Estimates of the world’s oil that is left vary widely, but the actual date when we run out is irrelevant to this thread. Let’s say hypothetically in 400 years there is so little oil left that its price is $2,000 a barrel (in today’s dollars), far too expensive to just burn it as fuel. This condition wouldn’t happen overnight; we would probably edge up on it for years.
But how will world society change as a result? Will the governments in the Middle East and elsewhere that depend heavily on oil to survive eventually collapse? If their economies have not diversified by then (here’s looking at you, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Nigeria) will their people starve? Can we assume that more developed nations like the U.S. and Western Europe have seen this situation coming and managed to find renewable sources for a majority of their energy by then? If they do/have not, will their economies collapse, leading to another Great Depression?
What will the world’s economy ultimately look like when oil can no longer be burned as fuel? I think the Middle Eastern countries, if they’re smart, will have developed some sort of solar power. The U.S. has a lot of options; solar, wind farms, hydroelectric, even burning more coal.
I’m just curious about what sorts of changes might be considered inevitable, even if quite far out in the future.
ANother thought: How will the lack of petroleum-based fuels affect how we live day-to-day and how the U.S. military operates? Right now tanks and military jets use either gasoline or special aviation fuels derived from oil. How will they oerate when these things are gone?
You can make synthetic oil from other sources, including plants (such as corn) and coal. It’s not done now, because it’s not economic. But as the price of oil goes up, it becomes economic.
Any resource rich country would be wise to diversify their economy and set up some kind of investment fund. Norway and UAE are pretty good examples. Saudi is coming around, and should get there long before the taps run out, assuming stability, which is admittedly a big assumption.
Giles already mentioned that it’s pretty easy to make fuel out of plants and coal. The U.S. has so much coal that we rarely bother to explore for new sources these days. You can also make fuel out of natural gas. Gas will be the “next big thing” as liquefied natural gas is used to transport stranded gas more often. Qatar, with massive gas reserves, is heavily invested in converting natural gas to diesel fuel.
In the long term, we will meet most transportation needs with electricity, generated by nuclear power I presume. I really don’t understand why the greens hate nuclear power. In my opinion, nuclear generation solved the problem of eventually running out of fossil fuels 50 years ago.
The book “The Bottomless Well” by Huber and Mills is a pretty good read. While I don’t agree with everything in the book, their premise that we will never run out of useable energy is on the mark. (Note: the book is not about oil, don’t let the cover art and title fuel you)
I would agree with them, as long as the Sun is still burning we have an energy source. What I was trying to get at in the OP is that human society and the world economy right now are based utterly upon fossil fuels. Globalization requires transport of massive amounts of freight by ships burning fossil fuels. Nuclear power will enable some substitution, for applications where smply electricity is needed.
But someday, waaaay in the future, there will just be no more coal, no more oil, and no more gas. I realy doubt converting plants into liquid fuel will ever be efficient enough to meet spiraling demand. Does that mean every vehicle you can buy in the year 3000 will be electric, or that we’ll will see globalization roll back because of the skyrocketing cost of transporting freight?
Well, that’s the point. Waaaay before we get to that stage, petroleum products will start climbing in price as they become harder and harder to find. Alternatives will become feasible. I can imagine large-scale cargo ships being fitted with reactors, as aircraft carriers and subs currently are, though it would be a brave (and desperate) shipping company to be the first over that hurdle.
Sure, it’ll cost more than EZ-burning gas. The global economy will have to become more efficient to be able to pay the higher cost while maintaining the lifestyle to which it has become accustomed. That, too, is a gradual process driven by necessity.
Scientific American periodically runs articles on this issue. A recent one had a plan for the energy infrastructure involving “reactor farms” built in isolated areas, transmitting power to city grids using superconducting (i.e. lossless) cables ([url=“http://www.nystar.state.ny.us/pr/06/press26-06.htm”]prototypes are already being tested[/url). Personally, I think wide-scale use of nuclear is the way to go, with the major hurdle being legal obstructions, not engineering problems.
Well on smaller scales ‘we’ have run out of oil at certain times in history, just look at Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, both had their oil supplies cut off. Germany manufactured oil from coal, I’m not sure what the Japanese did.
It has been pointed out that it is very unlikely we will wake up one day to find the wells have all run dry, it’s going to be a increasing cost of oil extraction, which will bring in alternate energy sources, so it will be a gradual shift from oil to other sources. At a certain point the value of oil will lie in it’s chemical properties, not it’s heat value I suspect.
Nuke (including fusion) and geothermal seem to be the longer term winners, and can be used to make a fuel.
The exception to the gradual shift, would be circumstances which would force a incredible burden on our ability to extract oil and make fuel, one such circumstance would be another global scale war. In this instance both sides need tremendous amounts of oil, environmental concerns go by the wayside, and pumps are run full out till destroyed by the enemy, irradiated, captured, or run dry. I know if you over pump a water well you can run dry long before you have depleted the aquifer, you just caused a local ‘cone of depression’ which will be filled in, it just takes time, I assume it’s the same for oil.
As oil become rare direct replacement synthetic fuels will have to do for military operations, which will reduce the effectiveness of the military. Civilian population will only get enough oil needed to keep up the war effort. There would be great hardship for the general population.
Of course, fuel isn’t the only thing crude oil is used for. Plastic account for about 8% of total oil usage (as raw material and processing), according to this site. We’re going to have to find alternative sources of raw materials for plastics and fertilisers, too. Of course, there are alternatives, but I’m assuming we’re talking of a (hypothetical and very distant) future in which these have been exhausted as well.
