7 ms·

52 years is a blip in human civilization. I'd be curious to see how in the grand scheme the depletion of oil looks. Will our tech/development boom grind to a ha

52 years is a blip in human civilization. I'd be curious to see how in the grand scheme the depletion of oil looks. Will our tech/development boom grind to a halt all of a sudden? Do we switch to nuclear?

cjslep 8y ago
Good luck making plastic.
- cfontes 8y ago
  There is already bio-plastic, it's just expensive because oil is super cheap.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
Iv 8y ago
What I am the most worried about the depletion of oil is that most people assume it will be a bell curve, like US' (conventional) oil production was. Thing is, it was a bell as people switched to other more profitable sources of oil as US' oil was becoming more expensive. I fear the depletion of world's reserve could look a lot more like a cliff. The absence of alternatives changes a lot the fundamentals of the problem.
- anonymou2 8y ago
  the seneca cliff: https://thesenecatrap.blogspot.com/ https://thesenecatrap.blogspot.com/
vichu 8y ago
I wouldn't be too concerned as renewables and nuclear technology should be at the point where it would be able to pick up the slack - we know the end is coming and we can prepare for it. An interesting thought experiment is whether or not humans (or some future species) would be able to reproduce the technological advancements that oil enabled given some sort of apocalypse scenario that resets us to year zero.
- govg 8y ago
  Oil isn't somehow magical in any manner - everything that oil does today can be boiled down to supplying kinetic energy. We don't use its chemical properties in any special way, it just happens to be among the most efficient in terms of calories per kg. With advances in battery tech, and large-scale shift to renewables, I think running out of oil is largely a non-issue in the long run (of course we'll have pains in shifting, but there will not be any long term drawbacks)
  - adrianN 8y ago
    It is pretty useful as a base for all kinds of chemicals. All plastics for example are made from oil.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    > We don't use its chemical properties in any special way, it just happens to be among the most efficient in terms of calories per kg. As far as I am aware a lot of oil is used as raw material in chemical industry, not only as energy source.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    The biggest issue is actually food - most of the seeds grown today are engineered to depend upon fossil-fuel based chemical fertilizers, and cannot actually survive on their own without both the chemical fertilizers and a large helping of herbicides/pesticides/fungicides (many of which are also produced by the chemical industry). Break that dependency and you have to undo the Green Revolution that multiplied agricultural output by 10x. Do that and instead of the world's current food production being able to support a population of 9B if they were all willing to eat a vegetarian diet, you'd be looking at 900M, i.e. about 85% of people on earth would have to die. I suspect that if you took away all the demand for oil from powering cars, though, there'd be plenty left at reasonable prices for growing food and maybe even flying planes. So you do need some fossil fuel production, but get rid of its use in automobiles, heating, and electricity and the remaining reserves can be allocated much more efficiently.
    - 8y ago
chvid 8y ago
To me as a casual observer it has always been obvious that the price of energy over the long term is going to zero. Ultimately all provided by renewalable sources. Sure the price of certain forms of energy (wood fire, oil ...) may go up over time but while that happens cheaper sources appear and ultimately take over.
- ppf 8y ago
  "Renewable" doesn't mean "free energy". Constructing renewable energy sources (wind, solar, etc) takes more energy than constructing an equivalent non-renewable energy source - this is the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). There's also space limits - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o What's apparent to me is that we live in a unique era where energy is abundant and cheap, which may never be repeated (unless fusion power is developed).
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    His conclusions seemed suspect to me - I remember doing out the calculations myself and came out with the conclusion that a 50x50 mile solar array in the Arizona desert could power the U.S. A 150x200 mile array in the Sahara could power the world. These are large arrays - they would be visible from space - but they are far from "country-sized", and quite doable if production costs come down (which they are - solar and wind are now cheaper than coal). (You can check my math yourself: total world energy consumption = 109,136 TWh [1] / 8760 hours/year = 12.45 TW / 15 W/foot solar panel output [2] = 830B square feet / 27878400 ft^2/mi^2 = 29772 mi^2 = 150x200 mi array.) Working through his math, I think the problem is that the UK is unique in a.) having a high population density b.) with a large per capita energy consumption and c.) a lot of cloud cover. On his chart, only Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and Bahrain had it worse. The U.S. and China both had an order-of-magnitude better energy consumption per unit area; most of the world had two orders of magnitude. That's an argument for why Britain is fucked in the new globally-warmed, fossil-fuel-limited world, but not why the world is fucked. A lot of developing areas could see their energy consumption rise to rival the U.S. and still not bat an eye with solar power. The EROEI of solar panels is between 8.7 - 34.2; wind is 20-50. [3] As long as this number is > 1 (which it is for nearly every energy source except biofuels) you can keep building production capacity indefinitely; you just invest the energy from previous capacity into building new capacity. Higher numbers of course let you do more other stuff while this is going on and build out faster, but it's just like capitalism. As long as you turn a profit on each panel, you'll have more as time goes on. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption [2] https://www.solarpowerrocks.com/solar-basics/how-much-electricity-does-a-solar-panel-produce/ https://www.solarpowerrocks.com/solar-basics/how-much-electr... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested#Photovoltaic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inve...
A2017U1 8y ago
Planes? There's no other alternative than biofuels unless you are happy landing every 2 hours.
- cannedslime 8y ago
  Biofules are easy to make from crops. Getting jetfuel aka. Diesel from fatty seeds is trivial.
- fulafel 8y ago
  Nuclear works too. The Burevestnik apparently (accorfing to WP) is flying a tubojet or turbofan nuclear engine. Also conventional fuel can be made from pretty much any carbon using https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proc... Hydrogen would also work vas a fuel.
bryanlarsen 8y ago
The Canadian & Venezuelan oil sands have about 4 trillion barrels of "Original Oil in Place". At current oil prices and level of technological development, only about 10% of this oil is considered recoverable and as such counted as reserves. But technology marches on, and if we start running out of oil from other sources, so will oil prices. So really, the world has hundreds of years worth of reserves. Much more concerning is that we have to keep ~80% of those 52 years worth of oil in the ground to keep climate change under the 2 degree goal...
- Fjolsvith 8y ago
  > Much more concerning is that we have to keep ~80% of those 52 years worth of oil in the ground to keep climate change under the 2 degree goal... Says who?

