Good - I wondered if this topic would arise again.
A “no-brainer”? Not quite, I fear. From what I’ve posted before in here
The tar sands are cool and all, but not that great, nor is there nearly as much as people say there is. If you want to focus on an enormous resource of hydrocarbons that can be economically extracted, look to the Orinoco fields of Venezuela, and Orimulsion[sup]TM[/sup].
This was the subject of an article in Scientific American a year or so ago. The same guy who predicted, correctly, in the 60s that US oil production would peak in the early 70s (and was widely derided) has predicted that world production would peak in 2008. He might be off by a year or two, but the explanation was reasonably convincing. Then what? Well, the tar sands are one answer, but they are a good bit more expensive to work and refine. People have been saying for years that the US oil price should be allowed/encouraged to rise to say $5/gal. The price in Japan is over 100Y/liter, IIRC, which is in that ball park and it hasn’t stopped Japanese from driving, although I don’t think you see nearly as many SUVs (and is that bad?) I think that in constant dollars, gas is at or near a historic low and a rise shouldn’t hurt too badly. Of course, a sudden rise should be avoided, but that is the inevitable result of the current so-called government’s head in the sand approach. In fact, what we are likely to see is govenments attempting to keep the price of gas down with a resulting shortage, lines at the pumps, some sort of rationing, all of you who are over 40 have been there, done that. And people will start to get small efficient cars again, as they did in the 70s. And then prices will rise. And all those people whose lives are predicated on driving 100 miles a day will painfully adjust their lifesyles, move closer to town, find activities for their kids closer to home, force their subdivision to build sidewalks, get rid of zoning that enforces rigid segregation of shopping and living (and working) and all those other insanities that the carheads have forced on the rest of us. Then maybe wind power, solar power, even fusion, will come into their own. And I guess eventually cars will be powered by some form of hydrogen that is generated at the wind farms or solar farms or fusion reactors. And we will have new sorts of problems from them that we scarcely imagine today.
In the meantime, imagine all those rich Albertans.
I am going to respond to several people here.
Ringo
Agreed, but back to the discussion.
Wumpus I agree about the penchant for hysteria.
I am not one to be caught up in hysteria, or to worry about the future. But what concerned me the most about the article was not that I would have to move closer to where I work but the impact on the agricultural world. Now I am a geek for my local government, but I live in farming country, and I grew up on a farm, so I know, to some degree, the energy uses that farming requires.
Sure it is very easy to say, let the prices climb and the market will adjust, and we will have to drive smaller cars. But what happens when it costs 3 times as much to heat in winter? 4 times as much to buy food? 3 times as much to drive a car? I don’t know about you folks, but my paycheque is stretched pretty far already.
IANAE so my opinions are probably not worth mentioning. I certainly hope that ataraxy22 is wrong. But even the most optimistic response I have seen here is saying we have 40+ years. Which is not a hell of a lot of time, especially since I have kids.
Hari Seldon
Nothing will make me more upset 
You’ve obviously done some research on this, Anthracite. I’m curious: is the “input energy” in the same form as the “output energy”, and does that have any bearing on the equation? My thought is that, for instance, using 1KWh of hydro-electric energy to get 1KWh of oil would be a good swap, the latter being more transportable, storable, etc.
One avenue of potential oil replacement that hasn’t been mentioned here is solar panels in space. We’re not there technically, of course, and transmission to earth would be a problem (beaming microwaves to a receiver-array in a desert has been suggested), but there’s lots of space available! The extreme case of this approach is a Dyson Sphere, in which a hollow sphere is constructed to enclose the sun and capture all its energy output… but now we’re really getting into science fiction.
If you want an example of a resource that became more and more expensive until its use almost vanished, consider artisan labor.
Go have a look at an old house some time, and look at the way it was built. Look at the handcrafted wood, the custom carvings on the ceiling, the way the walls are built, etc. We CAN’T build houses like that any more. We can’t afford to. I was watching “This Old House” the other day, and he mentioned that the balustrade for the stairway on the house they were working on was hand crafted and took six months to make.
Now, can you imagine having a a carpenter work for six months on a RAILING? If we built houses like that today, they’d all cost millions of dollars.
So what happened when the cost of labor started to rise? I’m sure that if you checked the newspapers in the late 1800’s - early 1900’s, you could find all sorts of handwringing article about how the price of labor was going to lead to a housing crisis. But what happened?
A) People started building less ornate houses.
B) New construction methods allowed for much less labor intensive construction. Think drywall, vinyl flooring, manufactured trusses, machine-made carpeting, and plastics.
C) Tools improved so that craftsmen could work faster and better. Power tools, new metals for blades, etc. This raised their price even further (since they could work more efficiently), but their real, hourly cost went down because they could do more in an hour.
That’s the way it will go with oil. As it becomes more scarce, A) We’ll start to use less of it, B) We will seek and use alternatives to oil, and C) The oil that we use will be used more efficiently.
We could always harvest oil from teenagers’ faces.
And exactly how many miles do you get from a gallon of vindication? 
Spain. Wood. Armada. No more Armada. No more wood. Changed Spanish society permanently by ending a long and quite successful era of massive seafaring and contributed to her decline as world power. Her lack of sea domination also forced her into some far away land based conflicts she had rather not had to fight, that made it worse. She adapted though and became a land based and coastal economy, it took a few hundred years, but she’s almost standing up again.
I doubt we will see that happen when oil dwindles, the world economy is not set under the same strain of competition and isolation as the Spanish was. It is it also most unlikely that global oil resources are struck by the same kind of disaster as the loss of the Armada was. More importantly we’re pretty inventive little animals when we set ourselves at it and we’re already working on it.
[tinfoil hat on]
If that doesn’t work we might get lucky and have the Alpha Omegans from Sirius the Dog Star come back and teach us the free energy trick again… like they did with the Pyramid builders in Egypt before they went over the Atlantic to build the massive space beacon at Techachulapichu which so unfortunately sank in the Atlantis disaster. Let’s just hope we come up with something before the big meteor strikes.
[tinfoil hat off]
Sparc
Ah! A very good point. Unfortunately, the sources I have say that the input energy is mult-source - some of it being electric (crushers, conveyors, running the reduction plants), but a lot of it is in oil/refined petroleum form (bulldozers, diggers, stacker/reclaimers, running miscellaneous heavy equipment, etc.) My sources do not break it down to that level of detail, so I cannot say if it is near 50/50, or heavily weighted towards one end or the other. It’s a good point, however.