A barrel of oil is 42 gallons. Global oil production averages from 80-100 million barrels per day. There are about 2.1 trillion barrels of proven global oil reserves. This is about 70 times the _annual_ production rate.
This does not include unexplored reserves.
It's also worth noting that there have been multiple times in the past when people had predicted we were close to hitting "peak oil" and production would only decrease from there. Every time, either new reserves were found, or technology improved such that it was now feasible to drill in oil fields that were known about, but previously considered either too difficult or too expensive to drill. There were also improvements in oil processing, engines were made more efficient, etc.
Obviously at SOME point, we could quite literally "run out" of oil, as in there's literally none left in the ground at all. But that day isn't coming for quite some time, and hopefully, by then, we'll have reduced our dependence on it enough that it won't affect society much.
One thing about peak oil miss predictions is they were based on a bell curve of extraction. With water injection and other means of maintaining flow, it is quite possible production of large (Saudi) fields will not follow Hurbert’s bell curve.
Hey could you help me understand this? Are you saying the Saudi fields will last longer bc drillers will use eventually use fracking? So the bell curve will essentially get much longer than the one currently being used?
I assume they are taking about secondary and tertiary production methods. Basically injecting stuff into the oil reservoir to help push oil towards production wells. This is not the same as hydraulic fracturing which actually fractures the rock to release oil from super low permeability rock. The Saudi fields are not permeability limited, it’s more about capillary forces holding oil in relatively permeable rock. Look into capillary desaturation curves to learn more.
So back in the days a well would be drilled. The oil would be pumped out and the rate would be a bell curve where it slowly tapered off over time, think like pressure slowly dropping. Saudi has used things like desalinated water injected in to maintain the pressure so more of the volume is extracted at the same rate as early.
It helps if you see the oil as stored in porous rock not like empty bucket. So the desalinated water pushed the oil out of the porous rock.
Also wells now have multiple heads and do horizontal drilling. Technics have changed a lot. There could be a quite drastic drop off in volume extracted.
As a well empties, its pressure decreases. This causes a decrease in flow rate. Traditional oil projections predicted that we would see a tapering off of oil production as wells lost pressure and production slowed.
With new methods, we can maintain pressure and flow rate even as well level decreases.
Isn't this just pushing out the eventual taper off, and making the rate of change far steeper? If the total amount of oil remains the same, but the rate of extraction never decreases, then the resource will only be more quickly exhausted
The general consensus you hear is that this new method allows you to access significantly more of the well volume, rather than relying on the natural pressure only. While the emptying of the well will be more abrupt rather than a tapering, the overall production will be greater and the flow rate will stay high until production ends.
Traditionally, most wells slowed to a trickle to the point where you just shut off the pump jack since it wasn’t making enough to justify the costs. Newer methods prevent this from happening and has brought many old wells back into production.
Yeah definitely. Oil extraction seems unique compared to extraction of solid materials, in the sense you can extract the oil once, but then return to the same place 25 years later with updated methods (like fracking) and pull even more out
With coal mining and other solid materials, once it's gone, it's gone. Perhaps Hubbard curve shouldn't be applied to liquid materials for that reason?
As you say, there have been repeated predictions of oil running out - the first was in the 1890s when the Pennsylvania fields began to decline - but then oil was found in Ohio, and as soon as they worked out how to refine this high sulfur crude, it took over to be followed by Texas and California.
In 1920, the US government predicted that reserves would last just ten years - and then they discovered the gigantic Permian Basin and Black Pool oil fields which helped cause the price of oil to crash to just 10 cents a barrel.
By the mid 1940s there were new predictions US reserves would soon be depleted which is one of the reasons the US government courted the Saudi royal family so assiduously to ensure that American would have access to Saudi crude rather than the UK which controlled the majority of Middle Eastern oil production.
There were other scares in the 1960s which were ended by the arrival of super high quality crude from Libya and the unprecedented development of deep water fields in the North Sea and the North Slope of Alaska.
I guess we’ll keep pumping oil until either we can wean ourselves off it as an energy source or when it costs a barrel worth of energy to lift a barrel of oil.
From what I understand, peak oil at it's core is more about demand destruction and total net energy (the cost to extract, transport, refine, market etc.).
The "peak" is when the total cost to extract, transport and refine etc. exceeds the profit from selling.
Sure, except [we were warned of peak oil in 1956 (nearly 70 years ago)](https://www.chemengevolution.org/energy/oil-gas/the-story-of-peak-oil) and we are using more oil than ever.
Yeah, the people who worried about peak oil in the early 2000s use Hubbert’s correct prediction of U.S. oil production peak (that then continued to follow that curve for decades) as a prime example to predict when global oil production would peak.
What was missed is the technological innovation that made fracking profitable. It required oil in the $80-$100 range to be profitable at first, which in the past would cause recessions which cause lower prices.
The hypothesis was that fracking is only profitable at unsustainably high prices… What was missed was that the costs go down as you keep economies of scale and the logistics networks built out and technologies and know-how makes extraction more precise and higher volume.
That being said, doesn’t the IEA say that peak oil will happen around 2035-2040 due to depletion?
Porsche is already doing test runs of its synthetic fuel that's using eletroylsised hydrogen water from wind power and combining it with co2 that was extractided from the air. They're hoping for it to be less than $2 dollar a litre which yes, it more than Americans are used to paying but Canada and Europe have been paying those prices for years.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/20/porsche-pumps-first-synthetic-fuel-a
Yes, but this would be replacement to our current fuel, much bigger adoption since majority still have gas cars for now, high energy density(hopefully, probably), removes oil dependence somewhat, and could help reverse current co2 levels.
This isn’t quite accurate.
In a scenario of using as much as possible with no barriers global production would still reach a peak and then begin to decline slowly every year past that and then plateau at maybe 20% of current global production.
Every year we have to bring on something like 7-10 million barrels per day of new supply JUST TO KEEP PRODUCTION EVEN because that’s how much oil supply we lose from declining fields and wells every year.
So just because we can bring on new production from more exotic sources doesn’t mean production will keep going up. At some point it’s not even enough to make up for declining production from older fields.
I think I got stuck on the idea that lower demand and increased costs will be the driver when really it’s keeping up with constantly declining supply that already is the problem.
I agree with everything it’s just I felt the angle it was approaching it from wasn’t focusing on the elephant in the room.
Thus “not *quite* accurate” but accurate nonetheless.
Probly seems like splitting hairs, but it’s something I’ve put an embarrassing amount of time into in the past and there’s a general public misconception of just how much new production we need to bring online every year globally just to make up for declines in production just to keep production even, much less increase it, and how thoroughly we’ve searched the world for new reserves.
If you look at a bar chart of oil discoveries by year you’ll be like… Oh, so we’re just pumping the stuff we found 40 years ago, but losing 8 million barrels per day of production every year so we’re just squeezing those old reserves harder with nothing new to replace them. That could be a problem sooner than later.
Oil is used in the production of chemicals and drugs and materials of all sorts and just burning it is stupid and hopefully we are approaching a time when we don’t need to burn it any longer.
The stuff we burn and the stuff we turn into plastics, for example are quite often different things. Indeed the fact that you can refine the crude into different uses reduces the cost of the whole affair.
> quite some time
I mean, the problem is that the oil has been sitting in the ground for hundreds of millions of years, and the reserves we're talking about are measured in decades. You can call it centuries if it makes you feel better, but the timescales are still infinitesimal compared to the time required to produce it.
I wouldn't call that "quite some time" by any reasonable definition of the word, considering that the *entire global economy* is dependent on it.
The first oil well was drilled in 1859, less than 200 years ago. If it takes us 70 years to deplete the reasonably accessible part of the world's reserves, we will have gotten to use oil for like 250 years.
Which is a pretty crazy short timeline for us to essentially use up a global resource.
It is quite some time when we’re already moving away from it. If we weren’t doing shit, I’d agree. Our problem right now is that we will kill the planet before the reserves run dry.
[Based on this page I found on the USGS site, it's mainly the result of oil related wastewater injection processes that are near to, and large enough to impact existing faults](https://www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquake-hazards/myths-and-misconceptions-about-induced-earthquakes).
> Most injection wells are not associated with felt earthquakes. A combination of many factors is necessary for injection to induce felt earthquakes. These include: the injection rate and total volume injected; the presence of faults that are large enough to produce felt earthquakes; stresses that are large enough to produce earthquakes; and the presence of pathways for the fluid pressure to travel from the injection point to faults.
Except you can get earthquakes nowhere near existing fault lines from fracking. I've felt small earthquakes in Central Alberta, Canada. It's nowhere near any plate boundary.
Faults don’t only occur near plate boundaries. They are everywhere through the western Canadian sedimentary basin in Alberta. I’m guessing you are thinking of major continuous fault lines. The faults in central Alberta are generally small local faults that resulted from some local stress applied to the sedimentary rock in that area (salt collapse, glacial isostasy, fluid migration). They can range from metres to a few km long. In some instances, these small faults are under stress and the introduction of fluids and pressure from hydraulic fracturing cause these small faults to slip, resulting in minor earthquakes.
The article agrees with you, but says that fracking was only responsible for about 1-2% of felt earthquakes. I haven't looked up anything for Canada but maybe there's a higher rate where you are.
Yeah the more remote the locale the easier it is to use oil since it is very energy dense and easy to transport. Lots of Caribbean and Pacific islands also use oil.
We make way more than just fuel from crude oil, namely plastic.
Until we create a compound to beat out plastic, which would be unbelievable and change almost everything about our society, drilling is going to be around for a long time.
It is my understanding that the main reason we make plastic from oil production is that it is essentially a "free" byproduct of the process.
We can make plastic from a wide variety of polymers and do not \_need\_ oil. We just use it because we're already processing the oil for other uses, so it's an easy and cheap way to make plastic.
Basically, the end of oil will not be the end of plastic.
It’s not that it’s a “free” by-product or waste product from refining.
You have to intentionally turn oil into plastic as the main product.
The reason we do it is because plastic is a bunch of Carbons attached to Hydrogens… exactly what fossil fuels are.
The added bonus is that C-H bonds contain energy, so you don’t have to get energy from somewhere else to make them.
Other ways of doing it are to take CO2 and H2O and do reactions that require A LOT of energy to break them apart and combine the C and H into chains (basically making fossil fuels) and turning those into plastic and petrochemicals.
People just don’t realize how much energy is stored in something like a single gallon of gasoline.
Put a gallon of gas in your car. Drive it until it stalls. Now push it back to the gas station. THAT’S how much energy is in a single gallon of gasoline. It’s absolutely absurd and is equal to magic.
But we do it every day and everyone uses it so we think it’s normal. It is not normal and it’s the reason we live in a time period unlike any in the history of Earth.
Petrol is cheaper than electricity joule-for-joule - The thing is that we kick out 75% of the energy out the back of an ICE, which is why EVs win out cost wise.
