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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't this example go against your point? I've been hearing that we were nearing the end of the oil supply since I've been a kid but the date keeps being pushed back. As the demand for oil grows the price goes up and new methods to extract more oil from the ground become profitable. Now current projections seem to target the 2050s at the earliest.

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Yeah. I mean if you started digging oil 100 years ago - you would probably be rich enough for another century today. Even if you don’t dig it anymore.

I remember oil exhaustion projected into the 2050 since I was a kid at the early 90's. Every time I ask for a source of those earlier dates, people point either at crazy conspiracy theorists or at projections of peak extraction rate at the early 00's, that seem to be correct¹.

1 - If you exclude oil substitutes that started being counted like oil by then. There have been two peaks at this time, and production is mostly staying steady. There was very little experience with how the after-peak of something with no replacement option would look like, so those projections were indeed very diverse and off-target.

This is also exactly what is holding back synthetic fuels from becoming profitable.

Fossil fuels will eventually lose out over synthetic fuels, but not until prices rise substantially.

How are "synthetic fuels" produced? If it's anything like synthetic lubricants, it's still fossil fuels, just with more energy-intensive processing.

From a theoretical standpoint, virtually any source of carbon could be used, you could even make it out of the carbon already in the atmosphere:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-carbon/scie...

my point is going too deep into one idea because we'll find more of it.

oil is flowing longer than expected .. and that's not something we're enjoying a lot right now

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