4 ms·

This applies to most natural resources including gas and oil. There's never going to be a moment when we squeeze the last drop of oil out of the Earth's crust.

This applies to most natural resources including gas and oil. There's never going to be a moment when we squeeze the last drop of oil out of the Earth's crust. It's just going to keep getting more expensive as we drain the easier sources and have to look harder and drill deeper in more and more remote areas.

biotinker 4y ago
Hand in hand with the increased monetary expense is also the increased energy expense that comes with looking harder and drilling deeper. Let's say that you have an oil field that contains a quantity of oil that, when burned, would release X megajoules of energy. The oil company consumes Y amount of energy extracting, refining, and transporting that oil. At the moment, Y is less than X, but Y is getting larger relative to X. Once Y and X are sufficiently close, it's no longer energetically worthwhile to pull oil out of the ground.
- lstodd 4y ago
  Not so if you get Y from other sources than oil.
  - margalabargala 4y ago
    You can, but in that scenario, oil becomes a niche product that is very expensive, because for everything that doesn't need oil it's significantly cheaper and more efficient to just use whatever energy source you're using for Y in your example. In this scenario, oil power plants can't operate anymore anyway, so demand for oil probably gets relegated to stuff like classic cars.
    - lstodd 4y ago
      Yeah, classic cars and also all the rest of most things. Where do you think all the plastic stuff originates? Natgas and oil to the point that fuels are becoming a byproduct. Edit: why Germany is now so troubled about Russian gas? Not because they'll freeze, but because the choice is to either freeze or shut down most of the industry. Which you can't just spin up in a couple of weeks.
- Retric 4y ago
  Oil is a terrible fuel, but an awesome battery. You need a factory to turn it into something useful unlike say coal which you can just shovel directly into a furnace. However, try to design an aircraft using natural gas, batteries, coal, hydrogen, etc and you run into huge issues.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Already happening. You can buy gas or oil at market rates or you can invest in some renewable energy. As prices for one go up and for the other go down, people start doing the right things. As for water, there's plenty of it in the ocean. All you need is some cheap energy to desalinate it. Californians need not worry. One of the richest and high tech economies in the world sitting right next to the largest reservoir of water on the planet. They'll figure it out eventually. I'm not saying it will be easy. But the combination of large scale investments in making renewable energy generation dirt cheap and increasingly more energy efficient ways to desalinate water inevitably means that people will have access to as much water that they need when this gets pushed far enough. Just a matter of time. Lots of places manage to get by with desalinated water already. Large parts of the middle east for example. It's just about making the process cheaper and more efficient.
- ptha 4y ago
  Desalination is not without problems, producing 1 to 1.5 times the amount of brine (compared to fresh water) being one of them. How to dispose/use this brine. There are some options: https://news.mit.edu/2019/brine-desalianation-waste-sodium-hydroxide-0213 https://news.mit.edu/2019/brine-desalianation-waste-sodium-h...
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    Sounds like a nice engineering challenge but not a show stopper problem. Also this seems like it would be more of an issue in shallow waters than it would be in open ocean. A simple pipe to deeper waters probably goes a long way to fixing things. The Pacific is pretty deep near the Californian coast and has strong currents too. The volume of water moving through that is probably many orders of magnitude larger than any brine you can dump there. So, unless I'm very wrong about this, I'd expect things to dilute pretty quickly.

biotinker 4y ago

Hand in hand with the increased monetary expense is also the increased energy expense that comes with looking harder and drilling deeper. Let's say that you have an oil field that contains a quantity of oil that, when burned, would release X megajoules of energy. The oil company consumes Y amount of energy extracting, refining, and transporting that oil. At the moment, Y is less than X, but Y is getting larger relative to X. Once Y and X are sufficiently close, it's no longer energetically worthwhile to pull oil out of the ground.

lstodd 4y ago
Not so if you get Y from other sources than oil.
- margalabargala 4y ago
  You can, but in that scenario, oil becomes a niche product that is very expensive, because for everything that doesn't need oil it's significantly cheaper and more efficient to just use whatever energy source you're using for Y in your example. In this scenario, oil power plants can't operate anymore anyway, so demand for oil probably gets relegated to stuff like classic cars.
  - lstodd 4y ago
    Yeah, classic cars and also all the rest of most things. Where do you think all the plastic stuff originates? Natgas and oil to the point that fuels are becoming a byproduct. Edit: why Germany is now so troubled about Russian gas? Not because they'll freeze, but because the choice is to either freeze or shut down most of the industry. Which you can't just spin up in a couple of weeks.
Retric 4y ago
Oil is a terrible fuel, but an awesome battery. You need a factory to turn it into something useful unlike say coal which you can just shovel directly into a furnace. However, try to design an aircraft using natural gas, batteries, coal, hydrogen, etc and you run into huge issues.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Already happening. You can buy gas or oil at market rates or you can invest in some renewable energy. As prices for one go up and for the other go down, people start doing the right things. As for water, there's plenty of it in the ocean. All you need is some cheap energy to desalinate it. Californians need not worry. One of the richest and high tech economies in the world sitting right next to the largest reservoir of water on the planet. They'll figure it out eventually. I'm not saying it will be easy. But the combination of large scale investments in making renewable energy generation dirt cheap and increasingly more energy efficient ways to desalinate water inevitably means that people will have access to as much water that they need when this gets pushed far enough. Just a matter of time. Lots of places manage to get by with desalinated water already. Large parts of the middle east for example. It's just about making the process cheaper and more efficient.

ptha 4y ago
Desalination is not without problems, producing 1 to 1.5 times the amount of brine (compared to fresh water) being one of them. How to dispose/use this brine. There are some options: https://news.mit.edu/2019/brine-desalianation-waste-sodium-hydroxide-0213 https://news.mit.edu/2019/brine-desalianation-waste-sodium-h...
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Sounds like a nice engineering challenge but not a show stopper problem. Also this seems like it would be more of an issue in shallow waters than it would be in open ocean. A simple pipe to deeper waters probably goes a long way to fixing things. The Pacific is pretty deep near the Californian coast and has strong currents too. The volume of water moving through that is probably many orders of magnitude larger than any brine you can dump there. So, unless I'm very wrong about this, I'd expect things to dilute pretty quickly.