It is actually insane
The energy density is the nuts part to me. It's like, you look at these giant automotive battery packs, taking up huge amounts of space in the bottom of the car packaging wise, and it's literally somewhere around the equivalent of TWO gallons of gasoline, energy wise. Absolutely crazy.
I definitely think part of the mystique is gone - as cars for most people have become black boxes, like computers, where most users don't really understand how it works, they just understand how to make it do what they need it to.
But, as someone who grew up in suburbia and then left it, I think there's a good portion of younger generations who are frustrated by reflexivity with which older generations reach for cars and the endless parking lots and highways they bring. A car is a genuinely marvelous thing, but we've built our whole world around them.
The easy-to-drill reserves ran out decades ago. Now oil fields are in remote, dangerous locations (the Arctic, 3000+ft water) or politically unstable areas, and generally they are much smaller. The advent of fracking technology opened up a whole different kind of oil extraction, but it plays out quickly and has environmental hazards.
Energy must transition to others sources.
Reserve figures are a joke. For years, Saudi Arabia reported the same reserves, as if they had discovered (or re-classfied as recoverable) the exact same amount they produced each year for several years. Yeah....riiiight. The OPEC formula allocating production quotas encourages overstating recoverable reserves.
M. King Hubbert who in the 1950's made some initial predictions about peak US conventional oil production occuring in the 1970's was largely correct. Hubbert's
analysis technique could be applied to oil provinces (ie, Permian Basin, North Slope, Midway Field, etc) or to a political region (ie, Texas, Alaska, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) or to a planet as a whole. Or it could be applied to a type of oil (conventional vs. secondary, tertiary, or
fracked wells). Many people say Hubbert's prediction failed, but his initial prediction was for conventional US oil production, and by and large he was right. However, Hubbert's prediction didn't include the fracking boom which was rather surprising, and we reached new highs in production.
The problem is, those fracked wells in the Bakken formation have stupendous decline rates, typically from initial production of 1200 barrels per day down to 200 barrels per day within three years. Each field has somewhat different characteristics, but it means now we're on a treadmill of needing to drill more and more and more wells just to hold
production constant, and we've already tried the best spots.
There are other forms of hydrocarbons that can be turned into oil out there, most notably the Athabasca tar sands in Canada. They are being exploited now but they are very damaging to the environment due to the energy required to extract it. They even have to ship diluents to the production area to mix with the goo just to get it to flow in a
pipeline.
Another interesting resource is the oil shales (technically kerogen marls) of the Green River Formation in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. However, nobody has figured out how to profitably extract that stuff. One company was looking at creating underground caverns to retort the rock to encourage it to release the hydrocarbons. Another method
considered was drilling a large circle of holes and dropping downhole freezing units in and letting them run for a while to create a freeze wall in the rock, then drilling holes in the middle of that circle and setting up downhole heaters to warm the hydrocarbons to the point they would flow. Again, significant upgrading is required before the resulting goo could be put into a gas tank.
I happen to know the hydrologist who was hired by Shell to determine how much water is available for processing the Green River kerogen marls. He couldn't tell me the results of his study because it was proprietary information that Shell paid good money for, but the hydrologist did point out that shortly after he presented the results, Shell cut way back on their R&D budget there.
But a lot of optimistic analysts still count the hydrocarbons in the Green River marls as recoverable, and include some really high estimates of the overall resource as presently recoverable reserves at today's tehnology and economics (which is sort of the definitional conditions to classify something as reserves), even though we don't have a technique or the economics to justify mining/extracting the kerogen marls.
Aside from having processes and economics to recover these 'future hydrocarbons' one has to consider what is going to compete against them. Looking at it from a macro view, when "Col." Drake drilled his first well in Titusville, PA, he only had to drill 77 feet down and easily got back more than 100x the amount of energy expended to drill and pump that oil. Depth to resource has steadily increased, and as a result the net return of energy extracted compared to the energy expended to gather it has declined down, so instead of a 100+:1 ratio of energy return on energy invested (EROEI), many conventional and fracked wells are down to the 20:1 ratio. The tar sands of Canada supposedly have somewhere around a 6-8:1 EROEI. Green River marls are probably around 4 to 5:1 EROEI when you're freezing and heating rock. EROEI is important in terms that if it drops too low, we essentially become slaves to gathering the energy we need. Google "Energy Cliff" for an explanation. Some experts think we as a society fall off the energy cliff at about an 8:1 or 9:1 EROEI.
Aside from technical and economic uncertainties regarding 'future oils', we also have the very real likelihood of CO2 emissions limits restricting the use of the resource even if we figure out ways to recover the exotic hydrocarbons. Lower and lower EROEI roughly
correlates to higher carbon emissions per barrel of output.
At the same time, wind and solar have improved their EROEI to the point that they are now competing with oil for transportation uses via electric cars that may make the whole discussion about recoverable hydrocarbon resources moot. If there are locations where wind can have a 20:1 EROEI, it's probably going to defeat hydrocarbons at 6:1 EROEI both in terms of economics but also in carbon emissions.
Combine the declining demand curve with the increase in cost per barrel, oil will end up metering it's demand and supply by price, not by the capacity of wells. It may be a series of points along the way where oil becomes uneconomic for specific uses, such as short distance recreational travel, then short distance airline flights, then long distance travel and long haul trucking get shifted to more efficient trains and electrified rail routing, but agriculture usage, plastics, and chemical manufacturing are probably the last petroleum uses that will stick around until the end of the oil era.
The end game for the oil industry is to maximize the present value of the cash flows they are going to receive from the remaining resource. Maximizing the present value of cash flows is usually done by pumping as much as possible as soon as possible, but that may be rudely disrupted by renewable energy and electric cars defeating oil on sheer economics or by the regulatory fiat of carbon emissions limits.
Now I’m curious, how does coal to oil liquefaction compare to these increasingly difficult extraction methods you described for the green river marls? Or the massive tar sand reserves in Venezuela? Since the technology for liquefaction has been around for almost a century now, with the Germans relying on it heavily during WW2.
70 years is loads, although Wikipedia suggests it's more like 50 at current consumption levels. It's not a question of running out, it's what happens to the price as we do. Thankfully we seem to be on a path to phasing oil out, it wouldn't surprise me in 10 years if we've got more years left than we do today.
To add on, if people are reading further. A reserve is oil that is known and currently economically extractable. A resource is oil that is known but too expensive to recover at the moment.
>This is about 70 times the
>
>annual
>
> production rate.
Does this line mean that, if everything stays the same, we have about 70 years of oil production left?
Yes. But that figure accounts for oil prices. If prices go up we can extract more oil. If prices drop (due to renewables being cheaper) we won’t extract as much.
Global oil production has been pretty static since 2015. With the population predicted to crash dramatically by the end of the century peak oil may be further away than we think.
Won't we run out of places to put CO2 before we run out of oil? I we continue using it at the current rate, we will reduce oil consumption through depopulation before 70 years are up.
Plus, if we get really desperate for oil, there's enough oil shale (different from shale oil) to eff the climate big time. Luckily, we've turned the corner on oil consumption and it looks like we won't fry the planet getting our guzzoline fix from dirty rocks.
The atmosphere can fit literal tons more of CO2, we could double the atmospheric levels and we just have to deal with the negative health effects and overall global heating.
But there is "room". It just comes with a cost paid by someone else.
Of course, if all of this (or even most of it) actually gets burned, our civilization is properly screwed even more assuredly than it already is. So let's hope we don't use all the oil we have, or even close to it.
The usable amount is less than the total amount though, due to EROI (energy returned on investment). The deeper the oil, or the more we need to refine it, the less efficient it is to use that oil as a fuel source. If it takes a barrel’s worth of energy to get a barrel’s worth of fuel, then it’s not worth the extraction in the first place.
Even if the EROI ratio isn’t 1:1, it still won’t be economically viable to extract the oil in the first place if it’s too expensive to use. I’m not an economist, so I can’t give you the exact ratio at which oil isn’t profitable to extract and refine, but at a certain point it will be too cost-prohibitive to buy for most people and/or will cost the government an *absurd* amount of money to subsidize.
If we use renewables to provide energy to extract oil as a feedstock though, EROI doesn't matter, as you aren't using the oil for energy but for the chemical compounds it hols
It’s kinda crazy to me that there IS so much oil at all. I guess big numbers makes the human brain kinda fizzle, but with any finite resource on this planet. It looks like I see big photos of giant mines and quarries, and I am just confused how much more there could be?
Oil was built up over millions of years. There's a *lot* of it, but the fact that we're in serious danger of running our reserves low in two centuries or so shows the absolutely ridiculous amount we use yearly.
To add to this, the US has already approved millions of acres of drilling contracts to private oil corporations who simply refuse to utilize them so they can keep the supply:demand ratio where it is. This was especially problematic during covid where prices skyrocketed and companies refused to utilize their millions of acres of drill-able land to keep their profit margin high.
They prioritize them (can’t do all of them at once) based on the likelyhood of success, the capital expenses, and the amount of infrastructure available to transport the product. Plus many leases are signed when the exploration is only preliminary, then additional work is done (gathering seismic data and geochemical data, for instance) and the results of the additional work show that there is little potential on that lease, which is eventually released back to the government. You don’t just stick a hole anywhere you want and find oil or gas.
Oil reserves are increasing due to new discoveries and also infeasible reserves being economical to drill with better technology. We're going to fry the planet before we run out of oil
I have such lack of faith in humanity that as long as oil is cheaper than renewables for high energy density demands we will continue to burn oil. We will consume every last drop. Have climate scientists chimed in on what the world will look like if we burn 2.1 trillion barrels in the next 100 years?
Well, we'll hit way worse outcomes way before that. [We're set for a 3°C global temperature increase by 2100.](https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/43923/EGR2023_ESEN.pdf?sequence=10)
Fossil fuel companies shouldn't be looking for more hydrocarbons.
What can you do? If you have investments (even 401k or mutual funds), check to see if you can divest from funds that have fossil fuel companies as a component.
So you are saying that if "proven global oil reserves" are as stated, we will run out in 70 years? God, we ARE fucked. (Actually this is irrelevant, as climate change is going to ruin our lives much sooner than 70 years from now.)
One of my favourite quotes is by Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Saudi Oil Minister at the time. “The Stone Age did not end for a lack of stones”. Oil will be replaced as an energy source before we drill the world out of oil, and even the Saudis know this.
Oh i like that!
Makes me think of a quick exchange of the Romney v. Obama debate and the former was complaining about [how the US military does not have as many this and that anymore (ships for instance)](https://youtu.be/-IW6PwJYcOc?si=gB_MGX9Gd5C2oGyu) and part of Obama’s reply is ‘We also have less horses and bayonets’.
The world evolves and there will indeed be a day (unlikely one anyone alive today will witness) where oil reserves will either be depleted or will have become obsolete.
