When will oil run out?
Assume that the average increase in consumption over the past ten years is the annual increase in consumption for the next twenty years- then consumption remains at that level until it’s gone.
We don’t know.
Estimates of oil in place vary, but a widely quoted article from the '90s, The End of Cheap Oil (I recently saw another article titled similarly) proclaimed that we’d used about half of what there is, and was in general agreement with industry thinking. Estimates from ten and twenty years earlier pronounced the remaining supply to be much less than that.
Most earlier estimates completely ignore oil shale reserves, because they were not thought to be economically viable to recover. They’re still not, but they’re closer to being viable.
And that touches on the phenomenon of change in efficiency that applies to both consumption and production. Efficiency increases pretty consistently over time. So, the rates of consumption and production in the future are unknown.
We now produce reserves that were thought to be economically unrecoverable just twenty years ago.
And, we keep finding more of the stuff.
In the late 1970’s many people, most notably Paul Erlich, said we had only 20 years left. I’m a huge proponent of exploring alternative energy sources but I think we’ll be ok for a long, ling time.
Haj
Based on what, hope? Just 'cause they were wrong before doesn’t mean they are now. We’ve been using oil faster than we’ve been finding it for some time now, it must run out (or more correctly, cheap oil as we know it today must run out) some time.
If you believe theory between now and 2015. If you believe the US Geological Survey, 50 to 100 years.
What’s for sure is that there is a finite supply of the stuff. Burning it to haul SUVs around the suburbs cannot possibly be the best use of it, no matter how much we have left.
Better to act as if it will run out soon and make a managed transition to a post-oil economy, than have it happen at a time not of our choosing. As side benefits the developed countries would no longer be at the mercy of the Middle East, and there would be less oil money to fund terrorism.
Oil will, of course, never run out - never, never, never.
Oil that we can afford to recover and use in anywhere near the manner we do now is, on the other hand, much more short lived. Depending on whose estimates you base your arguments about reserves, increased ability to find new reserves, ability of the various economies to adjust to the increased costs, how these new (and assumebly harder to get out of the ground) reserves will be harvested, where we stand with oil shales and oil sands, how much more efficient we can make our use of oil products, etc, etc, etc the answer varies all over the place.
The best guesses I am aware of vary from, “Not so very long but through the foreseeable future,” up to “Long enough that I’ll be dead so fuck it.”
Which of course means no one knows, nor does there seem to be much hope of finding out until some major crisis hits us.
Though it should be obvious to everyone in power most everywhere that we should have long since started seeking alternatives. The country/group to come up with, for instance, fussion power is going to be in a far better position than the major oil producing nations ever thought they were going to be in.
Just my $.02, YMMV.
Are you sure about that? I’m too lazy to dig up a cite right now but I’ve heard that wells have been mysteriously refilling, and there is evidence that oil comes from geological, not biological processes.
If you feel like doing a little research, here are a couple of good starting points:
Energy Information Administration
I’ve written too much in the past on this board on this subject to get fired up about doing it again tonight.
And, on preview, are you talking about Tom Gold’s as yet unverified hypothesis of abiogenic methane production, Eleusis? If so, what does that have to do with oil? If not, what are you talking about?
I don’t know 
He’s probably heard about Eugene Island 330. Flaky types think that the resevoir is being refilled by goblins or something. Us unimaginative industry types point to the fact that the reservoir is fault-connected to a slightly deeper reservoir.
This doesn’t really qualify as a cite, but this is basically what I was referring to.
I had a client who had production in Nevada that presented a pretty much normal decline curve from an admittedly unique reservoir for several years (i.e., production rates and pressures gradually declined) and then, suddenly, pressures shot up and production increased. While I didn’t stay on the project long enough to verify it, my hypothesis was that the initial reservoir’s internal pressures had been drawn down enough by production that it allowed a pressure differential between it and an adjacent, untapped, reservoir to breach the barrier between them. Sorta cheap development program there.
Wish that would happen here.
Damn acid stimultion mutter mutter mutter
The more interesting question is:
What in the heck do we do when the oil runs out? :dubious: :smack: :o :eek: :mad: 
“Oil crisis” ain’t gonna describe it, by a deficit of several orders of magnitude.
