When will the world run out of petroleum?

Great Debates
1

I feel like raking up the muck tonight. :wink:
As we all know, petroleum is not a renewable resource. The processes by which petroleum is made take millions of years (we think) to occur. Yet this non-renewable resource is still the number one source of energy for the industrialized world. As existing oil wells run dry, new oil deposits must continually be found – but we can’t keep finding new crude oil forever. Sooner or later, we will have discovered, and used up, every crude oil deposit that exists on the planet.

At our present and/or projected rate of crude oil consumption, how long will it be before the Earth simply runs out of petroleum?

2

This was covered here somewhat by myself and others.

3

I don’t have a thorough knowledge of how this works but I believe known world-wide oil field reserves tend to vary according to the current state of technology. As time passes, oil exploration has tended to happen where before it was impracticable (and at a rate related to projected consumption estimates).

One interesting side issue to the recent US / China confrontation is that the South China Sea is believed to be one giant oil field that the Chinese are beginning to look at with renewed interest as their industries expand exponentially. Coincidentally – or not – the South Atlantic (off the Falkland Islands) is also believed to hold very considerable reserves.

In terms of the internal combustion engine, we already have workable alternatives. Ford, for example, has a nice little car that runs on gas and produces pure drinkable water out of the exhaust. The tank is still a little bulky but they’re almost there with that issue.

The key to producing alternatives in a capitalist economy is to provide the right economic environment. For example, battery technology stalled completely until the advent of cell / mobile phones. Once the means of regaining initial investment in research and development can be seen i.e. the product is ready to go, technological developments suddenly abound.

Fords R&D in relation to car engines has been ‘fueled’ by the high price of gas / petrol in Europe – they now see investing R&D in potentially cheaper alternatives as viable and sound business practice.

However in the US, much depends on whether that market mechanism is allowed to kick in. You need higher oil prices (achieved via greater taxation) in order for alternatives to be viable. Given the relationship between the President and the oil industry that seems more than a little unlikely.

The view in Europe is that the higher taxation represents more closely the true cost of oil given the environmental consequences and, also, acts as a spur to efficiency (as well as releasing the above mentioned market mechanism). President Bush is not minded to believe there are any environmental consequences – which is handy for those who financially supported his election campaigns. Europe, of course, believes US gas prices are artificially low. That’s an issue in itself but the potential of another market driven consideration: ‘unfair competition’ may well lead to additional ramifications.

The likely area of friction / confrontation will be trade as US produced goods are increasingly considered to be subsidised by the EC. The WTO is probably going to enjoy interesting times.

Hope I offered some kind of answer, sorry for the leftish / hippy / eco warrior diversion towards the end, man.

4

As far as actually running out goes, it’s not going to happen. (Well, not in the next couple of centuries anyway.) My belief is that the combination of ecological concerns and increasing prices will reduce the demand.

I saw a quote several years ago, can’t remember who, that said “Our grandchildren will be amazed that we pumped this very valuable stuff out of the ground and set fire to it.” I think that is probably true.

Best Regards.

Testy.

5

Well, lessee… we’ll have fuel-cell cars which will use a tiny fraction of gasoline, hopefully we’ll find a way to make nuclear fusion a viable source of power within the next couple o’ decades… those two right there would theoretically reduce consumption significantly.

Realistically, though, it’ll take a long time to get both those inventions onto the common market and replace conventional means. Especially in third-world countries…

I’m curious… how successful have artificial-gasoline endeavors been? Or have there not been any successful ones?

6

SPOOFE Bo Diddly wrote:

During World War II, Nazi Germany made “synthetic crude oil” out of coal. The process was hideously inefficient, though – I believe Hitler was only using it as a stopgap measure until he could take over the oil fields in other countries.

7

London_Calling wrote:

What kind of “gas” does it run on? Hydrogen gas? Natural gas? Gasoline?

If the only exhaust product is water, it SOUNDS like the car runs on hydrogen. How does the tank store the hydrogen?

8

Sounds like a hydrogen fuel cell to me, tracer (and I apologize for thinking you were tomndebb, or vice versa, or something, on the other thread, btw :)). Here’s an interesting little newsclip from ENN on DaimlerChrysler’s version of the car.

As far as fusion goes, I think it’s an exciting prospect but I have difficulty finding really current and realistic assessments that a non-physicist can understand. Does anyone know whether the PPPL Tokamak has even reached breakeven yet? Should I ask in GQ? Does this whole thread belong in GQ?