cjslep 8y ago

Good luck making plastic.

cfontes 8y ago
There is already bio-plastic, it's just expensive because oil is super cheap.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

Iv 8y ago

What I am the most worried about the depletion of oil is that most people assume it will be a bell curve, like US' (conventional) oil production was. Thing is, it was a bell as people switched to other more profitable sources of oil as US' oil was becoming more expensive. I fear the depletion of world's reserve could look a lot more like a cliff. The absence of alternatives changes a lot the fundamentals of the problem.

anonymou2 8y ago
the seneca cliff: https://thesenecatrap.blogspot.com/ https://thesenecatrap.blogspot.com/

vichu 8y ago

I wouldn't be too concerned as renewables and nuclear technology should be at the point where it would be able to pick up the slack - we know the end is coming and we can prepare for it. An interesting thought experiment is whether or not humans (or some future species) would be able to reproduce the technological advancements that oil enabled given some sort of apocalypse scenario that resets us to year zero.

govg 8y ago
Oil isn't somehow magical in any manner - everything that oil does today can be boiled down to supplying kinetic energy. We don't use its chemical properties in any special way, it just happens to be among the most efficient in terms of calories per kg. With advances in battery tech, and large-scale shift to renewables, I think running out of oil is largely a non-issue in the long run (of course we'll have pains in shifting, but there will not be any long term drawbacks)
- adrianN 8y ago
  It is pretty useful as a base for all kinds of chemicals. All plastics for example are made from oil.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  > We don't use its chemical properties in any special way, it just happens to be among the most efficient in terms of calories per kg. As far as I am aware a lot of oil is used as raw material in chemical industry, not only as energy source.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  The biggest issue is actually food - most of the seeds grown today are engineered to depend upon fossil-fuel based chemical fertilizers, and cannot actually survive on their own without both the chemical fertilizers and a large helping of herbicides/pesticides/fungicides (many of which are also produced by the chemical industry). Break that dependency and you have to undo the Green Revolution that multiplied agricultural output by 10x. Do that and instead of the world's current food production being able to support a population of 9B if they were all willing to eat a vegetarian diet, you'd be looking at 900M, i.e. about 85% of people on earth would have to die. I suspect that if you took away all the demand for oil from powering cars, though, there'd be plenty left at reasonable prices for growing food and maybe even flying planes. So you do need some fossil fuel production, but get rid of its use in automobiles, heating, and electricity and the remaining reserves can be allocated much more efficiently.
  - 8y ago

