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Comment by RyanMcGreal | Hacker News Reader

I admire your bold prediction, and I hope we come back a year or two later to see how well your timeline bears out.

Just one quibble:

>Oil will run out (that one is actually easier, about 3 decades)

That would be roughly correct at current rates of extraction, but:

* The oil production rate is going to start declining by 2-3 percent a year some time in the next several years (we've been plateaued at 85 mbpd since around 2005).

* Eventually the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) for oil will hit 1:1, at which point it will no longer be useful as a source of energy - though it might still be useful as a material input.

So strictly speaking, oil will never run out; rather, it will gradually cease to be an important part of the economy.

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Production is declining, but consumption is increasing, so it could be less than 30 years. I also believe that oil will be come more valuable as a pharmaceutical base, for fertilizer, and plastics than for energy. We'll have other sources of energy that we will use to extract the oil, so the 1:1 rule may not apply. As long as the energy costs to extract it are lower than its value for all uses, it'll still be extracted.

We can't consume it faster than we can get it out of the ground. This is the main reason the oil price rose steadily through the 2000s and spiked in 2008: spare capacity shrank as demand rose against a maxed out supply until it disappeared entirely in 2007/08. The price super-spike was the market destroying excess demand the only short-term way it knows how.

We store oil and we find more places to extract it. Furthermore, as consumption leads to higher prices, we will produce more efficient and productive ways to extract it.

>We store oil and we find more places to extract it.

We've already extracted the lion's share of the fast, cheap, easy-to-reach stuff. What remains is slower, more expensive and harder-to-reach. Case in point: the deepwater well that's spewing 2,500 bbl of oil a day into the Gulf right now.

>Furthermore, as consumption leads to higher prices, we will produce more efficient and productive ways to extract it.

So I keep hearing. I'm highly skeptical that we can improve technique fast enough to start pumping oil out of the Alberta Tarsands at the same rate that we've been pumping it out of Ghawar for the past forty years.

That's the real issue: whether some combination of conservation, new sources and new techniques can somehow manager to cover the escalating annual shortfall in conventional production, without painful demand destruction via price spikes.

My sense from studying this stuff of the past several years is that we're going to spend a long time behind the eight-ball, lurching from economic crisis to economic crisis while our real living standards are slowly ratcheted down.

> My sense from studying this stuff of the past several years is that we're going to spend a long time behind the eight-ball, lurching from economic crisis to economic crisis while our real living standards are slowly ratcheted down.

I don't think I'm very happy about that vision, but I suspect it is on the money.

There's not really any other option within the current environment of quarterly reports. We have to think with more vision.

The best solution would be to stop using oil as an energy source now with any purpose except to get us over the hump. We don't even yet know how to get over the hump, realistically. The options are solar, wind, and gravity and all of those options require so much energy that we could exhaust remaining supplies making them productive enough to satisfy us all. It will take a lot of solar panels to cover the sahara, connect it to the grid, etc.

In the meantime, we're powering inefficient combustion engines and growing corn to, you guessed it... power inefficient combustion engines...

The best - and by "best" I mean "most depressing" - thing about ethanol-from-corn is that it's a net energy sink. It actually takes quite a bit more energy to grow and process the corn than it produces in ethanol. There's on way an ethanol industry would even exist without the colossal American subsidies to the corn industry.

Not to mention the fact that the ethanol itself has a lower energy density than gasoline, so mixing it in with gas is simply diluting the energy of the gas.

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