[Closed] What happens when all the worlds oil runs out ?

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........

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😀

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

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...?

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.

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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]I believe this is the stance presently adopted by [s]every politician[/s][b]pretty much everyone[/b] on the planet[/i]

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...

[i][b]'Don’t pick you nose or your head will cave in’.[/b][/i]

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.

[url= http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/08/oil-saudiarabia ]http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/08/oil-saudiarabia[/url]

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...

I call bullshit.
Evidence please.

I think what the optimists ignore is that whilst it is true that societies always move on when new technologies become available, it isn't necessarily a smooth transition. A awful lot of history consists of states which flourished and then sank without trace once the foundations on which they depended collapsed. I'm not saying it is going to happen, but I can certainly see modern (post)-industrial society ceasing to function before being replaced by something different & it wouldn't be a process I would volunteer to live through..

Squeaky chains and sticking gear cables are our future.
Oh the humanity.

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

This.

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.

Because these are oil companies that you're dealing with - probably the most devious, hypocritical, dishonest, machiavellian organisations on the planet outside of the Catholic Church.

Remember hydrogen fuel cell cars? The next Big Thing about 20 years ago? No? That's because the oil companies have bought the technology and shelved it. There's only Honda who are man enough to stand up to them about it, and even they don't shout very loud about the fact that they've had an H-cell car on sale in the USA for the last 10 years.

That's because the oil companies have bought the technology and shelved it.

Again I'd like to see the evidence.

Fuel cell technology is common knowledge, it's not a secret, but it requires hydrogen which is very hard to handle.

And you need energy to generate the hydrogen in the first place.

And you need energy to generate the hydrogen in the first place.

Hydrogen, rather than being a substitute fuel, makes most sense as a means of energy storage to smooth out peaks and troughs in production. If we were willing to build a lot more renewable or nuclear electricity production capacity, H2 could be produced and used for transportation fuel.

Right now however we have enough issues making electricity just for current demand, without trying to power everyone's car etc too.

The low hanging fruits that have made our oil so cheap are running out rapidly. It is indeed going to get more and more expensive, but it is not just extraction that will affect the price, we have to think about burgeoning demand and protectionism. If it were so abundant why are the Saudi's now drilling offshore? They apparently have the largest reserves in the world under their feet.

H2 could be produced and used for transportation fuel.

Extremely difficult and expensive.

A tanker of crude oil has far more value than a tank of H2 would. That is, IF you could actually store the H2 long enough to transport it from say Iceland or wherever.

No need for squeaky chains, we'll just have belts instead. Oh..

Torminalis - Member

If it were so abundant why are the Saudi's now drilling offshore? They apparently have the largest reserves in the world under their feet.

they claim* they've something like 300billion barrels of oil - which is a piffling amount when you start looking at oil shale/tar sands/whatever.

(*if it's true, it's enough to supply the entire world for 10 years, and it's [s]almost certainly[/s] 8o110**5)

Coal its the future

[img] http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRiUctRyquBzzEB2x3iJKeMZZ3V_ejImTg7m27DeePHJdDzG6nOUQ [/img]

There is currently more production capacity in the world than there is demand for oil. The growing demand from India and China is estimated to fill that gaop somewhere between 2016 and 2018. Then the price will rise sharply and alternative technologies will become more attractive.

How about railway style pantograph lines on motorways to give electric cars and lorries greater range?

We'll have eaten all the horses....

Because these are oil companies that you're dealing with - probably the most devious, hypocritical, dishonest, machiavellian organisations on the planet outside of the Catholic Church.

I am a catholic and I am OFFENDED !

At some point, someone who the oil companies haven't bought off or killed will present their engine that runs on poo or nasal hair and we'll all start using those.

In fact, we're probably doing that already. When you're filling your car up, you're not pouring petrol in, it's poo. They release a faint wiff of petrol to trick you otherwise but what you're really pumping in there is the output from Father Bob's cattle herd which as everyone knows is much cheaper than petrol.

meanwhile all the real petrol is being stockpiled to run the tories jags which won't run on poo.