chvid 8y ago

To me as a casual observer it has always been obvious that the price of energy over the long term is going to zero. Ultimately all provided by renewalable sources. Sure the price of certain forms of energy (wood fire, oil ...) may go up over time but while that happens cheaper sources appear and ultimately take over.

ppf 8y ago
"Renewable" doesn't mean "free energy". Constructing renewable energy sources (wind, solar, etc) takes more energy than constructing an equivalent non-renewable energy source - this is the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). There's also space limits - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o What's apparent to me is that we live in a unique era where energy is abundant and cheap, which may never be repeated (unless fusion power is developed).
- nostrademons 8y ago
  His conclusions seemed suspect to me - I remember doing out the calculations myself and came out with the conclusion that a 50x50 mile solar array in the Arizona desert could power the U.S. A 150x200 mile array in the Sahara could power the world. These are large arrays - they would be visible from space - but they are far from "country-sized", and quite doable if production costs come down (which they are - solar and wind are now cheaper than coal). (You can check my math yourself: total world energy consumption = 109,136 TWh [1] / 8760 hours/year = 12.45 TW / 15 W/foot solar panel output [2] = 830B square feet / 27878400 ft^2/mi^2 = 29772 mi^2 = 150x200 mi array.) Working through his math, I think the problem is that the UK is unique in a.) having a high population density b.) with a large per capita energy consumption and c.) a lot of cloud cover. On his chart, only Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and Bahrain had it worse. The U.S. and China both had an order-of-magnitude better energy consumption per unit area; most of the world had two orders of magnitude. That's an argument for why Britain is fucked in the new globally-warmed, fossil-fuel-limited world, but not why the world is fucked. A lot of developing areas could see their energy consumption rise to rival the U.S. and still not bat an eye with solar power. The EROEI of solar panels is between 8.7 - 34.2; wind is 20-50. [3] As long as this number is > 1 (which it is for nearly every energy source except biofuels) you can keep building production capacity indefinitely; you just invest the energy from previous capacity into building new capacity. Higher numbers of course let you do more other stuff while this is going on and build out faster, but it's just like capitalism. As long as you turn a profit on each panel, you'll have more as time goes on. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption [2] https://www.solarpowerrocks.com/solar-basics/how-much-electricity-does-a-solar-panel-produce/ https://www.solarpowerrocks.com/solar-basics/how-much-electr... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested#Photovoltaic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inve...

A2017U1 8y ago

Planes? There's no other alternative than biofuels unless you are happy landing every 2 hours.

cannedslime 8y ago
Biofules are easy to make from crops. Getting jetfuel aka. Diesel from fatty seeds is trivial.
fulafel 8y ago
Nuclear works too. The Burevestnik apparently (accorfing to WP) is flying a tubojet or turbofan nuclear engine. Also conventional fuel can be made from pretty much any carbon using https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proc... Hydrogen would also work vas a fuel.

bryanlarsen 8y ago

The Canadian & Venezuelan oil sands have about 4 trillion barrels of "Original Oil in Place". At current oil prices and level of technological development, only about 10% of this oil is considered recoverable and as such counted as reserves. But technology marches on, and if we start running out of oil from other sources, so will oil prices. So really, the world has hundreds of years worth of reserves. Much more concerning is that we have to keep ~80% of those 52 years worth of oil in the ground to keep climate change under the 2 degree goal...

Fjolsvith 8y ago
> Much more concerning is that we have to keep ~80% of those 52 years worth of oil in the ground to keep climate change under the 2 degree goal... Says who?