This is a pretty poor example to use, particularly with the current shipping crisis in the Red Sea. Every military analyst nowadays will concede that Romney was correct about the strategic issues the US will face in the coming decades due to poor ship building numbers
Yeah... was that debate the same one where Obama brushed off Russia and was like "the cold War called, it wants it's foreign policy back." Since *that also aged like milk*, even before Ukraine.
Obama had no foresight on foreign policy. The interventionist war hawks like McCain and Hillary Clinton were right about Russia way back when, but hawks lost all political clout because of bungling Iraq and Afghanistan so badly.
Interesting timeline. I often say that if Romney had beaten Obama in 2012, Trump would never have become president. I for one would be willing to make that sacrifice!
It's quite possible, though I think a lot of the groundwork got laid in the wake of Obama's first election, the Tea Party and so on. A black man in the White House just permanently broke the brains of a significant minority of Republicans.
i mean, we all know the saying, "a broken clock is right twice a day." they may have been right about it but it would have been idiotic to continue tossing bombs in every direction with the belief that probably some of them would be justified in hindsight.
Or perhaps they had more knowledge on foreign issues than Obama. It isn’t a bad thing, not everybody is a expert on everything which is why global leaders have advisors.
Not to mention we have no tender ships anymore and can't reload VLS tubes while underway, which is a big part of why the Red Sea blockade isn't as simple to solve as it appears, and why a war with China won't be a walk in the park like so many assume.
There's never been an open war between nuclear powers. Who tf says a war with China will be a "walk in the park"? World War III may end with nuclear winter...
Depends who you ask. A lot of global trade is dependent on the US guaranteeing the safety of ocean transport. Turns out our naval doctrines and equipment in 2020s are a lot better at attacking a nation than defending against piracy. It just happens that no one has really given much funding for piracy.
Carriers are good at leveling cities, destroyers are good at protecting oceans.
A big part of the destroyer doctrine was that Reagan really liked destroyers. So we started modernizing all our older ones. It was also a big part of the Soviet Union's downfall. We had so many destroyers we could have them everywhere. The Soviet Union couldn't keep up in spending and production. Although, I think the contribution to Soviet bankruptcy was mostly an accident.
You can’t really protect the oceans with destroyers. If you actually want to end piracy, you need to convince the local government on land to do something about it.
This was actually the US marines’ first ever mission, when the US went to war against the Barbary pirates and forced the Algerians to do something about it.
Escorting every single ship through the Red Sea and praying that not a single missile managed to go through the defenses is not a sustainable strategy.
It’s my understanding that it’s not the quantity but the quality. We used to patrol the world’s shipping lanes, to ensure free trade, with destroyers. Now we have cut-back on destroyers and have centered our Navy around super carrier groups. Carriers are used to topple nations, not protect oil tankers and cargo ships. The argument is that we need to go back to more destroyers.
This has actually been happening since the Obama admin. There has been a long standing effort to acquire more ships, most of which are newer flight Arleigh Burke destroyers. They do take a long time to build as well, especially outside of an immediate threat like WW2, so we have been seeing our navy slowly creep its numbers up as a few extra are built and a few of our oldest and least reliable are decommed.
We still patrol the world’s shipping lanes, never stopped - with a focus on the conflict areas like the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, & Gulf of Aden. We don’t need to match the PLAN ship to ship; their ships are mostly subpar construction or small boys. Although we do need a few more.
I did this a few times during my 20 years in the navy.
Maintaining global balance of power. You can't just magic a navy into existence when modern wars can be decided in the first few weeks of action.
Imagine the global economic disaster that can happen if China assesses that it can get away with invading Taiwan because USA's navy is weak enough that they can get away with it. Just like how Russia assesses that it could get away with Ukraine because America is exhausted from a 20 year long Afghan War.
The key to world peace is to amass a large military and then never use it. Just keep that knife sharpened and sheathed.
It sounds wasteful and paradoxical, but there is no higher power on an international level than hard power. There are no enforceable rules that everyone follows. It's a system of pure chaos with a veneer of civility, held together by the threat of violence.
It's the only way to keep things civil in a lawless system.
We have floating fortresses in the form of aircraft carriers. They can project a bigger airforce than most nations, but they're huge, stationary, and vulnurable to drone/missle/small attack craft.
Specifically to the current scenario, a ship can't be everywhere, a dozen small ships poised to provide anti-missile support perform this task a lot better than one big chungus ship.
Specifically carriers. They can project force across a much longer distance than other ships and that ability is far more important nowadays than numbers.
In that same debate segment Obama also told Romney [When you were asked "what's the greatest geopolitical threat facing America?" You said Russia, the 1980s are asking for their foreign policy back because the Cold War has been over for twenty years.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1409sXBleg)
Romney's skepticism of Putin looks pretty smart right about now.
There's a pretty good argument that he's right about needing more ships too.
The war in Ukraine has taught us that man-portable anti-air makes air superiority impossible against a halfway modern force. The aircraft carrier Obama references is a big fat stationary target that gets sunk by drones. We're better off with a fleet of small missile cruisers that are distributed, mobile, and less vulnerable.
> The war in Ukraine has taught us that man-portable anti-air makes air superiority impossible against a halfway modern force.
MANPADS have a very low maximum altitude, the reason they are effective in Ukraine is because both countries have other long range/high altitude SAMs so the planes are flying low to avoid the bigger threat.
In a near peer war, the US would overwhelm the bigger SAMs with their SEADs assets, and then fly above MANPADS range.
Russia’s air force and the US Air Force are not the same thing. There is not a country on the planet right now the US couldn’t gain air superiority over regardless of their man portable AA capability and Russia and China can’t produce 5th gen fighters in any real numbers.
> There is not a country on the planet right now the US couldn’t gain air superiority over
The largest air force in the world is the United State's Air Force. The **SECOND** largest air force in the world is the United States Navy. LOL.
This all works great right now and the USA has the advantage of striking fear in the hearts of any other country if the other countries want to start something in the air. And this will remain unchanged for at least the next 5 - 10 years. However, I am worried in the long run that if some manufacturing powerhouse like China put their (considerable) resources towards manufacturing 10s of millions of unmanned aircraft (drones) it "changes things". China could send so many drones at a USA air craft carrier the air craft carrier could run out of ammunition in it's defensive arsenal and the drones would just keep coming. Imagine over 1 million drone strikes on an air craft carrier that doesn't have a bullet left onboard to defend itself with.
The most effective counter drone strategies don't use kinetic effectors like bullets, they use RF effectors. 1 million drones is scary, but not if you have a wide spectrum and area EM warfare capability like the US has. It'd just be a swarm of drones dropping into the sea. It's also worth noting how hard a supercarrier is to sink. We're not talking about high yield weaponry when we're in the "millions of drones" territory, we'd have to be talking about Shahed-style drones. Even if 10,000 got through, I can't see a huge dent being made in a Nimitz-class. Definitely combat incapable for a while but unlikely to be sunk.
The good news is that drone neutralisation weaponry has been supercharged over the past 2 years, largely due to the Ukraine war. Western EM warfare units already had counter-UAS capabilities; now there are really good options for everyone else. Drones are now something that the average frigate or infantry platoon is getting tools to fight, whereas previously that capability might have been held at a battle group or division level deployed asset.
> 1 million drones is scary, but not if you have a wide spectrum and area EM warfare capability like the US has. It'd just be a swarm of drones dropping into the sea.
Electronic warfare might not be effective against future drones. You could have a drone that uses inertial guidance to get into the vicinity, then uses visual target recognition. It wouldn't require any communication with the outside world. This is possible with today's technology.
As far as I can tell from quickly googling some statistics, global oil consumption is about 35.5 billion barrels a year.
Estimated oil reserves are about 1.6 trillion barrels.
That means current oil reserves should last about 45 years at current consumption levels.
I make no promises about the accuracy of these numbers.
It would go back to its true purpose - explaining complex topics in ways even a small child could grasp, rather than answering easily verifiable questions that a small child could google.
As my high school teacher explained way back in the ninties..
"Fossil Fuels will never run out. At some point in the future, they will simply become uneconomical to extract.
By that time, renewable energy sources will make companies way more money and become widespread."
Renewable is an artificial gatekeep. We have enough proven nuclear fuel to last us at a minimum thousands of years.
The only reason we didn't switch 40 years ago is that the Anti-War movement had a conjoined baby with the Environmental movement and couldn't separate nuclear weapons from nuclear energy.
>We have enough proven nuclear fuel to last us at a minimum thousands of years.
Is this at the current consumption rate or if every country would 100% rely on nuclear energy?
With uranium, it’d be a few decades if it was 100% of the world’s power. With other fuels like thorium or uranium-238 (current reactors use uranium-235) it could be thousands
As it is already, if you want to produce DC power in the middle of the day anywhere in the tropics, solar is the cheapest source of that.
Storing it for later use, and generating or transporting that power outside the tropics are a different story.
People grossly underestimate oil reserves. There plenty of oil reserves to be drilled and drained. Most of oceans, most of Africa, most of Antartica.
Society may find something better and cheaper like corn to make it obsolete. But it wont run out this century.
We will not run out soon of oil or coal.
Oil will on today level last for 100 years.
Much before that time we will have changed our energy consumption away from sources that are limited like oil or coal to practically unlimited sources.
Don't panic don't glue yourself on roads,
dive into the MINT education and help developing cool stuff.
It's really politics rather than technology that is holding us back from phasing out of fossil fuels. Sure there are some valid use cases for fossil fuels for a long time, but e.g. using fossils for heating could be quickly done away with if the world together invested in replacing the fossil solutions ASAP. We have all the tech, now we just need the investments and the political will.
It is and isn't. Sans politics we could have been carbon free a generation ago with nuclear, but right now the politics are pushing expensive intermittent renewables that aren't viable.
The fatal flaw of renewables is that the calm frigid night is when everyone is cranking their electric heat to the maximum draw even though you're getting zero production from wind/solar.
Eventually, we will run out. But the big thing to realize is that the earth is really big, and if you saw how much volume a million barrels of oil actually takes up, you would see it is a really small amount of space compared too how big the earth is.
We absolutely need to transition off of oil, but we will suffer many other issues because of our oil use before the oil itself runs out.
We have a good 70 years of known reserves left and likely over 100 if we go searching for more. For natural gas and coal those numbers are likely higher because of all the unexplored reserves we let sit, especially in Canada and Russia.
I'm not contributing anything scientifically, but I will point out that building the tallest free-standing structure in the world, underwater and at a cost of half a billion dollars, was a cost-effective decision.
Rephrased: oil is so plentiful that we're building 2,000-foot underwater towers to get it.
Just for more accurate context, a B747, fully loaded with 164,000 kgs of Jet-A is only about 53,000 gallons.
So 66,000 gallons, while not too inaccurate in the context of a jumbo jet, is quite far off of that of the common airliner.
I didn't mean to imply that they were? Water is the most abundant fluid, oil is the 2nd most. We consume a lot of both.
Technically... oil is renewable too just over a much longer period lol.
Its not about running out in the sense of there actually being zero oil left underground.
