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"The stone age did not end for a lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil." S. Yamani
by hnzix 8y ago
"The stone age did not end for a lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil." S. Yamani
- whatshisface 8y agoThe Energy Information Administration estimates that the US has 234*10^9 barrels of oil in reserves (unproven but technically recoverable). At today's rate of production that's about 64 years. S. Yamani's quote sounds very likely to come true. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_Sta...
- quotemstr 8y agoThe volume of "technically recoverable" oil increases with price though, since a higher cost per bbl can justify more expensive extraction. Somewhere around $70-$100 bbl, shale oil becomes economical to extract, and the US and Canada have trillions of barrels worth of the stuff. We're never going to run out of oil in the sense that oil will become unavailable, not in 64 years, and not in 640 years. Oil will become more expensive, and eventually, price increases will diminish and eventually stop the use of oil as an energy source. It'll always be available for use as an industrial feedstock and for use in highly specialized situations.
- Retric 8y agoThe issue is 200+$ a barrel oil is mostly useless. The world runs on cheap oil, not just oil. And the supply of cheap oil is finite.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y agoOil that is considered cheap today would have been considered irretrievable fifty years ago. That's the whole point of the quote.
- quotemstr 8y agoI don't agree that $200/bbl oil would be useless: there's plenty of room at that price point for aviation and industrial chemistry. But it doesn't matter, because there are trillions of barrels of unconventional oil available at between $80-$100/bbl. That's expensive, but not infeasibly so. Short-lived supply shocks notwithstanding, there's no reason oil should rise above that price for a good long time.
- njarboe 8y agoWhat hopefully will happen is that electricity from non-fossil fuels will become cheap enough and technology will become advanced enough that humans can create hydrocarbons from the air and water (CO2 and H2O) at a price that keeps those trillions of barrels in the ground. Or at least lets us stop burning them.
- quotemstr 8y agoSure. The simultaneous trends toward cheaper low-emission sources and more expensive fossil fuels will force a switch at some point. We'll also need negative emissions (i.e., atmospheric carbon removal) at some point too. Now, will it be more expensive to keep drilling and remove the emissions than it will be to cook long-chain hydrocarbons? It's not clear. And it doesn't really matter, since either way you can hit a carbon target.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- BurningFrog 8y agoThe richer we become, the more cheap oil there will be.
- hackeraccount 8y agoI realize you got down voted to hell but that sentence explains so much. I think that one of the bigger problems when people talk about climate or any number of different things they don't appreciate wealth. There's a group of people who look at money in a bank account as just a bunch of numbers. That there's nothing "real" behind those numbers.