knee deep in pistachio nuts, which you love to eat. You pick up a nut, eat it, and throw the shell on the floor. When will you run out of pistachios (which are unquestionably a finite resource in the room)?
Answer: Never, because it will get harder and harder for you to locate a pistachio as the empty shells pile up in the room. Eventually, it will be not worth your while to continue looking, though there are surely pistachios left to find.
Back to oil–as the price of oil rises, it will eventually become economically attractive to start exploiting oil from areas that are not currently economically viable, such as the Canadian tar sands. There’s as lot of oil in them there tar sands.
So even though oil is also a finite resource, like the pistachio nuts, we are never going to run out of it. It will simply become more and more expensive as it becomes more and more difficult to produce.
BTW, as stated in the OP, oil has many other uses besides it use as fuel, such as feedstock for plastics and other chemical manufacturing. As the price of oil continues to rise, it will ultimately become too valuable to burn. Long before this point is reached, we will be using alternative energy sources.
That’s not an assumption that I made, read the first sentence again. Also, the pistachio analogy is good, but I also considered that in the first sentence.
Maybe my question should have been phrased, “what would the lead time for developing/implementing alternate strategies if we learned that there would be no more oil at X point in the future.”
Padeye, I’ll dig through GD and see if I can find anything, but I wanted to make my post clear, although if there was any information that one would like to add, please post.
Judging by the way Ft McMurray’s booming, it’s already plenty economically viable to extract oil from the tar sands. But it’s true that it’s much, much more expensive to extract oil there than it is to pull it out from under Saudi Arabia. Still, the cost is coming down as technologies are developed to improve how it’s done.
Actually after re-reading it 3x it seems like exactly the assumption you made.
Anyhoo (I use this term just because it peeves some people off)
As pointed out the earth will never run out of oil till the Earth itself is no more. But as also pointed out, as oil gets more expensive to extract, other fuels are comparativly cheaper. Now most of them currently depend on the price of oil (biofuel, in a recent Cecil post, require 2 gal of oil to make 1 gal of biofuel, so if the price of oil goes up so does biofuel. Nuke fuel is somewhat independant and competetive to oil right now, as oil prices increase, nuke power looks more attractive (too bad we arn’t building any nuke plants ) It may aslo brign on a revolution of electric and hydrogen cars.
Coal is also plentiful and cheap, but considered ‘dirty’ (though clean coal tech has come a long way), A sudden decrease in oil supply I would wag would result in a sudden increase in coal, which we (USA) have a great supply of).
I did answer your question as it was stated. The flaw in the initial assumptionmakes a factual answer difficult to impossible. The lead time to develop new technology will depend on the motivation to do so. While oil is cheap there is little financial incentive to do intensive research that can’t return a profit. As oil becomes more expensive it will gradually become more profitable to research alternate energy sources.
You also may want to draw a distinction between true energy sources and alternate fuels. Hydrogen is a fuel but not an alternative energy source as it isn’t found in nature apart from that contained in hydrocarbon fuels and biomass.
) It may aslo brign on a revolution of electric and hydrogen cars.