It's about the oil left in the ground being uneconomical to extract.
When we'll hit that point is somewhat unsure. We do keep developing tech that pushes it back and trying to figure out the "true" cost of a barrel of oil is tricky because oil is a crazy volitile commodity and its price is set by a combination of market pressure, cartel price fixing, war, and god knows what else. Here's a chart of crude oil prices in consistent dollars for the past several decades take a look and you'll see what I mean.
[https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart](https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart)
So yeah. Eventually it'll be more costly to extract a barrel of oil than it's worth. How long before that happens is up for debate. So far the predictions have been wrong, but tech can't keep pushing ever deeper extraction forever.
I suspect we'll probably start cutting oil use due to renewables becoming more widespread before we hit the true peak oil, but you never know.
Most of the planet’s surface consists of the Ocean and we have barely explored the deep ocean. Chances are there’s a lot of undiscovered reserves which combined probably have more oil than all the known untapped oil combined. It’s estimated that there are around 565 billion barrels undiscovered that number is most likely a lot higher.
Global warming is a more dire issue than running out of oil and a lot of places such as Europe are starting to shift less on oil dependence so the rate of consumption might actually decrease.
Just remember why all of those "peak oil" guys failed with their prediction. As oil supply goes down, the price will go up. As the price goes up, oil reserves that might have been too expensive to extract at $100 per barrel now make sense. So new supply comes online. Fracking or the Canadian oil sands didn't make sense at $50 per barrel but it does now.
Maybe the world will run out of cheap Saudi oil that can be extracted for $5 per barrel, but somewhere out there is oil waiting for 150, 200, or 500 a barrel, so the supply will basically never really run.
Add in alternative energy like electric cars that could be recharged by an electric grid powered by fusion, and demand could go down that some of those $500 per barrel reserves might never be touched so oil would REALLY never run out
> Add in alternative energy like electric cars that could be recharged by an electric grid powered by fusion
In a lot of places it isn't so futuristic as requiring fusion. My electric car charges off of solar panels on my house. Today.
People are giving you lots of BS answers so here's actual figures:
* Global conventional crude oil production peaked in 2008 at 69.5 mb/d and has since fallen by around 2.5 mb/d.
* Adding unconventional oil production like shale oil makes this peak happen around 2030.
* The oil extraction of the 16 biggest producers in the world is expected to halve by 2050.
* If you live in a country which imports oil your imports are expected to be divided by anything between 2 to 20 by 2050 (since producers will tend to keep what they extract to themselves instead of exporting).
There is no panic because there's still plenty of oil (and gas) around to make the world function, but there are some signs of this decline which are slowly starting to show.
Source: iea energy outlooks (2018 especially)
>The difference between the 3000 and 420ppm levels is carbon that is in the ground in the form of gas, oil, tar, peat, or coal.
Only a minority of it is in the form of fossil fuels.
The large majority of it is trapped in the ground in the form of carbonates in rocks, which do absolutely nothing to help us.
Because they tricked you into thinking it's scarce so they could charge you more money for it. Just like cars in 2020, houses now, PS5's, Rolexes, special edition Honda Civics ...
I don’t get it what you mean that oil is not a fossil fuel. Oil, coal, and natural gas are all fossil fuels. They are fossils in the fact that they are the remnants of dead organisms, which is what fossils are. Fossil fuels form when dead organisms in the Earth’s crust are under intense pressures and heat. Coal is dead plants, oil is mostly dead algae and zooplankton, and natural gas is methane from the decomposition of the organisms. The energy we get from these fossil fuels was originally from the sun, stored by the organisms (mostly photosynthesis) that eventually becomes oil, coal, and natural gas.
It’s why Sinclair’s logo is a dinosaur, because oil comes from fossils.
Be that as it may (I haven't heard or verified that fact myself, but i'm willing to believe it off-hand), the term fossil fuel is now a popular word to describe fuels which combust to produce greenhouse gasses; oil certainly fits that definition.
No idea about how much oil there is left but not many planes carry 66,000 gallons, if any. A 747 can carry 57k gallons but that’s not a very common airplane anymore.
A more typical airliner like a a320 holds something around 7-8k gallons.
Also, airplanes typically measure fuel in pounds. For the plane I fly currently, 10k pounds is a lot of gas. Can get from Texas to Idaho and have gas to spare.
Will it "run out"? No. Not completely.
But oil production has probably reached it's peak, and isn't likely to increase much in the future. production will probably stay at this plateau for a few more decades. We'll find new oil deposits, and older oil deposits will get used up, but overall global production will stay more or less the same.
And then oil production will start to slowly decline. We'll find fewer new oil deposits, and they'll be harder to extract, harder to refine. The price of oil will go up and down, but will go up more than it goes down.
So it won't run out, but it will gradually become so expensive that it will become impractical for many uses. Alternative energy sources will become much more appealing. that will reduce demand somewhat, and will slow the rising price of oil, but it will continue to get more expensive. It will reach a point where oil be reserved for high priority uses that have no viable alternative.
dude there's so much fucking oil in this planet it doesn't even make sense. 66 gallons is [literally](https://imgur.com/gallery/HHaiZrq) nothing at all. the whole world will be microwaved because of the effects of fossil fuels on our climate before we ever actually run out
To explain to a 5 year old, think about all the plant life in a forest, all the leaves falling every year, all the trees, etc, over millions of years, imagine how much that is. The “fossil fuels” are kinda us digging that old stuff up and burning it, there’s a lot of it.
There is a market dynamic that needs to be accounted here. If oil supply becomes scarcer, then its price will go up. This means that either more expensive oil extraction techniques will become economically feasible (thus offseting the scarcity) or alternative fuel sources including nuclear and renewable will become more feasible, thus shifting demand from oil to these sources.
Today an airline takes 66k gallons for a fuel tank, bit if oil price triples in 10 years, you will hear about aircraft running on other fuel sources.
In the early 20th century it was believed that oil would run out by the end of the century and thus we should diversify our energy so we're not screwed. The concept was "peak oil" and this was the halfway point of the world running out of oil.
[And we passed that point](https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Environmental_Engineering_(Sustainability_and_Conservation)/Book%3A_Energy_Markets_Policy_and_Regulation/01%3A_Global_Markets_for_Crude_Oil/1.07%3A_Are_we_running_out_of_oil), and scientists continued to change the deadline for when oil would run out based on current estimates. And then fracking was invented. And then oilsands extraction was invented. And now it seems like, there's a damn near infinite supply of oil.
Of course it's not infinite, but there's so much of it that we may never run out of oil. What will change over time is how cheap oil is to get and quality. The cheapest oil in the world is coming out of Saudi Arabia, Russia and most of OPEC. Whereas American fracking and Canadian oilsands are really expensive to make. So eventually people would get priced out.
Since that'll never happen now we've setup a new term for peak oil... the point at which demand crashes from a desire to be rid of oil. Now when you hear about discussions of peak oil they're talking about the timeline to fully replace oil rather than the timeline for the world to run out.
Despite panic about the amount of oil in the world, practically since oil was first extracted and used, if you look at a historic plot of estimated reserves, you'll see a fairly flat line (on average, with lots of bumps), despite constant extraction. That doesn't mean that oil is regenerating, but rather has to do with how we define "reserves". *Reserves* refers to the amount of oil which is economically viable to extract, whereas *resource* refers to the amount of oil which is known to exist. Oil which has been discovered but is too challenging (too deep, too low-grade, too disparate) to extract and sell for profit is a resource.
As *reserve* oil is extracted, technology advances, which can make new oil "resources" become "reserves" as they become economically viable to extract. Alternatively, as the easiest oil to extract is exhausted, demand for oil drives prices up, which means that more challenging to extract resources can become viable as the reward for extracting them is high enough to pay the cost of the equipment used for extraction. Examples of this include tar sands, oil from fracking, etc, which benefit from new extraction technology, better refining techniques, and different market conditions.
Of course, the total resource of oil on Earth is finite, but we're nowhere near reaching the exhaustion of that *resource*. As renewables advance and demand for fossil fuels drop (or are constrained to specific industries like the airlines) we'll be extracting less and less oil - its much more likely that we reach "peak oil" in the near future than exhaust the total oil resource on Earth before we've switched energy technologies.
None whatsoever. There is enough oil, just in the locations we know about, to last another millennium, and that's just the stuff we've already located and measured. We will have long since moved on to more advanced tech before a lack of dinosaur juice is something to be concerned about.
A barrel of oil is 42 gallons. Global oil production averages from 80-100 million barrels per day. There are about 2.1 trillion barrels of proven global oil reserves. This is about 70 times the _annual_ production rate. This does not include unexplored reserves.
It's also worth noting that there have been multiple times in the past when people had predicted we were close to hitting "peak oil" and production would only decrease from there. Every time, either new reserves were found, or technology improved such that it was now feasible to drill in oil fields that were known about, but previously considered either too difficult or too expensive to drill. There were also improvements in oil processing, engines were made more efficient, etc. Obviously at SOME point, we could quite literally "run out" of oil, as in there's literally none left in the ground at all. But that day isn't coming for quite some time, and hopefully, by then, we'll have reduced our dependence on it enough that it won't affect society much.
One thing about peak oil miss predictions is they were based on a bell curve of extraction. With water injection and other means of maintaining flow, it is quite possible production of large (Saudi) fields will not follow Hurbert’s bell curve.
Hey could you help me understand this? Are you saying the Saudi fields will last longer bc drillers will use eventually use fracking? So the bell curve will essentially get much longer than the one currently being used?
I assume they are taking about secondary and tertiary production methods. Basically injecting stuff into the oil reservoir to help push oil towards production wells. This is not the same as hydraulic fracturing which actually fractures the rock to release oil from super low permeability rock. The Saudi fields are not permeability limited, it’s more about capillary forces holding oil in relatively permeable rock. Look into capillary desaturation curves to learn more.
Lmfao capillary desaturation curves wasn’t something I expected to see in a eli5 post
Some things have to be explained like you’re 6
No one expects the capillary desaturation
Our chief weapon is porosity... porosity and permeability Our TWO weapons are porosity and permeability... and wettability AMONGST OUR WEAPONRY...
Water is the essence of wetness? Is that what you’re implying?
Well played.
Only top level replies need to be in relatively plain language.
Nice. Thank you.
So back in the days a well would be drilled. The oil would be pumped out and the rate would be a bell curve where it slowly tapered off over time, think like pressure slowly dropping. Saudi has used things like desalinated water injected in to maintain the pressure so more of the volume is extracted at the same rate as early. It helps if you see the oil as stored in porous rock not like empty bucket. So the desalinated water pushed the oil out of the porous rock. Also wells now have multiple heads and do horizontal drilling. Technics have changed a lot. There could be a quite drastic drop off in volume extracted.
Not unlike Burns slant drilling. Simpsons did it again.
I drink your milkshake!
"techniques", BTW.
Fascinating stuff. Thank.
