What happens when all the worlds oil runs out ?

Another ponder on the commute to work !

How many years of oil are left ?

When it runs out the world economy will collapse

Industry of all types will cease

War/fighting civil unrest/ starvation…

Its not looking great is it ?

Alternative ?

Any country in the world have back up plans of any type…?

Lets here your thoughts (I cant reply for a few hours)

No mentions of Soylent Green please !

There’s probably far more oil in the ground (that the oil tycoons know about) than they are letting us (and each other) know about.

If not, I suspect they have some highly secret R&D departments.

I’ll be dead by then, so who ****ing cares. Now wheres my massive chauffeur driven car, to take me to the airport?

I believe this is the stance presently adopted by every politician on the planet

your commute will be safer and quieter. 8)

there wont be any.

The power base of the world will change and possibly the US will invade the north west for the wind….

and Nuclear will be the darling of the world

If it hadnt been for prohibition in the USA cars would currently be running on ethanol.

As Sheik Yamani said, “The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil.”.

Something will take it’s place long before it runs out. Not sure of the source but I like this quote: “the stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones.”

Oil won’t run out, it’ll simply reach an unsustainable price and technology will either switch to alternatives and/or producing artificial hydrocarbons.

If it hadnt been for prohibition in the USA cars would currently be running on ethanol.

And whilst you’re busy growing fuel for your car, what are you going to eat.

Oil may get the headlines, but accessible water and sufficient food will be what WWIII will be over

Before the oil runs out we will have countless armed conflicts around ownership……..

😀

Current technology only allows about 30% of oil to be extracted from each well, when technology develops old wells will be re-opened but it’s not going to get any cheaper!

“The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones”
i like this.

Oil won’t run out, it’ll just get more expensive to extract, that’s why the preduictions keep getting put back despite increacing demand. At the peak when it hit $160/barrel the oil companies were still only investing in infrastructure that would be profitable at $75/barrel. What’ll happen is it’ll slowly become expensive to run cars etc untill people switch to alternatives (public transport or electric cars for example) and the cost of plastics and fertilizer will rise.

Another example would be the synthesis of hydrocarbons from Coal, there’s thousands of years of coal left. And it’s not that expensive compared to some of the more inacessible oil reserves.

How many years of oil are left ?

Hard to say, see above

When it runs out the world economy will collapse

no, unlesss your Shell of BP

Industry of all types will cease

why, we can make energy from more than just oil

War/fighting civil unrest/ starvation…

Over the remaining oil maybe, but worldwide, no.

Its not looking great is it ?

In your disaster ridden distoppia, no, but in reality I can’t see many problems.

Alternative ?

there is no plan B because there is no Plan A, shit happens

Any country in the world have back up plans of any type…?

Norway is 100% powered by renewables IIRC, a mix of that and nukes should keep us in the manner to which we have become acustomed for the forseable future.

Biofuel crops, famine everywhere on the panet outside affluent countries, severely limited international travel and lots of war. Either that or we’re all going to be living in Bartertown.

am i the only one thinking “the last of the v8 interceptors” right now ?

Scotland will return to the union…. 😉 KIDDING!!! (honest). Oil has been an important resource for a little over 100 years and before that the world still turned!. It will mean shifts in power (political) and the way we do things in general, I would imagine that in the 1850’s people could not imagine a world that didn’t revelove around steam and coal but things change sometimes for better sometimes for worse. I for one am not going to try and prdict what will happen as its a bit pointless, BUT i do think that think that world worship of oil and all that it leads to is a bad thing so not being so dependent on it may well be a good thing. (IMO of course)

Oil won’t run out, it’ll simply reach an unsustainable price and technology will either switch to alternatives and/or producing artificial hydrocarbons.

This.

We do have several hundred years of oil and coal left. However the price will keep on rising and rising as we run out of it in the usual places and have to use ever more expensive and/or desperate measures to get to it. Eventually, once fracking and drilling become too expensive we will be forced into developing viable alternatives (hopefully this will happen long before this point) and life will carry on as normal.