9

Kimstu wrote:

Ah, here’s the relevant quote from the article regarding the fuel tank:

Liquid hydrogen? Yikes! “Cold” doesn’t begin to describe what’s needed to keep liquid hydrogen in liquid form. Hydrogen only condenses out into a liquid when the temperature is below 20 degrees Kelvin. That’s 20 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. To put that temperature in perspective, liquid nitrogen is 79 Kelvin, frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice) is about 200 Kelvin, and water freezes at 273 Kelvin.

And if the temperature in the liquid hydrogen tank ever got above 20 Kelvin, the liquid hydrogen would turn into a gas and the tank would probably burst. The gaseous hydrogen thus released into our oxygen-rich atmosphere stands a good chance of exploding immediately. Oh, the humanity!

10

In a word:

Huh?

You are suggesting here that a “market mechanism” will not be allowed to kick in in the US because they might not raise gas taxes. That isn’t a “market mechanism,” that’s the government intefering in market mechanisms. The resulting behaviour is a market mechanism, but the market will always adjust. There’s no lack of a “Market mechanism” just because Washington chooses not to gouge people.

There is, on the other hand, a very obvious real-world market mechanism that will jack up gas prices in the U.S., sooner or later; Oil will start running out.

The more oil we use, the less there is and the more expensive the remaining oil will be. Eventually the supply of oil will shrink to the point that the price will rise enough for alternative fuels to be more economically viable. Then, people will stop driving gasoline-powered cars. Taxes, low or high, won’t stop that outcome from arriving at some point.

Everything in this paragraph was true up to your last sentence. European gasoline prices are artifically HIGH; they’re among the highest in the world. Whether that’s good or bad depends on who you listen to, but there is no question at all that European governments are gouging customers at the pumps at levels way above what anyone else pays. That’s artificial; your prices are higher than they would be if the market were permitted to set proper prices in a free market. The U.S. is not the exception in this regard - you are. Canadians, for instance, pay prices much closer to US prices than European prices. Same with most Western hemisphere countries, actually.

As for Europeans thinking their gas prices reflect the real cost of gas, maybe they do, but let’s be honest; European governments set taxes on gas high so they can get more money from helpless taxpayers, and they know the elasticity of demand of gasoline is low. They’re not doing it for the ecosystem, they’re doing it for the pocketbook.

11

Chill a li’l, RJ. Remember, all major economic systems involve some mix of free-market forces and state regulation: each has its own kind of positive and negative effects on economic events, and they are always very closely intertwined.

Now, to clear up this “market mechanism” business: I think that what London_Calling was referring to was the fact that there is no market pressure to develop new fuel economy strategies if fuel is sufficiently cheap. Jack up the price of fuel artificially, and suddenly it becomes worthwhile to invest in R&D for the new technologies. That is a “market mechanism”, although it is activated by government interference in markets. That is, in fact, arguably the best way for the government to encourage certain types of technological development: put just enough artificial pressure on the market to make development competitive. In other words, instead of saying “The State Science Cooperative must produce a replacement for Technology X and everybody must use it”, you say “Sorry podnas, we’re gonna slap a whole hot honking supertax on a vital component of Technology X. Whyn’t some of you smart li’l bugs put on your thinking caps and go figure out a new way to do it that’s cheaper?”

This has its disadvantages, to be sure, but it also has its advantages compared to such laissez-faire approaches as your “sit back and watch the oil run out” strategy. For one thing, it can ease the transition to more advanced technology without the violent adjustments that generally accompany genuine shortages and major supply squeezes.

As for gas prices in different countries, the word “artificial” is a little misleading here: it’s not as though those socialist Euros are perverting the free market while everywhere else is Adam-Smith-land. Petroleum production and use in the US is directly and indirectly subsidized by public money, so it’s just as true to say that our prices are “artificially” low as that the Europeans’ are “artificially” high. Nobody is literally setting “proper prices in a free market”; governments apply various incentives and disincentives to stimulate the behavior they want.

*let’s be honest; European governments set taxes on gas high so they can get more money from helpless taxpayers, and they know the elasticity of demand of gasoline is low. They’re not doing it for the ecosystem, they’re doing it for the pocketbook. *

Why should the two be mutually exclusive? Taxes are definitely a source of revenue, but they also discourage the taxed behavior. European countries have spent a good deal of money on environmental protection measures, in addition to acquiring revenue from gas taxes; it’s kind of silly to assert that their ecological concerns are nothing but a coverup.

12

RE: Ford’s fuel cell car…

According to Think Technologies, the designers of the Ford Focus Fuel Cell Demonstration Vehicle, it runs on methanol. They extract hydrogen from the methanol and use that as the fuel source.

http://www.thinktechnologies.org/technologies/

13

Correction: Think Technologies didn’t design the car, they just designed the engine.

