Hey, it’s fun to talk about hypotheticals.
So, we find that oil supply will collapse in five years.
There are a few scenarios that immediately come to mind.
Historical: Nazi Germany and South Africa had made a lot of progress by turning coal into Synthetic Oil, which is a particularly dirty ad hoc solution, albeit one that would prevent Armageddon by fighting over the dwindling remains. This kept the Germans in the game in 1944, and it’s clear this could keep emergency systems running, particularly with the ample and unaffected amounts of coal recoverable.
There would be no choice but to sprint to other sources of energy, and coal isn’t one of those choices.
A moonshot level of funding could go into Generation IV Fission, Biodiesels, Fusion Power, or Space Based Solar (Or a combination of the above). While this happening, heavy rationing is imposed. Efficiency improvements, a massive proliferation of solar and wind power plants, all go forward. It’s very possible this simply stretches out supply long enough for less drastic scenarios, so second fun warning here that this probably gets a little unrealistic here too.
Let’s talk about what these options mean.
Gen IV Fission: Chernobyl and Fukushima have made clear that nuclear power, as designed, is unacceptably dangerous. Catastrophic meltdown needs to never happen, and there are interesting ideas that can offer higher levels of safety than previous designs. Nuclear power, however, has a lot of baggage, and it’s not clear that this would be society’s major choice. Desperate people looking for any answers might well decide to just run crude reactors in the middle of nowhere, but in this scenario there are five years left and I don’t think people are going to accept random radiation roulette.
Biodiesels. When the people who created Aftermath: Population Zero created a scenario of Life after Oil, they didn’t humanity five years to figure out what to do. In their concept, Biodiesels emerge as a major source of fuel in ten years. Uncritically copying this figure would make clear that Biodiesels can not save humanity on their own, even with all of humanity on moonshot / National Crisis level of motivation, and so they’re not going to be ready for prime time. There’s no reason farmers couldn’t continue to convert crops into Alcohols, and these blending agents decrease the amount of gasoline actually used, but Alcohol is simply less powerful a fuel and this has many other problems, not least of which is that everyone still needs to eat.
Fusion Power. Well, mankind figured out how to use Fusion Power to make nuclear weapons one hundred times as scary in the 1950s. It’s been a long time. And Fusion power has obvious promise, obvious potential and obvious advantages. While humanity has never gone into ‘moonshot’ levels of funding for Fusion, we have been grinding against this and making gradual improvements. Unlike the other options on this set of choices, Fusion Power is probably the entry that simply falls flat: We don’t have a proof of working concept, and while vastly increased resources would move that forward, actually getting this into a power plant in five years is hands down impossible. Doing it in twenty years would require many things to work successfully where they have not.
Space Based Solar: It’s solar power IN SPACE. Seriously, no weather, no giant piles of dust, dirt or mud to clear off the panels, just uninterrupted power. That said, there is a problem with scale: The world consumes Terawatts of power, however the largest solar power plant generates around 350 Megawatts (1/3,000th of a Terrawatt). SBS is a big bet on launch capacity and means humanity’s answer to peak oil is based on space. It’s not going to do much in five years.
The realities of the scenario is that major R&D milestones will happen, but they’re too far ahead to implement. The most likely answer is a forced transition to renewables, with several of these ideas being rapidly advanced to augment the energy mix that supplies the world.
Heavy rationing of Oil, efficiency improvements, and potentially even a parallel deployment of Natural Gas automobilies and gas station infrastructure probably makes some effect in pushing back the specific date man runs out of fuel.
It attacks the scenario, so I didn’t bake it in, but the UN proceeds to shred various bans on prospecting for resources in Antarctica. A full on frenzy to ‘find more oil’ is assumed to fail, and I recognize that there’s a large difference between the Saudis pumping it into a well designed infrastructure and having to build that same infrastructure to the South Pole, but getting harder, more expensive oil would be an answer.
Much of the world is winners and losers in this trade off. Coal could briefly see some additional use; Natural Gas, Uranium and Lithium (for the required batteries to store peak energy from renewables) win big. Oil, and the nations that rely heavily on procuring it are screwed. Venezuela and Russia are in serious trouble, the Arab Nations implode. This could be war–but also remember that the world got into this position because of a silly agreement. Humanity tends to respond to difficulties WHILE COOPERATING by further cooperation.
Sometimes progress needs a push.