Baggins, as usual, wasnt making a point. He was hurling insults. So there was nothing for me to rebut. Obviously oil is a finite resource, but I was commenting on the notion put forth by thaumatergy that the US was "going to use it all up." Oil will never be all used up.
OK, here's a rather subtle and important point. Speaking as a geologists (and mind you, I'm not a practicing geologist like Baggins, so you should listen to him before me, but here goes)
Oil is like so many other geologic resources, of varying grades. You seem to be aware of the fact that as the "easier" oil gets depleted the stuff left over is harder to come by. This is something we all learn in our Economic Geology class.
But the curve of cost isn't necessarily linear and it isn't necessarily an assumption that we will be able to make use of the material available. At some point just because it's "down there" doesn't necessarily mean we can "get it back out".
Currently in the U.S. we have passed peak production almost 40 years ago. IF, however, you want to pay say about $30 a gallon for gas here in the U.S. you might wish to "use" the U.S. oil available. But even then at some point we will run out of the stuff that can even be accessed.
On top of that the North Sea oil fields are probably at peak production and on the decline. We are left largely with the oil in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East that we know of. However our friends there have been rather opaque on what their
reserve estimates are. In fact we don't really know how much they have left. It is in their interest to tell us there's plenty more, and some experts feel they may not be telling us what their real reserve estimates are.
Your point that oil will never run out before we find an alternative is a nice idea and certainly one people are working on. Are
you working on it? I did briefly in my second postdoc. It ain't easy and it ain't guaranteed we'll get it i
n time.
And even if we do we will
still probably have to dramatically alter our lifestyle.
But here's another wrinkle: if we run out of cheap oil that doesn't just impact our ability to drive around gas guzzlers....
it dramatically impacts just about every item you have in your home. We live in a "Plastic Age" (as the Buggles said) and that isn't just a metaphor. It's a reality. I am sitting in a cubicle and a vanishingly small amount of the material I interact with and use in my daily life is inorganic in nature.
Plastic comes from oil.
In fact a
huge amount of the organic chemistry that underlies our lives comes from oil.
So you and your friends find an alternative energy source. It better be fast enough to leave us with sufficient cheap oil to afford cheap organic chemicals as well.
You speak as if it is simply "a foregone conclusion" we will be able to easily transition to an alternative to oil. But I can tell you, as a chemist, it isn't going to be an easy transition. It may be a very scary time.