There will still be oil in the ground, but we won’t be using it.

What concerns me most in this situation is if we keep burning oil for fun when alternatives like hydrogen and electric (powered from a nuclear station or a renewable source) already exist, what will happen to plastic? (this may be based on nonsense- while my knowledge of oil in the ground is good, my knowledge of what grades of oil get made into what products isn’t)

Watch Mad Max for your answer

I believe this is the stance presently adopted by every politicianpretty much everyone on the planet

What happens when all the worlds oil runs out ?

two things as far as I’m aware..

1). will no longer have to deal with the shame of my STW addiction as I suspect the internet will be down

2). will have to use animal fat to lube chain

There i quite a lot of oil left. The price of oil will rise. This will make it economically viable to go and get the harder to reach oil. Oil will not disapear overnight. The quest for cheap oil has already begun, why do you think the USA is so interested in places like Iraq.
Investment in neuclear and solar will keep the lights on over the next few decades and the slide away from evermore expensive petrochemicals will continue until it will go the same way as steam and used by strange men in sheds.
New technologies will become more efficient. Batteries that do not take many hours to re-charge will emerge and fuel cell systems will become more common and efficient.
The current problems of investment will lessen. This is mainly due to poor Patent practice. The oil companies purchased huge amounts of patents in order to stop proliferation of cheap and non-petrochemical forms of of power from becoming mainstream, to protect monopolies and status quo.
Many of these patents will slide out of protection and allow use of alternatives. An example of this is what was the “British Rail” owned a patent for “flying Saucers”. They had no idea how they would really work, they had enough speculative detail to gain a patent but this was an effort to maintain a status quo should a “flying saucer” be invented.
One of the richest people I know invented and patented a human powered machine that could fly short distances. It was baught from him by a large oil company. He iives in a £10m house and has not worked a day since.
Innovation away from old pardigms of power systems will evolve (the “eureka” moments are very rare so it will be evolution through investment and research). This is time consuming and requires investment by the big players in petrochem companies. They are unwilling to do this at the moment. It is easier for them to dig deeper or further than before. Political treaties to enable oil exploration in politically unstable regions will develop and make availabe oil in Alaska and parts of Africa and hostile governments will be “amended” (see Iraq) and pipelines for oil transportation will become available (See Afganistan).

Oil will not die – it may fade slowly.

I assume it will be a bit of a global version of what we were told as kids…

‘Don’t pick you nose or your head will cave in’.

The world will simply collapse on itself.

the other good quote on the topic is:
“Oil is far too valuable a commodity to be burnt”

No-one here gets out alive.

Another example would be the synthesis of hydrocarbons from Coal, there’s thousands of years of coal left. And it’s not that expensive compared to some of the more inacessible oil reserves.

But it is expensive in the sense of energy required to achieve it.

I’d suggest people look up EROEI – energy return on energy invested. It is scary to see how much is needed as an input to get some of this stuff out of the ground.

Oil has been an important resource for a little over 100 years and before that the world still turned!

Before that, coal. We’ve screwed the carbon reserves and oil is but one of them. Comparing life 100 years ago to now as a device to support inaction is pure folly.

I think oil will last long past the time that the planet has become uninhabitable for mankind.

I think oil will last long past the time that the planet has become uninhabitable for mankind.

Doesn’t look like it will run out in my lifetime, by which time I’m sure there will be more important things to worry about.

One of the richest people I know invented and patented a human powered machine that could fly short distances. It was baught from him by a large oil company. He iives in a £10m house and has not worked a day since.

I call bullshit.

The oil companies purchased huge amounts of patents in order to stop proliferation of cheap and non-petrochemical forms of of power from becoming mainstream, to protect monopolies and status quo.

Evidence please.

If I were an oil company boss and I bought patents, I’d want to make some money out of them. Extracting oil isn’t particularly easy, I’d love to make my money by manufacturing and maintaining water powered cars instead, since everyone in the world would want one I’m sure they’d be a big hit.

don’t worry about it, there’s shed loads of oil.

we’ll run out of loads of other vital stuff long before we run out of oil.