That's because the oil companies have bought the technology and shelved it.

Do you actually believe this?

If so, I suggest you seek medial help for paranoid delusions....

But really, don't the oil companies just pretend there's no oil to keep the price high?

lazybike - Member
We'll have eaten all the horses....

I do not shop at Tesco.

There are many thinks that we will not have available that are of concern. Oil is finite but so are many other things, water being one of them.

Yeah but it's a lot easier to recycle water than it is petrol.

Oil is finite but so are many other things, water being one of them.

samuri - Member

But really, don't the oil companies just pretend there's no oil to keep the price high?

no.

1) oil companies like us to think they've got access to loads of easy oil, cos that's the stuff which makes loads of profit - and that's good for investors.

(ie: "we've got loads of easy oil" = strong share price / vs: "we've go no oil left" = collapsed share price and a buy-out)

2) the price isn't high - it's just not fantastically cheap anymore.

There is quite a lot of oil but:

* It's in environmentally difficult sites requiring some innovation in extraction technologies to safely access e.g. Macondo well - Deep Water horizon disaster, Canadian tar-sands etc

* It's in countries with dubious politics

* It's damaging the climate and the air we breath

But really, don't the oil companies just pretend there's no oil to keep the price high?

Historically, oil companies have tended to over-estimate supplies. At the end of the day they need to inspire confidence in the future supply of oil, otherwise they're on a downward spiral while other technologies are sought.

It's a very interesting topic. In reality the shift will probably be slow. It's already begun. And we'll mould around it as a society, as we have done for thousands of years.

But it's interesting because our entire modern society revolves around oil. Our lifestyles are a distant whisper of the ones our ancestors lived 100 years ago. Almost every product we buy contains oil, was manufactured by oil, or at the very least was delivered through the use of oil.

[i]If[/i] there was any serious disruption in supply it would have a direct impact on our ability to continue living. It would be a bit of a mess.

2) the price isn't high - it's just not fantastically cheap anymore.

After all, a pint of beer will cost you up to £6 in a posh bar and it must cost a fraction of the price of oil to produce.

If there was any serious disruption in supply it would have a direct impact on our ability to continue living.

You lot do know that 'oil' isn't just 'oil' don't you? All that light sweet crude is getting scarce and the cruddy stuff is mostly what is left.

If there was any serious disruption in supply it would have a direct impact on our ability to continue living in the same manner that we are used to living now.

You can interpret that in different ways. Of course we could all become farmers and the like, living off the land as we have done for thousands of years.

The fact is, if oil production stopped tomorrow, food would be scarce, there'd be no jobs to go to. It would be a fight for survival and we'd probably see civil war. Many of us would die.

2) the price isn't high - it's just not fantastically cheap anymore.

It isn’t really is it?

You can pay as much for water.

Economic leveling will of course prevail, and current non viable technologies will replace a proportion of the conventionally located energy sources.

It's important to understand the difference between energy harvesting, and energy storage. Oil is actually energy storage, the harvesting process occurred millions of years ago, and without any invervention from Man. We are now reaping those riches. Any susbtitutional energy system will need to carry about BOTH processes, the harvesting and the storage.

2 options exist for harvesting: Nuclear and "sun powered" (be that solar, wind, wave, or biomass etc)
Multiple options exist for storage as distribution, including hydrogen.

The intesting things are what happens to technologies that currently completely depend upon oil, like plastics (as someone mentioned earlier), and transport systems like aeronautics which must have a high energy density fuel to work (fly!)

Currently, 95% of hydrogen is chemically cracked from, yup, you guessed it, oil........

This really leaves the same two options: Nations become self sufficient on a mix of nuclear and renewables for harvesting, and a mixture of direct demand electricity usage (grid powered) and hydrogen storage (electrolysis of water (v inefficient!).
OR:
Countries close to the equator become net exporters of energy, either directly via electricity over massive cables, or into a storage medium, again, probably hydrogen. This is probably the greenest, and highest efficiency solution, but leaves all other nations onces again in a political trap very similar to what we have with the middle east nations and their oil reserves.

