This will work for as long as the world has enough oil to meet demand. Eventually as oil becomes a more scarce resource, someone will explore for oil there.
In the 00s, we pursued biofuels (ethanol, biodiesel, bioplastics, etc… which has problems but does still replace some uses of oil) and on-shore wind aggressively.
In the 2010s, we developed battery electric vehicles, grid storage, solar, and off-shore wind.
I suspect this decade we’ll see hydrogen steel and ammonia production, battery electric flight, and chemical carbon capture. Another decade of this and expensive methods of oil extraction just aren’t very feasible, so if the price spikes, people will just switch to alternatives faster or even start synthesizing carbon neutral hydrocarbons (ie via electrolyzed hydrogen, direct air CO2 capture, and Fischer-Tropsch).
Are folks just not aware of this, so they think people who say you can "make plastic out of CO2 and water" are talking hand-wavy nonsense?
The process is used commercially today in Qatar, Malaysia, and South Africa plus has had pilot plants in the US. But many of these US pilot plant efforts stopped when the price of oil cratered. So again, we absolutely do have alternatives to crude oil, it's just a function of economics.
It's pretty cheap, commonly used in one-time plastic items, and is the most common 3D printing plastic.
But also, you can make polypropylene and polyethylene pretty easily from methane (which can be from biological sources or synthesized from electrolyzed hydrogen and CO2) via methanol-to-olefins processes, common in China.
But you're missing the point. We can synthesize literally anything you can make from oil using hydrogen, direct air captured CO2, and the Fischer-Tropsch process. It's a complete replacement for crude oil. It's just more expensive than getting it from the ground.
What is likely to happen is change in political will to keep the ban - you know, the usual bribery and the talk of “jobs” etc. That is a bigger threat than oil shortage
The best option is to develop means of providing energy which disrupt the economics of even oil extraction/refinement. Nuclear could do this - uranium occurs at a pretty constant rate across the earth's crust. Nuclear could also be built out at a rate of choice to meet and pass the energy provided by fossil fuels. One thing that typified the industrial expansion to modernity is ever increasing utilization of greater amounts of energy. Energy storage even has suitable options to disrupt fossil fuels - vis a vi hydrogen fuel cells, lithium batteries, and plenty of other options. (Personally, I like that fuel cells output water since desert areas are seeing greater population characteristics.)
In short, the best option is to leave oil and fossil fuels in the ground and grow the world off its use through appropriate investments in tech and infrastructure.
Even the term “fossil fuels” is an inappropriate framing of the chemicals involved since it restricts their use to burning. Consider the processes involved in their formations: organic material grew for eons millions of years ago. It then had to be buried in just the right conditions and later embedded into even further beneficial conditions. It took millions of years, high temperatures, and high pressures to go from plant material to these complex molecular forms. Then we dig them up or seep them out with fracking and further refine them. Then we burn them. Huge losses of energy all along the way. Using oil as fossil fuel is a huge waste of the energy it took to create those molecules.
We may not have reached 100% on each, but we've changed a lot. We have other values than money.
Solar allows us to keep doing some things that oil powers, but we would stop using oil at some point, limited by pollution killing too many of us, running out, or choice.
But if Greenland is the last reserve of oil left on the planet, the value of that oil will be astronomical. Holding off on drilling during cheap oil is a good investment.