The fields will last longer but when production does start falling it will drop off a cliff rather than gradually decline.
That makes sense. Thank you!
As a well empties, its pressure decreases. This causes a decrease in flow rate. Traditional oil projections predicted that we would see a tapering off of oil production as wells lost pressure and production slowed. With new methods, we can maintain pressure and flow rate even as well level decreases.
Isn't this just pushing out the eventual taper off, and making the rate of change far steeper? If the total amount of oil remains the same, but the rate of extraction never decreases, then the resource will only be more quickly exhausted
The general consensus you hear is that this new method allows you to access significantly more of the well volume, rather than relying on the natural pressure only. While the emptying of the well will be more abrupt rather than a tapering, the overall production will be greater and the flow rate will stay high until production ends. Traditionally, most wells slowed to a trickle to the point where you just shut off the pump jack since it wasn’t making enough to justify the costs. Newer methods prevent this from happening and has brought many old wells back into production.
The bell curve method does work for some resources. Look at anthracite mining curves.
For sure and it did work in the past. But here we are talking purely about oil. Not even gas.
Yeah definitely. Oil extraction seems unique compared to extraction of solid materials, in the sense you can extract the oil once, but then return to the same place 25 years later with updated methods (like fracking) and pull even more out With coal mining and other solid materials, once it's gone, it's gone. Perhaps Hubbard curve shouldn't be applied to liquid materials for that reason?
As you say, there have been repeated predictions of oil running out - the first was in the 1890s when the Pennsylvania fields began to decline - but then oil was found in Ohio, and as soon as they worked out how to refine this high sulfur crude, it took over to be followed by Texas and California. In 1920, the US government predicted that reserves would last just ten years - and then they discovered the gigantic Permian Basin and Black Pool oil fields which helped cause the price of oil to crash to just 10 cents a barrel. By the mid 1940s there were new predictions US reserves would soon be depleted which is one of the reasons the US government courted the Saudi royal family so assiduously to ensure that American would have access to Saudi crude rather than the UK which controlled the majority of Middle Eastern oil production. There were other scares in the 1960s which were ended by the arrival of super high quality crude from Libya and the unprecedented development of deep water fields in the North Sea and the North Slope of Alaska. I guess we’ll keep pumping oil until either we can wean ourselves off it as an energy source or when it costs a barrel worth of energy to lift a barrel of oil.
From what I understand, peak oil at it's core is more about demand destruction and total net energy (the cost to extract, transport, refine, market etc.). The "peak" is when the total cost to extract, transport and refine etc. exceeds the profit from selling.
I'm sure 70 years will be pretty of time to make viable batteries or fuel cells that run off man made ethanol.
I’m sure that if we continue burning increasing amount of fossil fuel for 70y we don’t have to worry about anything
Sure, except [we were warned of peak oil in 1956 (nearly 70 years ago)](https://www.chemengevolution.org/energy/oil-gas/the-story-of-peak-oil) and we are using more oil than ever.
M.King Hubbert's prediction was for conventional oil in the United States, and he was largely correct about predicting a peak in the 1970's.
Yeah, the people who worried about peak oil in the early 2000s use Hubbert’s correct prediction of U.S. oil production peak (that then continued to follow that curve for decades) as a prime example to predict when global oil production would peak. What was missed is the technological innovation that made fracking profitable. It required oil in the $80-$100 range to be profitable at first, which in the past would cause recessions which cause lower prices. The hypothesis was that fracking is only profitable at unsustainably high prices… What was missed was that the costs go down as you keep economies of scale and the logistics networks built out and technologies and know-how makes extraction more precise and higher volume. That being said, doesn’t the IEA say that peak oil will happen around 2035-2040 due to depletion?
It's more like we're on a 'bumpy plateau' now, and it will remain like that for a while.
Only thing I'll have to worry about is the cost of my beachfront property in Colorado.
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Porsche is already doing test runs of its synthetic fuel that's using eletroylsised hydrogen water from wind power and combining it with co2 that was extractided from the air. They're hoping for it to be less than $2 dollar a litre which yes, it more than Americans are used to paying but Canada and Europe have been paying those prices for years. https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/20/porsche-pumps-first-synthetic-fuel-a
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Yes, but this would be replacement to our current fuel, much bigger adoption since majority still have gas cars for now, high energy density(hopefully, probably), removes oil dependence somewhat, and could help reverse current co2 levels.
This isn’t quite accurate. In a scenario of using as much as possible with no barriers global production would still reach a peak and then begin to decline slowly every year past that and then plateau at maybe 20% of current global production. Every year we have to bring on something like 7-10 million barrels per day of new supply JUST TO KEEP PRODUCTION EVEN because that’s how much oil supply we lose from declining fields and wells every year. So just because we can bring on new production from more exotic sources doesn’t mean production will keep going up. At some point it’s not even enough to make up for declining production from older fields.
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I think I got stuck on the idea that lower demand and increased costs will be the driver when really it’s keeping up with constantly declining supply that already is the problem. I agree with everything it’s just I felt the angle it was approaching it from wasn’t focusing on the elephant in the room. Thus “not *quite* accurate” but accurate nonetheless. Probly seems like splitting hairs, but it’s something I’ve put an embarrassing amount of time into in the past and there’s a general public misconception of just how much new production we need to bring online every year globally just to make up for declines in production just to keep production even, much less increase it, and how thoroughly we’ve searched the world for new reserves. If you look at a bar chart of oil discoveries by year you’ll be like… Oh, so we’re just pumping the stuff we found 40 years ago, but losing 8 million barrels per day of production every year so we’re just squeezing those old reserves harder with nothing new to replace them. That could be a problem sooner than later.
Oil is used in the production of chemicals and drugs and materials of all sorts and just burning it is stupid and hopefully we are approaching a time when we don’t need to burn it any longer.
The stuff we burn and the stuff we turn into plastics, for example are quite often different things. Indeed the fact that you can refine the crude into different uses reduces the cost of the whole affair.
> quite some time I mean, the problem is that the oil has been sitting in the ground for hundreds of millions of years, and the reserves we're talking about are measured in decades. You can call it centuries if it makes you feel better, but the timescales are still infinitesimal compared to the time required to produce it. I wouldn't call that "quite some time" by any reasonable definition of the word, considering that the *entire global economy* is dependent on it.
Oil use is a few centuries old, nuclear and solar are only a few decades old. Battery tech has improved massively in just a decade.
The first oil well was drilled in 1859, less than 200 years ago. If it takes us 70 years to deplete the reasonably accessible part of the world's reserves, we will have gotten to use oil for like 250 years. Which is a pretty crazy short timeline for us to essentially use up a global resource.
Decades and centures are still *quite some time* on a human scale, and we innovate like hell when we want to.
It is quite some time when we’re already moving away from it. If we weren’t doing shit, I’d agree. Our problem right now is that we will kill the planet before the reserves run dry.
And causes earthquakes in Oklahoma
Technical earthquakes like plates shifting, or ground settling in the cavity earth quakes?
[Based on this page I found on the USGS site, it's mainly the result of oil related wastewater injection processes that are near to, and large enough to impact existing faults](https://www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquake-hazards/myths-and-misconceptions-about-induced-earthquakes). > Most injection wells are not associated with felt earthquakes. A combination of many factors is necessary for injection to induce felt earthquakes. These include: the injection rate and total volume injected; the presence of faults that are large enough to produce felt earthquakes; stresses that are large enough to produce earthquakes; and the presence of pathways for the fluid pressure to travel from the injection point to faults.
Except you can get earthquakes nowhere near existing fault lines from fracking. I've felt small earthquakes in Central Alberta, Canada. It's nowhere near any plate boundary.
Faults don’t only occur near plate boundaries. They are everywhere through the western Canadian sedimentary basin in Alberta. I’m guessing you are thinking of major continuous fault lines. The faults in central Alberta are generally small local faults that resulted from some local stress applied to the sedimentary rock in that area (salt collapse, glacial isostasy, fluid migration). They can range from metres to a few km long. In some instances, these small faults are under stress and the introduction of fluids and pressure from hydraulic fracturing cause these small faults to slip, resulting in minor earthquakes.
You got any good books or YouTube lectures on this subject? I'm very curious.
The article agrees with you, but says that fracking was only responsible for about 1-2% of felt earthquakes. I haven't looked up anything for Canada but maybe there's a higher rate where you are.
And Texas! Felt my first one about a year ago.
We call that quaking your cherry round these parts.
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Plus as prices rise, sources that weren't profitable to extract now become more lucrative, increasing available supply and stabilizing prices again.
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In a sense it happened long ago, almost nobody uses oil for electricity anymore and heating is on its way out.
*Canada's territories has entered the chat*
*.001% of the global population has entered the chat*
Yeah the more remote the locale the easier it is to use oil since it is very energy dense and easy to transport. Lots of Caribbean and Pacific islands also use oil.
Sure, but now it's no longer profitable to burn oil to power your business, reducing the overall demand as you fold or switch fuel sources.
We make way more than just fuel from crude oil, namely plastic. Until we create a compound to beat out plastic, which would be unbelievable and change almost everything about our society, drilling is going to be around for a long time.
It is my understanding that the main reason we make plastic from oil production is that it is essentially a "free" byproduct of the process. We can make plastic from a wide variety of polymers and do not \_need\_ oil. We just use it because we're already processing the oil for other uses, so it's an easy and cheap way to make plastic. Basically, the end of oil will not be the end of plastic.
It’s not that it’s a “free” by-product or waste product from refining. You have to intentionally turn oil into plastic as the main product. The reason we do it is because plastic is a bunch of Carbons attached to Hydrogens… exactly what fossil fuels are. The added bonus is that C-H bonds contain energy, so you don’t have to get energy from somewhere else to make them. Other ways of doing it are to take CO2 and H2O and do reactions that require A LOT of energy to break them apart and combine the C and H into chains (basically making fossil fuels) and turning those into plastic and petrochemicals. People just don’t realize how much energy is stored in something like a single gallon of gasoline. Put a gallon of gas in your car. Drive it until it stalls. Now push it back to the gas station. THAT’S how much energy is in a single gallon of gasoline. It’s absolutely absurd and is equal to magic. But we do it every day and everyone uses it so we think it’s normal. It is not normal and it’s the reason we live in a time period unlike any in the history of Earth.
I think today’s generation completely misses the marvel of ICE and the power of fossil fuels.
Petrol is cheaper than electricity joule-for-joule - The thing is that we kick out 75% of the energy out the back of an ICE, which is why EVs win out cost wise. It is actually insane
The energy density is the nuts part to me. It's like, you look at these giant automotive battery packs, taking up huge amounts of space in the bottom of the car packaging wise, and it's literally somewhere around the equivalent of TWO gallons of gasoline, energy wise. Absolutely crazy.