Maybe that should be a different thread?
Stranger
In my humble opinion I believe its called
We’ve discussed this before here. My brother works in the oil industry and does reservoir modelling. He says there is oodles of the stuff left, with new reserves being regularly discovered. I don’t know the details - they’re likely commercially sensitive anyway. The main issue is whether or not it’s economic to recover. A secondary issue is that some producers are not managing their oilfields properly, with the result that the fields will stop producing oil while still having plenty of oil left. So they’ll have to be left for many years until the oil can again be extracted.
Stranger
More accurately, it doesn’t mean they are or *are not * now. In fact, having been wrong before doesn’t tell us much of anything.
However, we are entitled to learn from experience. My experience suggests that experts pontificating about the future generally don’t know what they’re talking about, and that those who say they have a good idea when the oil will run out are talking hot air.
Frankly, the older you are, the easier it gets to greet these kinds of predictions with the calm contempt they deserve. I can remember back to 1973 and the ‘oil crisis’, when this question was splattered all over the media on a daily basis. Pretty much all of the experts, all of the gurus, all of the self-styled pontificating sound-bite savvy rent-a-quote mouths said the same thing: it’ll be gone by the year 2000, or soon after. This view was promulgated far and wide, and debated with ultra-seriousness throughout the media. What nobody ever had the sense to admit was the truth: “We just don’t know”. Because that doesn’t fill TV shows or papers, and it doesn’t sell books.
It was all a giant heap of speculation and conjecture, with some political posturing thrown in. None of it gave us a clue when the oil will run out, and all the ‘experts’ taking up so much time on the TV and space in the papers were wrong. Dead wrong. As wrong as the King of Wrong Land on ‘National Let’s Be More Wrong Than We’ve Ever Been Before’ day. In lieu of the honest answer, “We just don’t know”, each so-called expert just offers their own pet brand of speculation together with whichever slice of evidence can be puppeted to chime in with their theory.
Will the oil run out? Yes. Is it a good idea to try and use what we have wisely? Yes. Is it a smart move to look at what alternative energy sources we could use? Yes. Do we know when the oil will run out? No.
Yep. And then there’s the issue of energy expended vs. energy received. If (for example) there’s 100 million barrels of oil in an artic reservoir, and we need to burn 80 million barrels (in terms of energy expended) in order to retrieve it, then the effective capacity of the reservoir is only 20 million barrels.
And as others have said, we will never run out of oil. As supply decreases, the price will simply increase to the point where no one wants it anymore (i.e. when alternative energy sources become cheaper).
It is worth noting that the oil will not just “run out” as in here today, gone tomorrow.
Chances are we will see a gradual move to alternative energies, more efficient use and so forth as oil becomes harder to get. Harder to get = more expensive.
Right now people are happy to trundle about in their SUV’s because oil is cheap. Raise the price of a gallon of gas in the US from $2.30/gallon to $5/gallon and you will likely see a LOT fewer SUVs about.
There is still a lot of oil left. I’ll need to look for a cite but IIRC “easy” (read cheap) to get oil would be running low in ~2020. Even then we have a broad gray area as some fields will go offline well before others so the spread will be over a decade or more (give or take). As that happens prices will rise. As prices rise the motivation to go get harder to get oil becomes economically viable and it is done. At some point the economics of alternative energy begins to make more sense. More research dollars go into it and more products arrive. The whole process will likely take decades and chances are most anyone here over 30 won’t live to see a world with no oil (oil can always be produced synthetically too). We will all almost certainly see oil prices go up and this whole process get under way.
I seem to remember a story a long time back for the tin foil hat types that suggested the oil companies bought up patents for anything that smacked of a better, more efficient, non-oil using item. Supposedly they would sit on those till the oil was gone then conveniently come to the rescue with a great new invention just when they are needed. Good stuff for conspiracy nuts.
Note that while more efficient uses of oil are being produced China will likely overwhelm any savings that gets us via their demand which is growing in leaps and bounds.