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Comment by bryanh | Hacker News Reader

I would imagine a key difference here is that with water, the root sources will never be eradicated. Evaporate it and it enters the atmosphere. Dump it on the ground and it drains to the water table. Flush it down the drain and it enters a treatment system which dumps it into a river where it enters the ocean in due time.

The tech required to recycle the water is already available (and is commonplace), however, costs associated with this practice lead to government subsidies.

That's why nobody noticed. Oil runs out. Water sticks around (though it may need some cleaning).

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> That's why nobody noticed. Oil runs out. Water sticks around (though it may need some cleaning).

Except it doesn't run out. Sure at some point you can't pump it out of wells any more (just like with water) and the tar sands will run out, but there's a zillion other options that are just not-quite-profitable right now. Water has sewage treatment plants and desalination, oil has various forms of biological-based sources and I'm pretty sure some straight chemical options.

The difference is that with water, if the aquifers run out you can increase the output of your desalination and sewage treatment plants, or build more of them, or whatever--all it takes is more energy inputs. Oil is energy inputs; if the EROEI drops too low we can't replace it until we find more than the energy we're currently getting from it from non-petroleum-based sources. It's unfortunately quite difficult to build thousands of nuke plants overnight without using petroleum inputs.

This isn't really an overnight sort of problem though, it's not like all the existing sources will suddenly run dry over the course of a year and leave us with nothing to bootstrap new sources.

The amount of processing it takes to turn oil into gasoline already takes a lot of energy from sources other than oil. Gasoline energy cost about 15x what wind energy does today, changing that to 16-20x is not a huge issue.

Fortunately, a lot of oil use is recreational. Look at the USA, which uses 10 times the oil per capita as heavily industrialized China.

When oil does start running short, there will be huge price shocks. Either market driven, or war-style command economies will curtail most shipping; while manufacturers pump out electrical vehicles and wind generators as fast as they can (wind generators can be built in factories and set up fairly quickly; nuclear plants require a long lead time due to site construction, planning, etc). Energy production is a relatively small part of the economy, so cutting back on the rest of the economy can pay for alternative energy supplies.

Planes can run on bio-fuel (which costs a fortune, but nobody needs to fly), cars can run on stationary energy (if you convert them to use electric motors). I don't know what container ships can use, perhaps rail will replace them in many cases (though this will be a big disruption).

It won't be pretty. There may be severe shortages. But at least the technology is being developed now.

Or, alternatively, people will live close to where they work and just walk there.

Yes as the article pointed out, water does not face the same constraints as coal,oil, and other resources that follow the 'peak' distribution. It is, for the most part, not fundamentally transformed when we consume it. The "water cycle" we all learned about in school is much quicker than waiting for dead plants and animals to decompose into hydrocarbons. It seems like this research has more to do with branding & marketing than actual scientific discovery.

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