14

I don’t have such a strategy. I’m not suggesting that the government SHOULDN’T try encouraging innovation through market pressures. There are, however, better ways to do it than screwing Joe Blow at the pump; emissions laws, for instance.

Wellllll… sort of. The problem with this is that once a given type of consumption is taxed, the government has a vested interest in that consumption continuing. If everyone in Germany starts driving Ford Solarcars tomorrow, the FRG loses about a gazillion dollars in tax deutschmarks. While Germany might claim they’re taxing us for our own benefit, I think you would be surprised at how loathe they would be to everyone not buying gasoline.

Situations like this can result in BizarroLand situations where a government is actively discouraging a type of consumption on one hand and encouraging the industry that relies on that consumption on the other. Obvious Case #1 is the tobacco industry; the U.S. government, and others, spend billions telling people not to smoke and taxing their smokes and then giving suitcases full of money to the tobacco industry. The booze industry is the same thing; they’re taxed to the eyeballs and the government simultaneously protects and nurtures them. I won’t even get into weapons manufacturers. Polluting industries like petroleum are/will be more of the same. We’ll have the government paying oil companies not to pump oil. Don’t laugh; it happened in agriculture.

Since the problem isn’t gasoline - it’s pollution - it seems to me the appropriate step is to tax pollution, not take an indirect route through gasoline. Emission laws are a step in the right direction, and taxing actual emissions by volume strikes me as being an obvious project to undertake.

15

I’m really interested in the theory advanced by Thomas Gold. It was mentioned briefly in the linked GQ thread.

Here is an article from Wired about him:

Apparently, this is the guy that discovered the quasar. I really don’t like it when they do this – the press latches on somebody’s expertise in an unrelated area in order to lend credibility to a completely unrelated thread.

But, he does forward an argument and shows evidence in support of it. I’d like to know what evidence shows this not to be true, or some problems with his theory.

16

I should mention that Thomas Gold advances a “fringe” theory that there is a large reservoir of petroleum close to the mantle. This basically refreshes the oil near the top of the crust (which we drill). He says there is like a hundred times more oil than thought of on this planet. He goes on to describe why he thinks oil is a common planetary feature and does not depend on the presence of biomatter – rather, it may be the source of life on a planet.

17

SPOOFE Bo Diddly wrote:

What do they do with the carbon and oxygen that was in the methanol? The site you linked to doesn’t say.

18

http://www.epa.gov/opptintr/chemfact/f_methan.txt

Basically, Methanol fuel (unless I’m SERIOUSLY mistranslating something) puts out pollution similar to gasoline, but it’s in such smaller amounts (since the extracted hydrogen provides much more energy per gallon than gasoline) that the environment breaks it down very quickly. Thusly, the impact on the environment is negligible.

You can also search through http://www.methanol.org/ for more information.

19

edwino wrote:

I remember hearing about that over a decade ago. Someone repeated a rumor to me that some company-or-other was bankrolling an oil-drilling expedition in Switzerland, on the off chance that this unorthodox hypothesis about oil formation was actually true. I don’t know what happened to the expedition, though.

20

SPOOFE Bo Diddly wrote:

I poked around on the “Methanol Fuel Cell” section of that webpage, but I didn’t see anything like “How does a methanol fuel cell work?”

I know how a hydrogen fuel cell works. It’s the electrolysis reaction run in reverse. The hydrogen gas combines with oxygen gas from the atmosphere, and creates electric power directly (plus, of course, water vapor). In a methanol fuel cell, the hydrogen would have to be stripped out of the methanol molecules before it could be fed into the reverse-electrolysis reaction. Methanol is CH[sub]3[/sub]OH. Strip off the four H’s, and you’re left with a C and an O. You’d have to burn this in air to turn it into CO[sub]2[/sub]. Is anything done with the heat of the 2 (C + O) + O[sub]2[/sub] --> 2 CO[sub]2[/sub] reaction, or is this just “waste heat”?

And, yes, the extracted hydrogen produces much more energy per gallon than gasoline does, but there’s an energy cost in producing this hydrogen – it takes energy to liberate the hydrogen from the methanol molecules. How does the energy consumed in turning methanol into hydrogen compare to the energy gained by turning hydrogen (and oxygen) into water? Is the greater efficiency of the hydrogen-oxygen reaction (as compared to gasoline) wiped out by the losses incurred by the methanol-to-hydrogen reaction?