Is the problem with oil that we’re running out of it under the ground*, or that we’re using it faster than we can get it out of the ground & refined into gasoline?
Also - while the auto industry seems to be entering into the post-gasoline era kicking and screaming (witness the high number of electric vehicles that haven’t yet made it past the “concept” stage), I’m wondering about the airline industry: are the airplane manufacturers looking into ways to power airplanes once oil dries up (or becomes cost-prohibitive to use any more)?
*I understand that oil is not infinite, and that eventually we’ll have used the last of it. I’m just curious if we’re running out of it faster than we initially thought.
Detroit wants to make gasoline engined cars, because it has a multi-billion dollar investment in its conventional vehicles. Re-tooling for the mass-production of electric vehicles would make that investment worthless.
Plus, electricvehicles are not yet commercially viable-witness the TESLA-how many people can affor a $104,000 car?
Gasoline is still relatively cheap-it is going to take prices >$7.00/gallon, to make alternate vehicles feasible.
I don’t want to send this thread to Great Debates, but…
Tesla is working on more affordable cars, at least down the road. The $104,000 Roadster is more of a Wow - Look at that! model meant to impress and build a brand and pave the way for more realistic electric cars, IMHO.
There’s at least one alcohol-fueled plane – IIRC, it’s a Mooney single-engine prop. I saw it a year or two ago on the Science Channel. Also, Virgin Atlantic has done at least one test of a biofuel in one of its jets; I don’t recall if the fuel was 100% petroleum-free.
Gas prices are high because gas is refined from crude oil, and the ‘in ground’ supply is much less an issue versus the ‘above ground supply’.
China and India are growing rapidly with a need for oil. Demand is way up, yet oil fields are geared to produce X amount of oil, and refineries are geared up to refine X amount. Oil, like anything else, is more expensive because demand is up and supplies are short of demand.
Imagine various people bidding on oil. Those selling the oil are going to sell it to the highest bidder. Don’t expect them to say that they feel benevolent today and are going to sell it to the lower bidders.
The United States has oil that it does not tap and has a need to refine more oil but hasn’t built a refinery in decades. Combine that with an aversion to nuke power, and too little oil is supporting too much infrastructure. To make electric cars viable economincally, nuke power, solar and hydro electric power, combined with clean coal, are going to have to be the base for powerplants.
Yes I knew all that, except for the bit about the above ground vs. below ground. That is the gist of my question - are we running out below ground? (at least, running out at an unsustainable rate)?
Yes, in the sense that easy-to-extract oil reserves are getting harder to find, and the ones we have are being pumped as fast as their owners (Saudi Arabia, for example) will allow. There’s lots more oil in harder-to-extract formations - tar sands, offshore, etc.
So, we’re not really running out of oil, we’re running out of cheap oil.
The issue at hand is the above-ground supply, which is limited by the number of oil fields and their production rate, combined with the refining rate, combined with an abstract component: risk and forecasting.
It’s a loaded question when you ask about the in-ground supply. There is enough of it that it doesn’t affect gas prices right now…sort of. Short-term issues are not related to in-ground supply. I mean, all the issues at the pump are essentially from an inability to get it up and refined.
However, we all know that the bigger long-term issue is that there is a limited in-ground supply in limited areas, and those areas are often tinderboxes and this makes a lot of people nervous, which means they are willing to pay a little more if they forecast these tinderboxes to have turmoil to the point that production is hurt.
Short-term, we have refining and pumping limits aggravated by regular increase in demand plus abnormal increases in demand thanks to places like India and China.
Long-term we have issues because there is a finite amount of oil, and the further into this oil experiment we get, the more it costs to get the oil. It ain’t all sitting in some natural undeground holding tank. It’s gonna cost a bunch more just to get it. Margins on oil sales aren’t great, because oil companies have to pump most of their profits back into research, exploration, etc.
If by unsustainable you mean “extracting it faster than it is produced”, then yes. The natural processes which make petroleum are so incredibly slow that it is, for human purposes, finite. If by unsustainable you mean “will there be greater demand for petroleum than the extraction, refining, and transportation infrastructure’s ability to supply”, maybe. As it stands now (except in cases of war, embargo, or natural disaster), if there is a customer who wants petroleum or one of its derivatives, there is a seller who can supply it in a timely fashion, in the amount requested. This may not always be the case. With luck, we will transition away from fossil hydrocarbons to more sustainable (first definition) energy sources, before the situation becomes unsustainable (second definition). My guess is that diesel and gasoline made from fossil hydrocarbons will be replaced mostly by diesel and methane made from algae, garbage, and agricultural waste.
Bear in mind that ‘reserves’ means the volume of hydrocarbons that can be extracted economically. So, an increase in price per barrel due to increased demand or speculation will result in an increase in the reserves of an oil company, solely because previously unprofitable projects now meet the minimum economic criteria. This relationship is not linear- a 10% rise inthe price of crude does not mean you have 10% more reserves. Consider, even with the recent large increase in the price of oil, all of the majors (companies that both extract and refine petroleum) continue to have declining reserves, ie. the amount they extract from the ground is greater than the amount of new reserves discovered through exploration plus the amount of reserves ‘created’ through being able to support higher finding costs. The only way they can end the year with more petroleum than they started is to acquire independent producers, who by and large have reserve growth.
This is a canard. During those decades, the capacity of US refineries has increased. The number of refineries is completely irrelevant. The capacity is what mainly matters. This is a favorite of “certain media types”.
Here’s an article that talks about a controversial attempt at closing a refinery that was actually making money.