I am not saying there is an infinite amount of oil but there is much more than your older cites suggest. Things have changed a great deal in the last 8 years in terms of oil and natural gas reserves and production. Most of this has come from better extraction technology - especially hydraulic fracturing (fracking) that that seemed to come out of nowhere and actually reversed the earlier peak oil claims at least for the next few decades. The world isn’t going to run out of oil in 45 years. We have the opposite problem at the moment. There is too much oil being produced and it is making it unprofitable to extract it from some of the newer sources but that oil and much more will still be there when the price-demand curve warrants it again. If those sources start to become exhausted, there are enormous reserves still left in the tar sands of Canada and other parts of the world that are only partially being tapped so far because it is more expensive than more readily available sources.
I am not saying that the world won’t start to run out of oil 100 - several hundred years from now but hopefully it will just be a minor need at that point because other energy technologies will have matured and supplanted oil.
hydraulic fracturing is scraping the bottom of the barrel, no pun intended.
I am sure that there is oil down below the surface of the oceans but really, isn’t it time for us to get serious and look really hard for lasting energy sources-? We could take the uranium out of our atomic bomb stockpiles and this would give us the transition time we need.
Then again if you have a better idea, I am all ears as is the rest of the human race
All of that is a political and environmental argument rather than a purely factual one. I am not opposed to either because it is obvious that the world currently relies too much on fossil fuels to meet energy demands but plenty of smart people are working on that and making decent progress.
My only point is that it isn’t true that we are going to run out of oil or any other fossil fuels in the next few decades even using currently known sources (and there are undoubtedly many more waiting to be found if we really need them). In the absolute worst case, coal can be converted to other forms of fossil fuels including gasoline and diesel fuel using known methods that are moderately expensive but scale up quite well. The supply of coal in the U.S. alone is enough to last at least another several hundred - 1,000 years with rising demand and no progress on any other energy source. I am not advocating it for obvious reasons but it is simply not true that we are simply going to run out of oil (or other fossil fuels) any time soon.
I am all for nuclear energy but, ironically, it is the environmental movement that has largely shut down that path in the U.S. at shot itself in the foot in the process. New nuclear power plants require decades to build even without any opposition so they aren’t even a viable solution in the medium-term.
Why don’t we look at the last 15 times the end of oil has been predicted and see what we did then?
Oil won’t be with us forever, but the end most likely will be a slow, steady decline, with time to adapt and overcome. We’ve been doing so for a while and we’ll continue to do so.
Millions of people have been talking about this globally for decades. Ideas are not something we are short of.
Or is your point that we anonymous members of a message board are responsible? Why aren’t you responsible instead? What would you do if we gave you the answer?
To the OP:
So called reserves have nothing to do with the actual amount of oil in the ground: it is more an accounting concept to monetize the oil in oilfields the company has drilling rights to.
Fossil fuels are a finite resource but nowhere near as finite as “reserves” would suggest.
I believe our future automobiles will be power by batteries. I envision a car pulling up to a filling station, a robotic arm removes the discharged battery and installs a charged one. The charge should last you a week or two or say 150 miles.
What happened to hydropower? It was the original large scale source of electricity, and is still a great option in many places. Over the past 30 years, a lot of dams have been dismantled for political reasons.
I envision a car being plugged into your house current and charging overnight in your garage. You could even install a power station that supplies 240 vAC for quicker charging. Add a conventional gasoline engine to power the car and recharge the batteries when the charge goes low. You could call it a plug-in hybrid.
I think running coach was making the point that it makes more sense to plug your car in at home than to go to a filling station and swap your discharged battery for a fresh one each week or two.
Electrochemical batteries like that used in the Tesla are very large and heavy; the 85 kWh battery for the high performance version of the Telsa Model S is abut 1200 lbm (~550 kg) and its integrated shelf forms the bottom structure of the chassis. The cost is somewhere between 30% and 50% of the production cost of the vehicle alone. The most recent lithium-ion polymer matrix (LiPo) batteries are within about half an order of magnitude of the best efficiency we ever expect to achieve from rechargeable electrochemical batteries. Electric vehicles certainly represent a niche of future transportation modes for short to mid range commuters, but is not a global replacement for all transportation needs, and the question of where the additional energy will come from and what improvements to the existing, patched together, and often at the edge of faltering US power grid infrastructure still remains. See more discussion in [THREAD=611155]this thread[/THREAD].
Hydropower only works in areas with favorable geography and large rivers. It consumes land, displacing native flora and fauna, and often interferes with natural downstream ecosystems. Dams are often more expensive to construct and maintain that estimated, and there is considerable embedded energy in the construction and materials of a dam.
Hydroelectric is not very scaleable and certainly not to the extent of replacing petroleum even if you could figure out how to store the energy in a form useful for transportation.