No article about the industry is complete without a reference to "peak oil".
Do people realize there's a much harder problem to solve than alternative sources of energy? Namely: How do we make all the other compounds essential to modern life which currently originate in an oil well?
We won't be able to quit oil for a long fucking time.
It's basically the same shortsightedness that led us into hunting whales to (near-)extinction for lamp oils. At least less animal cruelty is involved, I hope.
Also, planned Obsolescence should be illegal - or at least thought of, socially, as immoral. The thing is, that the need for replacing vast majority of things that you use regularly do to the disposable nature of profit-only-driven markets is typically built around supporting components in a product which are made out of plastic - but the useful aspect of the item can often be a re-usable material.
Take Razors as a prime example... Overall plastic is bad, regardless of the ephemeral convenience it currently provides - i has stifled innovation, its short-sighted and its detrimental effects will last for generations...
On another note, many things are plastic that should instead be glass, hemp, or other material.
But the numbers are so large that's really only going to be possible with fusion, so we're talking generations from now.
But then there's "Peak Oil" as an apocalyptic theory with imploding economies and starving billions. That's just... not going to happen.
But I do not believe the price of oil is suddenly going to shoot up to some astronomical value overnight and cause mass die-offs, which is something you hear every time the price of oil goes up a bit.
So no, we won't totally eliminate the need for oil for a long time. We also won't totally run out of oil for a very, very long time. But we can eliminate the need for 50-75% of current oil demand in this century, possibly the first half of this century.
That's true. But if you remove transportation as a consumer of oil, suddenly our oil stocks will for more than 3x the amount of time.
http://www.globalpetrolprices.com/articles/39/
Once you remove transportation from the mix, the affected industries have a lot more time to move themselves from petroleum as a feedstock.
The problem is that as the oil price goes up oil that was not economically viable in the past suddenly becomes viable and so peak oil will shift a little bit into the future.
Eventually it will run out though, it is a finite resource after all.
Peak oil is about the point where oil production (weird word for moving it from below ground to above ground, but part of it is refining) is largest.
We would be fortunate if that ends up being near the half way mark, as that would likely mean that production wouldn't fall abruptly.
Also: I hope we will never run out of oil. Ideally, alternative energy will get so cheap that it will become uneconomic to get out the last x%.
There is also a finite amount of oil in the ground. It's stupendously useful and rich in chemistry. We still don't know where all the reserves are, and there is a lot of oil still in the ground. But that oil comes at a cost: inconvenient, excessively deep, politically untenable. But we'll be able to get oil for a long time (just at ever increasing costs).
Put another way, you can, for a crude estimate, divide national GDP by petroleum consumption to arrive at the net economic gain per barrel of oil consumed.
In the U.S., that's about $1,000. For India and China, it was about $400 - $500 as of a couple-three years ago. For much of Europe, about $1,500, peaking with Switzerland at about $3,000/bbl.
Put another way, figure what you spend to get a barrel of oil, and subtract that from what you gain by it. Or divide to get a multiplier. At $10/bbl cost and $1000/bbl value, the US gains $100 for each dollar spent on petroleum. At $100/bbl cost, that falls to $10 per dollar.
For countries with lower value per barrel, those gains are even smaller.
A couple of other perspectives:
* In India and China, there are low-value activities enabled by energy usage which would be driven out by higher energy costs.
* There is the question of total net energy. It's one thing to say "but we've got $10/bbl oil". But if there are only, say, 10 billion barrels/year of $10/bbl oil, vs. the 35 billion barrels consumed annually, well, that's 25 billion barrels/year you've either forgone or need to substitute by other means. And our substitutes for petroleum, most especially in transport, are exceedingly limited.
* There's substitutability, generally. Passenger vehicle traffic may be electrifiable. Transit and cargo freight as well. Marine freight not so much, and commercial air travel almost certainly not at all. Options for alternative liquid fuels are at best highly problematic. Some exacerbate current problems, most create new ones.
But answering your point: what's changed isn't the amount of fuel, or the benefit gained per use. Rather, market price has climbed (and fallen, and climbed, but that's another story, unless you owe or hold loans based on market price assumptions...) to the point that previously noneconomic reserves are now economically viable.
The limit of energetically viable deposits is, however, a hard cap, and barring some massive developments in technology, are unlikely. There's that little emissions problem as well.
Hydrofracking is a technology which was first developed in the 1940s and 1950s. It wasn't used until the past decade simply because it wasn't necessary or viable. And while there've been some select specific technological improvements in application, the fundamental concept is as it was first conceived.
Most reserves have already hit or passed that point. Most oil today is more expensive than it was, say, in the 70s because you have to inject water to force it to the surface and things like that. Just digging a hole and watching it gush skyward from internal pressure is a thing of the past, basically.
Synthesizing organic compounds sounds pretty reasonable given our modern advanced awareness of chemistry, the liklihood that we'll be able to use renewable energy to offset the overhead of synthesis. Just so long as we don't write checks on these kinds of ideas before we can actually cash them.