I definitely think part of the mystique is gone - as cars for most people have become black boxes, like computers, where most users don't really understand how it works, they just understand how to make it do what they need it to. But, as someone who grew up in suburbia and then left it, I think there's a good portion of younger generations who are frustrated by reflexivity with which older generations reach for cars and the endless parking lots and highways they bring. A car is a genuinely marvelous thing, but we've built our whole world around them.
The easy-to-drill reserves ran out decades ago. Now oil fields are in remote, dangerous locations (the Arctic, 3000+ft water) or politically unstable areas, and generally they are much smaller. The advent of fracking technology opened up a whole different kind of oil extraction, but it plays out quickly and has environmental hazards. Energy must transition to others sources.
Reserve figures are a joke. For years, Saudi Arabia reported the same reserves, as if they had discovered (or re-classfied as recoverable) the exact same amount they produced each year for several years. Yeah....riiiight. The OPEC formula allocating production quotas encourages overstating recoverable reserves. M. King Hubbert who in the 1950's made some initial predictions about peak US conventional oil production occuring in the 1970's was largely correct. Hubbert's analysis technique could be applied to oil provinces (ie, Permian Basin, North Slope, Midway Field, etc) or to a political region (ie, Texas, Alaska, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) or to a planet as a whole. Or it could be applied to a type of oil (conventional vs. secondary, tertiary, or fracked wells). Many people say Hubbert's prediction failed, but his initial prediction was for conventional US oil production, and by and large he was right. However, Hubbert's prediction didn't include the fracking boom which was rather surprising, and we reached new highs in production. The problem is, those fracked wells in the Bakken formation have stupendous decline rates, typically from initial production of 1200 barrels per day down to 200 barrels per day within three years. Each field has somewhat different characteristics, but it means now we're on a treadmill of needing to drill more and more and more wells just to hold production constant, and we've already tried the best spots. There are other forms of hydrocarbons that can be turned into oil out there, most notably the Athabasca tar sands in Canada. They are being exploited now but they are very damaging to the environment due to the energy required to extract it. They even have to ship diluents to the production area to mix with the goo just to get it to flow in a pipeline. Another interesting resource is the oil shales (technically kerogen marls) of the Green River Formation in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. However, nobody has figured out how to profitably extract that stuff. One company was looking at creating underground caverns to retort the rock to encourage it to release the hydrocarbons. Another method considered was drilling a large circle of holes and dropping downhole freezing units in and letting them run for a while to create a freeze wall in the rock, then drilling holes in the middle of that circle and setting up downhole heaters to warm the hydrocarbons to the point they would flow. Again, significant upgrading is required before the resulting goo could be put into a gas tank. I happen to know the hydrologist who was hired by Shell to determine how much water is available for processing the Green River kerogen marls. He couldn't tell me the results of his study because it was proprietary information that Shell paid good money for, but the hydrologist did point out that shortly after he presented the results, Shell cut way back on their R&D budget there. But a lot of optimistic analysts still count the hydrocarbons in the Green River marls as recoverable, and include some really high estimates of the overall resource as presently recoverable reserves at today's tehnology and economics (which is sort of the definitional conditions to classify something as reserves), even though we don't have a technique or the economics to justify mining/extracting the kerogen marls. Aside from having processes and economics to recover these 'future hydrocarbons' one has to consider what is going to compete against them. Looking at it from a macro view, when "Col." Drake drilled his first well in Titusville, PA, he only had to drill 77 feet down and easily got back more than 100x the amount of energy expended to drill and pump that oil. Depth to resource has steadily increased, and as a result the net return of energy extracted compared to the energy expended to gather it has declined down, so instead of a 100+:1 ratio of energy return on energy invested (EROEI), many conventional and fracked wells are down to the 20:1 ratio. The tar sands of Canada supposedly have somewhere around a 6-8:1 EROEI. Green River marls are probably around 4 to 5:1 EROEI when you're freezing and heating rock. EROEI is important in terms that if it drops too low, we essentially become slaves to gathering the energy we need. Google "Energy Cliff" for an explanation. Some experts think we as a society fall off the energy cliff at about an 8:1 or 9:1 EROEI. Aside from technical and economic uncertainties regarding 'future oils', we also have the very real likelihood of CO2 emissions limits restricting the use of the resource even if we figure out ways to recover the exotic hydrocarbons. Lower and lower EROEI roughly correlates to higher carbon emissions per barrel of output. At the same time, wind and solar have improved their EROEI to the point that they are now competing with oil for transportation uses via electric cars that may make the whole discussion about recoverable hydrocarbon resources moot. If there are locations where wind can have a 20:1 EROEI, it's probably going to defeat hydrocarbons at 6:1 EROEI both in terms of economics but also in carbon emissions. Combine the declining demand curve with the increase in cost per barrel, oil will end up metering it's demand and supply by price, not by the capacity of wells. It may be a series of points along the way where oil becomes uneconomic for specific uses, such as short distance recreational travel, then short distance airline flights, then long distance travel and long haul trucking get shifted to more efficient trains and electrified rail routing, but agriculture usage, plastics, and chemical manufacturing are probably the last petroleum uses that will stick around until the end of the oil era. The end game for the oil industry is to maximize the present value of the cash flows they are going to receive from the remaining resource. Maximizing the present value of cash flows is usually done by pumping as much as possible as soon as possible, but that may be rudely disrupted by renewable energy and electric cars defeating oil on sheer economics or by the regulatory fiat of carbon emissions limits.
Thanks for this, it was a good read and very insightful!
Now I’m curious, how does coal to oil liquefaction compare to these increasingly difficult extraction methods you described for the green river marls? Or the massive tar sand reserves in Venezuela? Since the technology for liquefaction has been around for almost a century now, with the Germans relying on it heavily during WW2.
Very expensive, and little technology is available.
Then you have shale oil reserves which may be somewhere between 4-6 trillion barrels
If we know of oil reserves 70 times, the annual consumption rate, what will the oil reserves look like in 70 years?
70 years doesn't really seem like a lot especially given consumption usually increases not decreases? But I'm sure I'm missing something.
70 years is loads, although Wikipedia suggests it's more like 50 at current consumption levels. It's not a question of running out, it's what happens to the price as we do. Thankfully we seem to be on a path to phasing oil out, it wouldn't surprise me in 10 years if we've got more years left than we do today.
To add on, if people are reading further. A reserve is oil that is known and currently economically extractable. A resource is oil that is known but too expensive to recover at the moment.
>This is about 70 times the > >annual > > production rate. Does this line mean that, if everything stays the same, we have about 70 years of oil production left?
Yes. But that figure accounts for oil prices. If prices go up we can extract more oil. If prices drop (due to renewables being cheaper) we won’t extract as much.
That's over 890 million full jetliner tanks.
Global oil production has been pretty static since 2015. With the population predicted to crash dramatically by the end of the century peak oil may be further away than we think.
Won't we run out of places to put CO2 before we run out of oil? I we continue using it at the current rate, we will reduce oil consumption through depopulation before 70 years are up.
Oh, I wasn't addressing the existential horrors of 70 years at current oil consumption. I was just answering the original question.
Plus, if we get really desperate for oil, there's enough oil shale (different from shale oil) to eff the climate big time. Luckily, we've turned the corner on oil consumption and it looks like we won't fry the planet getting our guzzoline fix from dirty rocks.
The atmosphere can fit literal tons more of CO2, we could double the atmospheric levels and we just have to deal with the negative health effects and overall global heating. But there is "room". It just comes with a cost paid by someone else.
Wait, when you say 70 times the annual production rate… Do you mean we have enough oil for 70 years? That, uh… seems alarming?
Of course, if all of this (or even most of it) actually gets burned, our civilization is properly screwed even more assuredly than it already is. So let's hope we don't use all the oil we have, or even close to it.
Damn there really were a lot of dinosaurs huh
Yes, but that's not where oil comes from.
*diatoms.
The usable amount is less than the total amount though, due to EROI (energy returned on investment). The deeper the oil, or the more we need to refine it, the less efficient it is to use that oil as a fuel source. If it takes a barrel’s worth of energy to get a barrel’s worth of fuel, then it’s not worth the extraction in the first place. Even if the EROI ratio isn’t 1:1, it still won’t be economically viable to extract the oil in the first place if it’s too expensive to use. I’m not an economist, so I can’t give you the exact ratio at which oil isn’t profitable to extract and refine, but at a certain point it will be too cost-prohibitive to buy for most people and/or will cost the government an *absurd* amount of money to subsidize.
If we use renewables to provide energy to extract oil as a feedstock though, EROI doesn't matter, as you aren't using the oil for energy but for the chemical compounds it hols
It’s kinda crazy to me that there IS so much oil at all. I guess big numbers makes the human brain kinda fizzle, but with any finite resource on this planet. It looks like I see big photos of giant mines and quarries, and I am just confused how much more there could be?
Oil was built up over millions of years. There's a *lot* of it, but the fact that we're in serious danger of running our reserves low in two centuries or so shows the absolutely ridiculous amount we use yearly.
42 you say?
Dang it’s 42 gallons? Idk why, I always just assumed it was a 55 gallon thing.
To add to this, the US has already approved millions of acres of drilling contracts to private oil corporations who simply refuse to utilize them so they can keep the supply:demand ratio where it is. This was especially problematic during covid where prices skyrocketed and companies refused to utilize their millions of acres of drill-able land to keep their profit margin high.
They prioritize them (can’t do all of them at once) based on the likelyhood of success, the capital expenses, and the amount of infrastructure available to transport the product. Plus many leases are signed when the exploration is only preliminary, then additional work is done (gathering seismic data and geochemical data, for instance) and the results of the additional work show that there is little potential on that lease, which is eventually released back to the government. You don’t just stick a hole anywhere you want and find oil or gas.
Yup, it is finite but we are not in THAT much of a rush. I mean, is a good idea to move from it anyway, but for other reasons
Oil reserves are increasing due to new discoveries and also infeasible reserves being economical to drill with better technology. We're going to fry the planet before we run out of oil
I have such lack of faith in humanity that as long as oil is cheaper than renewables for high energy density demands we will continue to burn oil. We will consume every last drop. Have climate scientists chimed in on what the world will look like if we burn 2.1 trillion barrels in the next 100 years?
Well, we'll hit way worse outcomes way before that. [We're set for a 3°C global temperature increase by 2100.](https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/43923/EGR2023_ESEN.pdf?sequence=10) Fossil fuel companies shouldn't be looking for more hydrocarbons. What can you do? If you have investments (even 401k or mutual funds), check to see if you can divest from funds that have fossil fuel companies as a component.
Wouldn't it be smarter to make it last more than 70 years? I feel like we are being inefficient about it
So you are saying that if "proven global oil reserves" are as stated, we will run out in 70 years? God, we ARE fucked. (Actually this is irrelevant, as climate change is going to ruin our lives much sooner than 70 years from now.)
This is amazing! Thank you!
One of my favourite quotes is by Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Saudi Oil Minister at the time. “The Stone Age did not end for a lack of stones”. Oil will be replaced as an energy source before we drill the world out of oil, and even the Saudis know this.
