How long does it take for the earth to produce enough oil to make one liter (or gallon - if you’re not metric!) of petrol (gas to Americans)?
How many liters of petrol do we consume globally per day?
How much oil is left in the world’s oilfields?
OK - here’s the zinger: When are we going to run out?
(Anyone got a solar powered buggy for sale, perhaps?!? )
Please, I’d really like to know how long we can sustain our oil-based way of life.
Lotus
I don’t know the answer to your first question, but I heard just today, from some guy on Englebart’s Stanford online Bootstrap Colloquium (which started 10 weekly sessions today), I think it was this chemist:
http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/engelbart/powerpoint/sld017.htm
, that there are about 40 cubic miles of oil left in the ground; that’s essentially it, at the rate we’re using it up (waaaaaaaayyyyyyy faster than it is being produced). He thought we’d use this up in about 2 or 3 decades.
Ray
An article in Scientific American last year stated with new methods of extracting oil from old fields combined with better techniques in finding new deposits the world has about 100 years of oil left at current usage. After we run out of oil we can switch to coal which we have enough for centuries. Coal can be converted into gasoline, this process is very expensive and cannot be justified now when we have good supplies of oil. If we run out of coal and oil we can extract hydrogen from sea water and burn that forever. Hydrogen is tricky to store and expensive to extract but will last indefinitely. We will always have fuel but it may be more costly in the future.
We’ve used ~850 billion barrels of oil and we’ve got established reserves of about that much, or so some say. Established reserves are estimates, almost always too high; so… we’ll see about that. Some estimate there’s about 150 bbo yet to be found; once again…
Current usage is not a good yardstick, as our usage has continually accelerated, and manny of the third world countries are perched on the edge of their coming industrial revolution (which will usher in an attendant increase in their consumption). The U.S. presently consumes ~20 bo per capita v. 1/2 bo in China - once the mopeds start getting passed around over there consumption will increase dramatically.
I think.
One way or another, you can only expect your energy costs to rise over the long term. Said costs have not kept pace with other increases in the cost of living over the last 20 years, largely due to increases in the efficiency with which we find and produce the stuff. But an increase in demand combined with a shrinking number of exploratory projects will lead to rising energy costs should alternatives not be developed (and they will be as soon as they become cost effective).
When I was in grade school, we were told the world would run out of oil in the mid 1980’s. 
I do NOT expect energy costs to rise over the long term. They have not over the last 2,000 years - why should they start now? Sure, our energy demands are rising very quickly, but our ability to find and extract energy from different sources has gone up even faster.
For an in-depth analysis of this, check out The Ultimate Resource 2, by Julian Simon. Icerigger expressed the general idea- as we start to run out of something, that economic pressure forces us to use new technology to find something else. This “something else” almost always ends up better than what it replaced, and by the time we need it, the technology is cheap.
Arjuna34