How many years of oil are left ?

at least 50 years of the cheap and easy stuff we can pump out of the ground.

many hundreds of years of the difficult dirty stuff (oil/tar sand/shale) we have to dig out of the ground.

(and when we’ve run out of oil, we can bodge a substitute out of coal.)
the price of oil will continue to rise slowly. This will (slowly) force us to find alternative ways of doing things.

This transition is already happening, and eventually we’ll reach a tipping point where it’s easier to use the alternatives than carry on pissing around maintaining the industry/infrastructure required to extract and process oil.

summary: we’ll never run out, the transition has started, everything will be fine.

I’ll be dead by then, so who ****ing cares. Now wheres my massive chauffeur driven car, to take me to the airport?

I believe this is the stance presently adopted by every politician on the planet

Plus one, now where’s that effing butler

I call bullshit.

+1

It’s an apocryphal tale that normally only fools undergrads (and humanities ones at that)…..

The future is Nuclear. Ignore the whining and increasingly irrelevant NGOs and their like who harp on that we should each own our own farmstead with our own chicken and goat and wear clothes made of grass.

There’s not a lot that most people can do about any of it – most aren’t wealthy enough to be early adopters or powerful enough to influence policy. By the time I (and quite likely you) have an electric car (or motorbike for me) it’ll be because everyone does. Keep recycling and putting in loft insulation though.

But we the human race already have the next energy technology, as soon as we start deploying it en mass we’ll be fine. (Will be quite funny to see “nuclear free” Germany buying the bulk of their electricity from nuclear generation in France. Buy shares in EDF now!)

There’s probably far more oil in the ground (that the oil tycoons know about) than they are letting us (and each other) know about.

Why would they do that, each time there is a revelation about oil, it isn’t that they have been hiding how much they have, it is that they don’t have as much as they said they did.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/08/oil-saudiarabia

If there was more oil than reported, why has oil shale suddenly become economical where 10 years ago it was considered non-viable. And why have they started prospecting for new oil in some of the most inhospitable places in the world (Alaska, Antartica etc). It is running out, have no doubt.

why, we can make energy from more than just oil

Yeah, but can you make car tyres from these alternative sources? There are hundreds of millions of cars in the world all of them requiring huge amounts of energy for production and raw materials, of which oil is involved at every level. Do you really think we are going to be able to find the oil to build a world full of electric cars?

(Will be quite funny to see “nuclear free” Germany buying the bulk of their electricity from nuclear generation in France. Buy shares in EDF now!)

it’s mostly what the UK does

summary: we’ll never run out, the transition has started, everything will be fine.

Did you factor in the overall increase in global tmperatures into your profligate carbon-burning prediction?

I work in the oil industry in a small company doing R&D type work and I can confirm that there is a lot of effort and money going into developing better, cheaper ways of extracting the more difficult to access reserves of oil and getting moe oil and gas out of the existing reservoirs. There’s an awful lot that could be done even without drilling more holes in the ground but it becomes more expensive so it’s all driven by the economics. Once it becomes economical to go get that hard to get oil, we’ll do it and we are already figuring out how.
As others have said it’s very likely that in reality the price of oil will rise sufficiently to make other options economically more attractive before the actual oil runs out.

If there was more oil than reported, why has oil shale suddenly become economical where 10 years ago it was considered non-viable. And why have they started prospecting for new oil in some of the most inhospitable places in the world (Alaska, Antartica etc). It is running out, have no doubt.

the price of oil has risen over the last 10 years, to the point where it’s economically viable (profitable) to do those difficult things.

we’re now happy to pay more than $100/barrel, and that’s opened the door to a world ram-jam-packed-stuffed-full of oil.

in 10 years, we’ll be happy to pay $200/barrel, and that’ll open more doors.

in 20 years we’ll be happy to pay $400/barrel, and so on.

my dad’s a bit of a hippy, he’s worried that we’re not running out fast enough…