Anyone who thinks we can simply stop using oil is simply ignorant.
That is not to say that we shouldn't use renewable energy for fuel but the narrative of we should stop everything 100% is highly irritating.
Happy to hear is anyone has different opinions :)
"Modern medicine relies on petroleum, particularly to transport patients, staff, and supplies"
That part is largely 'solved' problem and the rollout of those solutions over the next 30 years will probably be significant. As far as plastics and pharmaceuticals are concerned the paper puts it at "an estimated 0.2% of petroleum used in the United States was for medical plastics"
As for plastics in general the current number seems to be in the 6-10% range globally depending on who you ask. With a combination of reducing, recycling and misc. technology improvements I'm sure we can get that down further in the next 20-30 years. And much of that oil can probably come from sources other than pumping it out of the ground.
So on the whole I think winding down the petroleum industry as we know it today over the next 30 years to a fraction of what it is today (no one is seriously suggesting 100% shutdown) is absolutely doable, from a technology point of view. The reasons why it won't happen are political.
More importantly, it will hopefully come from onshore wells which are easier to access and manage than the crazy underwater shenanigans necessary of deep offshore extraction.
People often forget that the problem isn't producing CO2, the problem is producing too much CO2. If we have sequestration techniques (natural or man made) you can produce as much CO2 as you want as long as you have sustainable levels (which currently we need negative net production).
When people say "stop using oil", it really means stop using it for fuel because that is the vast majority of usage, and if we eliminate that then what's left is not a significant problem. The worldwide demand could probably be satisfied by a handful of drilling rigs instead of the thousands we have now.
But this article is not about that - this is about one country deciding to get out of oil production. I guess they have discussed this at lenght and decided that, all factors considered, it makes more sense for them to stop oil production, decarbonize their economy as far as possible, and import the oil that they will still need.
You can synthesize hydrogen from water. You can synthesize methane, methanol or ammonia with hydrogen and CO2 and go on from there to build everything that is built from oil today.
This isn't exactly efficient, and doing this at scale is a huge challenge. But in the end we'll have to find alternatives for all oil products, because making them from oil will inevitably lead to carbon emissions (both in the refinery and at the end of life of products when they decompose in a landfill or get burned).
Chances are wherever you are most of of what you have in your direct sightline contains petroleum in a way or another. Try living without products containing petroleum and you're basically back in 1800s.
Once we run out of it we're truly fucked because we have yet to find viable alternative for most of its use cases.
I consume maybe somewhere on the order of 2kg per week (100kg/yr) in the form of plastic packaging, toothpaste, rubber, asphalt, etc. And most of this consumption results in solid waste or other inert storage, as opposed to the generation of CO2.
Eliminating fossil fuels for energy and heating uses will not mean "you're basically back in 1800s" - those sorts of uses are not as relevant to climate change. You'll still be able to buy tires and toothpaste (though the economics of something like asphalt, which is almost a waste product unless you're doing cracking, might result in alternative materials trials for road surfacing treatments, particularly in urban areas. Interlock pavers are particularly suitable for low-strength situations where asphalt is currently used due to artificially low prices)
I never talked about energy and heating, quite the contrary. All I'm saying is that almost everything we use or consume are petroleum derived, that petroleum is not an infinite resource and that for most of these things we don't have anything viable to replace them with yet.
The economics of synthetics are cost prohibitive for use in transportation and road construction. But luckily, electric vehicles will continue to reduce the need for petroleum for transportation purposes and asphalt is the most recyclable petroleum product out there. You can literally recycle it on-site.