I think the likelyhood of global war, fought over access to oil, will happen long before we get anywhere close to running out.
I’m not very confident that governments will be sufficiently forward thinking to convert us to non-oil energy in time. Look at how our (US) government is responding to global warming. This is a serious problem that they’re just ignoring and denying. I think they will do the same thing with oil – they’ll ignore converting to non-oil energy until it is too late. (Partially due to the influence of the huge oil companies, who won’t want to lose their cash cow.)
I don’t think the catalyst for this war will be “running out of oil”. I think as soon as the PERCEPTION that we have passed “peak oil” becomes widespread, that governments will begin to panic. “The world is running out of oil. We need to secure our access to sufficient quantities for our industries and consumers. You’ve got oil. We’re going to take it.”
One minor country seizing the oil fields of an oil-rich neighbor could start it. Larger countries would be required to intervene, and the US, Russia, China, and India would likely not be all on the same side. Thus, we’d have the largest countries fighting each other.
The question in my mind is, how much time do we have until “peak oil”? (Or have we already passed it?) And that is part of the problem. We won’t know it’s approaching until we’ve already passed it, or until it’s so close we won’t have sufficient time to convert.
And to end this message on an even grimmer note I don’t think the original question is valid. It’s not “will the oil-producing countries survive”, it’s “will humanity survive”?
(I’m usually NOT this pessimistic. Really…)
I sincerely hope that I am absolutely and completely wrong about this.
I think the 400 years period on the OP is so long that the changes that will occur by then by virtue of progress in all fields will be much more than what could come as a consequence of oil depletion.
And I don’t think it will take 400 years for oil to run out, either.
I think a 50 year scenario would make for a more interesting discussion.
I don’t think the oil will EVER run out. It will simply price itself out of the top spot as a fuel source for personal transport and energy generation. Other technologies will eventually become cost effective as the price of oil rises. When will this happen? I think we are getting fairly close to the break even point now. I figure when we see the price of gas at the pump (in the US) around $10/gal a lot of alternatives will start to kick in. Say…2 decades tops.
There is way more oil still left in the world than the popular press will have people believe. The doom and gloom numbers thrown out usually just reflect the easy to refine crude oil coming out of the Middle East and a few other scattered hot spots around the world but that is far from the only kind.
For4 instance, Canada’s Tar Sands (Alberta) are just now being frantically opened up with frenetic construction as the price other conventional oil eased up past the break even point to extract and refine this messier form of petroleum. This isn’t some second-rate alternative either. Reasonable estimates say that Canada’s Tar Sands alone contain 1.7 trillion barrels of oil which, amazingly, might meet or exceed oil all the conventional oil in the Middle East and the Gulf of Mexico combined. If that isn’t enough, Venezuela has that much in their tar sands as well.
Contrast that with another big oil discovery earlier this year in the Gulf of Mexico. that contains about 15 billion barrels of oil. That discovery really is big but it is dwarfed by the 3 trillion barrels held in the known tar sands.
Even with just those sources, it is unlikely we can use them all in 50 years. Assuming that we did use all reasonable sources of oil in the world and it became economically unfeasible to use, we can still tap our ace in the hole, our coal reserves. Our known coal reserves in the U.S. are currently plotted to last about 300 more years but that assumes that we keep the same mining and extraction techniques in place today. Coal can be used to make almost anything crude oil can including gasoline but it isn’t economical for that purpose today and it is messy.
This is both reassuring and comforting. The good news is that it would be virtually impossible to actually run out of sufficient petroleum sources in our lifetime because there are too many alternative sources that are already known. The bad news that something like the Alberta Tar Sands or using coal to make gasoline would cause price stability for petroleum products and encourage us to keep using the same fuels that we have been.
true, I think I will subscribe to xtisme’s line. We will run out of interest in oil before we run out of oil. Oil will be the fuel of choice for airplanes and not much else as the rising prices of oil make alternatives cost-efficient.
This is quite simply nonsense (unless we are talking about the fantasy scenario of “everybody wakes up one morning and there ain’t no oil no more” rather than the realistic “a long-term trend toward increasing oil prices generates pressure toward conservation and alternatives over the next few decades”).
If these figures are accurate, and this project were brought forward, 265 square miles of these solar cells would meet the total energy requirements for the entire planet. Of course, it would make sense to spread that minimum 265 square miles all around the globe for reasons that should be obvious.
Oil is both a fuel and energy source, so it is far and ahead, but given a energy source, we can store that in a fuel, which will be suitable for vehicular use. Our best long term energy source is nuke, and can over time build up excess capacity to manufacture fuels.
Also what hasn’t been mentioned is natural gas, which we are expected to have far more of then oil, to the point that some suspect that CNG tankers will be constructed to transport that stuff oversees. Modern vehicle’s can run on NG with some modifications, but nothing that would require vehicle replacement.
Very roughly and without much consideration to the rest of the infrastructure needed, what would be the cost of 265 square miles of solar cells? How many Belgiums is that (in surface)?
I doubt anyone could give you even a rough estimate on the cost right now as the process is experimental…give it a few years to have all the kinks worked out and be in production before estimating something like that. It still needs to be proved our for that matter…those figures seem pretty high to me for a full scale system.
As for how many Belgiums it would take…don’t build the things in Western Europe. Try on the plains in Russia. The US could hide 250 square miles of solar cells easily in several of our western states. Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona spring to mind…but really any of the states in the South West would do.
I don’t think the original question is valid. It’s not “will the oil-producing countries survive”, it’s “will humanity survive”?