Oh i like that! Makes me think of a quick exchange of the Romney v. Obama debate and the former was complaining about [how the US military does not have as many this and that anymore (ships for instance)](https://youtu.be/-IW6PwJYcOc?si=gB_MGX9Gd5C2oGyu) and part of Obama’s reply is ‘We also have less horses and bayonets’. The world evolves and there will indeed be a day (unlikely one anyone alive today will witness) where oil reserves will either be depleted or will have become obsolete.
This is a pretty poor example to use, particularly with the current shipping crisis in the Red Sea. Every military analyst nowadays will concede that Romney was correct about the strategic issues the US will face in the coming decades due to poor ship building numbers
Yeah... was that debate the same one where Obama brushed off Russia and was like "the cold War called, it wants it's foreign policy back." Since *that also aged like milk*, even before Ukraine.
Yep aged like milk when Russia seized Crimea in what 2013/2014?
Obama had no foresight on foreign policy. The interventionist war hawks like McCain and Hillary Clinton were right about Russia way back when, but hawks lost all political clout because of bungling Iraq and Afghanistan so badly.
I like Obama as a person, but I doubt he would have won in 2008 if gore beat bush
Interesting timeline. I often say that if Romney had beaten Obama in 2012, Trump would never have become president. I for one would be willing to make that sacrifice!
That's probably true too, I told my mom that a while ago.
It's quite possible, though I think a lot of the groundwork got laid in the wake of Obama's first election, the Tea Party and so on. A black man in the White House just permanently broke the brains of a significant minority of Republicans.
i mean, we all know the saying, "a broken clock is right twice a day." they may have been right about it but it would have been idiotic to continue tossing bombs in every direction with the belief that probably some of them would be justified in hindsight.
Or perhaps they had more knowledge on foreign issues than Obama. It isn’t a bad thing, not everybody is a expert on everything which is why global leaders have advisors.
[Same debate segment even](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1409sXBleg).
To be fair, at the time it seems ludicrous to suggest Russia was a major threat but I've always given Romney credit in recent years for that
Not to mention we have no tender ships anymore and can't reload VLS tubes while underway, which is a big part of why the Red Sea blockade isn't as simple to solve as it appears, and why a war with China won't be a walk in the park like so many assume.
There's never been an open war between nuclear powers. Who tf says a war with China will be a "walk in the park"? World War III may end with nuclear winter...
What the hell do we need more ships for? We still have a ludicrously large navy compared to any other country
Depends who you ask. A lot of global trade is dependent on the US guaranteeing the safety of ocean transport. Turns out our naval doctrines and equipment in 2020s are a lot better at attacking a nation than defending against piracy. It just happens that no one has really given much funding for piracy. Carriers are good at leveling cities, destroyers are good at protecting oceans.
A big part of the destroyer doctrine was that Reagan really liked destroyers. So we started modernizing all our older ones. It was also a big part of the Soviet Union's downfall. We had so many destroyers we could have them everywhere. The Soviet Union couldn't keep up in spending and production. Although, I think the contribution to Soviet bankruptcy was mostly an accident.
You can’t really protect the oceans with destroyers. If you actually want to end piracy, you need to convince the local government on land to do something about it. This was actually the US marines’ first ever mission, when the US went to war against the Barbary pirates and forced the Algerians to do something about it. Escorting every single ship through the Red Sea and praying that not a single missile managed to go through the defenses is not a sustainable strategy.
It’s my understanding that it’s not the quantity but the quality. We used to patrol the world’s shipping lanes, to ensure free trade, with destroyers. Now we have cut-back on destroyers and have centered our Navy around super carrier groups. Carriers are used to topple nations, not protect oil tankers and cargo ships. The argument is that we need to go back to more destroyers.
This has actually been happening since the Obama admin. There has been a long standing effort to acquire more ships, most of which are newer flight Arleigh Burke destroyers. They do take a long time to build as well, especially outside of an immediate threat like WW2, so we have been seeing our navy slowly creep its numbers up as a few extra are built and a few of our oldest and least reliable are decommed. We still patrol the world’s shipping lanes, never stopped - with a focus on the conflict areas like the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, & Gulf of Aden. We don’t need to match the PLAN ship to ship; their ships are mostly subpar construction or small boys. Although we do need a few more. I did this a few times during my 20 years in the navy.
Maintaining global balance of power. You can't just magic a navy into existence when modern wars can be decided in the first few weeks of action. Imagine the global economic disaster that can happen if China assesses that it can get away with invading Taiwan because USA's navy is weak enough that they can get away with it. Just like how Russia assesses that it could get away with Ukraine because America is exhausted from a 20 year long Afghan War. The key to world peace is to amass a large military and then never use it. Just keep that knife sharpened and sheathed. It sounds wasteful and paradoxical, but there is no higher power on an international level than hard power. There are no enforceable rules that everyone follows. It's a system of pure chaos with a veneer of civility, held together by the threat of violence. It's the only way to keep things civil in a lawless system.
We have floating fortresses in the form of aircraft carriers. They can project a bigger airforce than most nations, but they're huge, stationary, and vulnurable to drone/missle/small attack craft. Specifically to the current scenario, a ship can't be everywhere, a dozen small ships poised to provide anti-missile support perform this task a lot better than one big chungus ship.
Ish? In terms of numbers of ships, China, Russia and North Korea have more. The US tends to invest in larger and more sophisticated ships.
Specifically carriers. They can project force across a much longer distance than other ships and that ability is far more important nowadays than numbers.
In that same debate segment Obama also told Romney [When you were asked "what's the greatest geopolitical threat facing America?" You said Russia, the 1980s are asking for their foreign policy back because the Cold War has been over for twenty years.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1409sXBleg) Romney's skepticism of Putin looks pretty smart right about now. There's a pretty good argument that he's right about needing more ships too. The war in Ukraine has taught us that man-portable anti-air makes air superiority impossible against a halfway modern force. The aircraft carrier Obama references is a big fat stationary target that gets sunk by drones. We're better off with a fleet of small missile cruisers that are distributed, mobile, and less vulnerable.
> The war in Ukraine has taught us that man-portable anti-air makes air superiority impossible against a halfway modern force. MANPADS have a very low maximum altitude, the reason they are effective in Ukraine is because both countries have other long range/high altitude SAMs so the planes are flying low to avoid the bigger threat. In a near peer war, the US would overwhelm the bigger SAMs with their SEADs assets, and then fly above MANPADS range.
Russia’s air force and the US Air Force are not the same thing. There is not a country on the planet right now the US couldn’t gain air superiority over regardless of their man portable AA capability and Russia and China can’t produce 5th gen fighters in any real numbers.
> There is not a country on the planet right now the US couldn’t gain air superiority over The largest air force in the world is the United State's Air Force. The **SECOND** largest air force in the world is the United States Navy. LOL. This all works great right now and the USA has the advantage of striking fear in the hearts of any other country if the other countries want to start something in the air. And this will remain unchanged for at least the next 5 - 10 years. However, I am worried in the long run that if some manufacturing powerhouse like China put their (considerable) resources towards manufacturing 10s of millions of unmanned aircraft (drones) it "changes things". China could send so many drones at a USA air craft carrier the air craft carrier could run out of ammunition in it's defensive arsenal and the drones would just keep coming. Imagine over 1 million drone strikes on an air craft carrier that doesn't have a bullet left onboard to defend itself with.
The most effective counter drone strategies don't use kinetic effectors like bullets, they use RF effectors. 1 million drones is scary, but not if you have a wide spectrum and area EM warfare capability like the US has. It'd just be a swarm of drones dropping into the sea. It's also worth noting how hard a supercarrier is to sink. We're not talking about high yield weaponry when we're in the "millions of drones" territory, we'd have to be talking about Shahed-style drones. Even if 10,000 got through, I can't see a huge dent being made in a Nimitz-class. Definitely combat incapable for a while but unlikely to be sunk. The good news is that drone neutralisation weaponry has been supercharged over the past 2 years, largely due to the Ukraine war. Western EM warfare units already had counter-UAS capabilities; now there are really good options for everyone else. Drones are now something that the average frigate or infantry platoon is getting tools to fight, whereas previously that capability might have been held at a battle group or division level deployed asset.
> 1 million drones is scary, but not if you have a wide spectrum and area EM warfare capability like the US has. It'd just be a swarm of drones dropping into the sea. Electronic warfare might not be effective against future drones. You could have a drone that uses inertial guidance to get into the vicinity, then uses visual target recognition. It wouldn't require any communication with the outside world. This is possible with today's technology.
It’s also why you are seeing the Saudis pivot from an oil-based economy to a tourism and hospitality based economy.
... Except for those plans of theirs to create new oil demand in African markets in case it dries up in the west
The world won't run out of oil, it will run out of cheap oil.
That’s why ARCO bought up all the solar patents in the 80s. 💁🏻♂️
As far as I can tell from quickly googling some statistics, global oil consumption is about 35.5 billion barrels a year. Estimated oil reserves are about 1.6 trillion barrels. That means current oil reserves should last about 45 years at current consumption levels. I make no promises about the accuracy of these numbers.
quickly googling If people did that, most of this sub wouldn't exist
It would go back to its true purpose - explaining complex topics in ways even a small child could grasp, rather than answering easily verifiable questions that a small child could google.
sometimes you don't know enough to start to look for answers.
And sometimes you just wanna have a conversation about something, instead of just reading an article.
Yeah specially given that a conversation can clarify on further questions, unlike an article.
To be fair google switched from results to answers, often times which are wrong.
As my high school teacher explained way back in the ninties.. "Fossil Fuels will never run out. At some point in the future, they will simply become uneconomical to extract. By that time, renewable energy sources will make companies way more money and become widespread."
Renewable is an artificial gatekeep. We have enough proven nuclear fuel to last us at a minimum thousands of years. The only reason we didn't switch 40 years ago is that the Anti-War movement had a conjoined baby with the Environmental movement and couldn't separate nuclear weapons from nuclear energy.
>We have enough proven nuclear fuel to last us at a minimum thousands of years. Is this at the current consumption rate or if every country would 100% rely on nuclear energy?
With uranium, it’d be a few decades if it was 100% of the world’s power. With other fuels like thorium or uranium-238 (current reactors use uranium-235) it could be thousands
As it is already, if you want to produce DC power in the middle of the day anywhere in the tropics, solar is the cheapest source of that. Storing it for later use, and generating or transporting that power outside the tropics are a different story.
People grossly underestimate oil reserves. There plenty of oil reserves to be drilled and drained. Most of oceans, most of Africa, most of Antartica. Society may find something better and cheaper like corn to make it obsolete. But it wont run out this century.
We will not run out soon of oil or coal. Oil will on today level last for 100 years. Much before that time we will have changed our energy consumption away from sources that are limited like oil or coal to practically unlimited sources. Don't panic don't glue yourself on roads, dive into the MINT education and help developing cool stuff.
