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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 ha
by 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 agoNot so if you get Y from other sources than oil.
- margalabargala 4y agoYou 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 agoYeah, 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 agoOil 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.