What is clear is that any of those solutions will be massively expensive and politically difficult. Certainly, i believe it is likely that we may once again enter an "age of austerity" where millions of average working people once again have to work very hard, and have much less expendible income and leisure time to which we have become very familiar. It is perhaps suprising how quickly we have forgoten how we lived as little as 60-70 years ago.

You can interpret that in different ways. Of course we could all become farmers and the like, living off the land as we have done for thousands of years.

The fact is, if oil production stopped tomorrow, food would be scarce, there'd be no jobs to go to. It would be a fight for survival and we'd probably see civil war. Many of us would die.

If there was no water we would die, but not oil.

Countries close to the equator become net exporters of energy

Or ones with easy geothermal sites. Iceland, New Zealand, East Africa maybe.

Perhaps, but we don’t *need* oil to survive as such.

If you want to argue semantics, no. However, the transition from the current 'need' for oil to 'not needing' oil would probably kill several billion people.

Page 3 and no Mr Fusion?

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Who knows?
Deal with it when it happens.

Just glad I own a bike and understand a life which is not car dependent.
A lot of people will struggle with adapting to a non-car dependent lifestyle...

Extremely difficult and expensive.

A tanker of crude oil has far more value than a tank of H2 would. That is, IF you could actually store the H2 long enough to transport it from say Iceland or wherever.

So we'll never be able to do it? Don't be daft molly - a H2 economy is possibly something that would happen in the long run - not least because it fits the current model of being able to drive somewhere and fill up, rather than wait to charge a vehicle. Also, if renewables are to become a larger part of the energy mix then H2 also represents the most plausible current tech for large-scale energy storage to even out the peaks and troughs.

Yeah but it's a lot easier to recycle water than it is petrol.

Not when it's evaporated, it's not.

And also not on the scale required to irrigate vast areas of semi-arid agricultural land to make it productive. And with climate change, demand for irrigation will increase. Most of this water is effectively mined - abstraction rates far exceed aquifer recharge. Typically we don't think about water in the UK because it rains a lot. Yet the SE is suffering from chronic water shortages.

Oil is but a sideshow by comparison. Food and water are the biggies, and as modern agriculture is dependent upon fossil-based energy both for working on farms, but also to make fertiliser, the cost of food will be squeezed from both sides. Fertiliser and fuel become scarce increasing food production costs, and limited water for irrigation increasing pressure on what were the more fertile, wetter areas. Then there's the transportation costs of said food.

If we can't afford the petrol to go for a day out to the beach that will be an inconvenience. When bread is over $20 a loaf, and you have to get your water from a rationed stand-pipe, then you have a problem.

[i]What happens when all the worlds oil runs out ?[/i]

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[i]Don't be daft molly[/i]

W/R Isn't that like asking the Sun not to be hot ?.
😉

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Mr Woppit - Member

No-one here gets out alive.

Well played sir.

xiphon - Member

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.

Might be. Alternatively they might just be doing capitalism- as long as it works for their lifespan/tenure as CEO then it's good enough, if the company fails the day after it doesn't matter.

ahwiles - Member

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

Probably right tbh. We're going to get more and more into the marginal schemes for fossil fuels- methods previously unacceptable on ecological or environmental grounds will become "there is no alternative", fracking and massive open casts and drilling in wildernesses, all that jazz. And we'll chuck resources at these increasingly expensive approaches to preserve the status quo, rather than at improving the alternatives- because extracting a bit of oil from these sources isn't that hard but extracting as much oil as we do now will be harder.

And eventually, it'll all get so marginal that the alternatives will become viable- but that's not a good result, because they'll still be underinvested and substandard, just they'll be a less bad option than oil, and we'll be choosing from 2 bad options.

[i]am i the only one thinking "the last of the v8 interceptors"[/i]

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