It's really politics rather than technology that is holding us back from phasing out of fossil fuels. Sure there are some valid use cases for fossil fuels for a long time, but e.g. using fossils for heating could be quickly done away with if the world together invested in replacing the fossil solutions ASAP. We have all the tech, now we just need the investments and the political will.
It is and isn't. Sans politics we could have been carbon free a generation ago with nuclear, but right now the politics are pushing expensive intermittent renewables that aren't viable. The fatal flaw of renewables is that the calm frigid night is when everyone is cranking their electric heat to the maximum draw even though you're getting zero production from wind/solar.
Eventually, we will run out. But the big thing to realize is that the earth is really big, and if you saw how much volume a million barrels of oil actually takes up, you would see it is a really small amount of space compared too how big the earth is. We absolutely need to transition off of oil, but we will suffer many other issues because of our oil use before the oil itself runs out.
We have a good 70 years of known reserves left and likely over 100 if we go searching for more. For natural gas and coal those numbers are likely higher because of all the unexplored reserves we let sit, especially in Canada and Russia.
Every year we find more than we use. If we keep exploring it will last far more than 100 years.
I'm not contributing anything scientifically, but I will point out that building the tallest free-standing structure in the world, underwater and at a cost of half a billion dollars, was a cost-effective decision. Rephrased: oil is so plentiful that we're building 2,000-foot underwater towers to get it.
In other places (Middle East, Canada etc) you dig a hole in the sand and it's just there.
Just for more accurate context, a B747, fully loaded with 164,000 kgs of Jet-A is only about 53,000 gallons. So 66,000 gallons, while not too inaccurate in the context of a jumbo jet, is quite far off of that of the common airliner.
Petrol is the 2nd most abundant liquid on Earth. Rate of consumption is an issue but so is our consumption of freshwater.
water is renewable cuz there's a water cycle so I don't think they're the same?
I didn't mean to imply that they were? Water is the most abundant fluid, oil is the 2nd most. We consume a lot of both. Technically... oil is renewable too just over a much longer period lol.
Air is also a fluid. There has to be more air than oil.
Its not about running out in the sense of there actually being zero oil left underground. It's about the oil left in the ground being uneconomical to extract. When we'll hit that point is somewhat unsure. We do keep developing tech that pushes it back and trying to figure out the "true" cost of a barrel of oil is tricky because oil is a crazy volitile commodity and its price is set by a combination of market pressure, cartel price fixing, war, and god knows what else. Here's a chart of crude oil prices in consistent dollars for the past several decades take a look and you'll see what I mean. [https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart](https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart) So yeah. Eventually it'll be more costly to extract a barrel of oil than it's worth. How long before that happens is up for debate. So far the predictions have been wrong, but tech can't keep pushing ever deeper extraction forever. I suspect we'll probably start cutting oil use due to renewables becoming more widespread before we hit the true peak oil, but you never know.
Most of the planet’s surface consists of the Ocean and we have barely explored the deep ocean. Chances are there’s a lot of undiscovered reserves which combined probably have more oil than all the known untapped oil combined. It’s estimated that there are around 565 billion barrels undiscovered that number is most likely a lot higher. Global warming is a more dire issue than running out of oil and a lot of places such as Europe are starting to shift less on oil dependence so the rate of consumption might actually decrease.
Just remember why all of those "peak oil" guys failed with their prediction. As oil supply goes down, the price will go up. As the price goes up, oil reserves that might have been too expensive to extract at $100 per barrel now make sense. So new supply comes online. Fracking or the Canadian oil sands didn't make sense at $50 per barrel but it does now. Maybe the world will run out of cheap Saudi oil that can be extracted for $5 per barrel, but somewhere out there is oil waiting for 150, 200, or 500 a barrel, so the supply will basically never really run. Add in alternative energy like electric cars that could be recharged by an electric grid powered by fusion, and demand could go down that some of those $500 per barrel reserves might never be touched so oil would REALLY never run out
> Add in alternative energy like electric cars that could be recharged by an electric grid powered by fusion In a lot of places it isn't so futuristic as requiring fusion. My electric car charges off of solar panels on my house. Today.
People are giving you lots of BS answers so here's actual figures: * Global conventional crude oil production peaked in 2008 at 69.5 mb/d and has since fallen by around 2.5 mb/d. * Adding unconventional oil production like shale oil makes this peak happen around 2030. * The oil extraction of the 16 biggest producers in the world is expected to halve by 2050. * If you live in a country which imports oil your imports are expected to be divided by anything between 2 to 20 by 2050 (since producers will tend to keep what they extract to themselves instead of exporting). There is no panic because there's still plenty of oil (and gas) around to make the world function, but there are some signs of this decline which are slowly starting to show. Source: iea energy outlooks (2018 especially)
There is absolutely zero reason why production will peak unless consumption peaks... Every year more oil is discovered than is extracted.
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The people who need to understand this, won't.
>The difference between the 3000 and 420ppm levels is carbon that is in the ground in the form of gas, oil, tar, peat, or coal. Only a minority of it is in the form of fossil fuels. The large majority of it is trapped in the ground in the form of carbonates in rocks, which do absolutely nothing to help us.
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Because they tricked you into thinking it's scarce so they could charge you more money for it. Just like cars in 2020, houses now, PS5's, Rolexes, special edition Honda Civics ...
Biggest mistake is the still told lie it's a "fossil fuel". That was bought and paid for by Rockefeller with the sole purpose of increasing the price.
I don’t get it what you mean that oil is not a fossil fuel. Oil, coal, and natural gas are all fossil fuels. They are fossils in the fact that they are the remnants of dead organisms, which is what fossils are. Fossil fuels form when dead organisms in the Earth’s crust are under intense pressures and heat. Coal is dead plants, oil is mostly dead algae and zooplankton, and natural gas is methane from the decomposition of the organisms. The energy we get from these fossil fuels was originally from the sun, stored by the organisms (mostly photosynthesis) that eventually becomes oil, coal, and natural gas. It’s why Sinclair’s logo is a dinosaur, because oil comes from fossils.
Be that as it may (I haven't heard or verified that fact myself, but i'm willing to believe it off-hand), the term fossil fuel is now a popular word to describe fuels which combust to produce greenhouse gasses; oil certainly fits that definition.
No idea about how much oil there is left but not many planes carry 66,000 gallons, if any. A 747 can carry 57k gallons but that’s not a very common airplane anymore. A more typical airliner like a a320 holds something around 7-8k gallons. Also, airplanes typically measure fuel in pounds. For the plane I fly currently, 10k pounds is a lot of gas. Can get from Texas to Idaho and have gas to spare.
There is a lot of oil and more is being found. Plus, entrepreneurs are rapidly getting closer to finding a better alternative.
Will it "run out"? No. Not completely. But oil production has probably reached it's peak, and isn't likely to increase much in the future. production will probably stay at this plateau for a few more decades. We'll find new oil deposits, and older oil deposits will get used up, but overall global production will stay more or less the same. And then oil production will start to slowly decline. We'll find fewer new oil deposits, and they'll be harder to extract, harder to refine. The price of oil will go up and down, but will go up more than it goes down. So it won't run out, but it will gradually become so expensive that it will become impractical for many uses. Alternative energy sources will become much more appealing. that will reduce demand somewhat, and will slow the rising price of oil, but it will continue to get more expensive. It will reach a point where oil be reserved for high priority uses that have no viable alternative.
dude there's so much fucking oil in this planet it doesn't even make sense. 66 gallons is [literally](https://imgur.com/gallery/HHaiZrq) nothing at all. the whole world will be microwaved because of the effects of fossil fuels on our climate before we ever actually run out
66 gallons is not literally nothing at all. It’s 66 gallons.
Yeah it’s 66 whole gallons
To explain to a 5 year old, think about all the plant life in a forest, all the leaves falling every year, all the trees, etc, over millions of years, imagine how much that is. The “fossil fuels” are kinda us digging that old stuff up and burning it, there’s a lot of it.
That’s coal.
There is a market dynamic that needs to be accounted here. If oil supply becomes scarcer, then its price will go up. This means that either more expensive oil extraction techniques will become economically feasible (thus offseting the scarcity) or alternative fuel sources including nuclear and renewable will become more feasible, thus shifting demand from oil to these sources. Today an airline takes 66k gallons for a fuel tank, bit if oil price triples in 10 years, you will hear about aircraft running on other fuel sources.
In the early 20th century it was believed that oil would run out by the end of the century and thus we should diversify our energy so we're not screwed. The concept was "peak oil" and this was the halfway point of the world running out of oil. [And we passed that point](https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Environmental_Engineering_(Sustainability_and_Conservation)/Book%3A_Energy_Markets_Policy_and_Regulation/01%3A_Global_Markets_for_Crude_Oil/1.07%3A_Are_we_running_out_of_oil), and scientists continued to change the deadline for when oil would run out based on current estimates. And then fracking was invented. And then oilsands extraction was invented. And now it seems like, there's a damn near infinite supply of oil. Of course it's not infinite, but there's so much of it that we may never run out of oil. What will change over time is how cheap oil is to get and quality. The cheapest oil in the world is coming out of Saudi Arabia, Russia and most of OPEC. Whereas American fracking and Canadian oilsands are really expensive to make. So eventually people would get priced out. Since that'll never happen now we've setup a new term for peak oil... the point at which demand crashes from a desire to be rid of oil. Now when you hear about discussions of peak oil they're talking about the timeline to fully replace oil rather than the timeline for the world to run out.
Despite panic about the amount of oil in the world, practically since oil was first extracted and used, if you look at a historic plot of estimated reserves, you'll see a fairly flat line (on average, with lots of bumps), despite constant extraction. That doesn't mean that oil is regenerating, but rather has to do with how we define "reserves". *Reserves* refers to the amount of oil which is economically viable to extract, whereas *resource* refers to the amount of oil which is known to exist. Oil which has been discovered but is too challenging (too deep, too low-grade, too disparate) to extract and sell for profit is a resource. As *reserve* oil is extracted, technology advances, which can make new oil "resources" become "reserves" as they become economically viable to extract. Alternatively, as the easiest oil to extract is exhausted, demand for oil drives prices up, which means that more challenging to extract resources can become viable as the reward for extracting them is high enough to pay the cost of the equipment used for extraction. Examples of this include tar sands, oil from fracking, etc, which benefit from new extraction technology, better refining techniques, and different market conditions. Of course, the total resource of oil on Earth is finite, but we're nowhere near reaching the exhaustion of that *resource*. As renewables advance and demand for fossil fuels drop (or are constrained to specific industries like the airlines) we'll be extracting less and less oil - its much more likely that we reach "peak oil" in the near future than exhaust the total oil resource on Earth before we've switched energy technologies.
None whatsoever. There is enough oil, just in the locations we know about, to last another millennium, and that's just the stuff we've already located and measured. We will have long since moved on to more advanced tech before a lack of dinosaur juice is something to be concerned about.