A sentence I'd never thought I'd ever write, but we can actually look at the Nazis for an answer. They too had the problem that there was barely any oil available, so they turned to a recent-ish French invention - wood gas - instead [1] and scaled the technology up to hundreds of thousands of deployed units, including locomotives.

Wood is perfectly fine to kickstart a re-industrialization, it was how the original industrialization went on as well with giant steam power plants in the first place. The largest benefit of oil was that it was waaay cheaper to extract and handle than to deal with wood, and you can make plastics out of it.

A future civilization may actually have an easier path, by using either power-to-gas technology to create energy-dense fuel, or by letting plants do the job instead (biofuel). The only thing that will be really short in supply is plastics - for now, we make cheap plastics out of the byproducts of oil refineries, but in a society that doesn't have oil, they will be limited to plastics that do not require oil (e.g. PVC) as part of the supply chain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas

During the past 40 years the amount of oil and natural gas remaining in known reserves:

- Was cut in half

- Stayed about the same

- More than doubled

If you answered more than doubled you’d be right.

More and more oil and natural gas reserves have been discovered and much of it in just the last 10 years (including off the coast of Gaza, go look it up).

This means they are not running out like most people think.

We need to switch to cleaner energy now, we can’t just wait for the dirty stuff to run out. But because we are constantly discovering new accessible supplies the threshold for running out keeps getting pushed further back, and we haven’t even really started to tap several suspected massive reserves in the arctic and elsewhere and Russia is rumored to be sitting on discoveries that they haven’t even announced to the world.

People wrongly think that as we use more oil and gas, the reserves will run lower. They hadn’t realized that as technology improves, it becomes more possible to find and extract fossil fuels.

To prevent the absolute worst effects of climate change, oil and gas reserves must stay in the ground. But they will never run out, just become more expensive to extract.

We just need to create alternatives that are cheap enough that extracting oil for burning and not manufacturing isn’t cost effective to do anymore.

The technology to replace fossil fuels is coming, and it’s been dropping in cost profoundly in recent years. There’s every reason to believe that we will make this transition, it’s just a question of getting better energy density with existing technologies and getting them widely deployed with less exotic materials.

When electric cars have a 2000 kilometer range and cost 1/2 of the price to refill, gas vehicles won’t stand a chance.

Have faith. Things are dire but they are far from lost. We do need to shift society, and quickly, but that only happens when the system that got us in trouble gets used to cause the transition to sustainability.

I am not a doomer so perhaps we don’t see eye to eye on things. But the idea that we are going to run out of oil anytime soon is a falsehood that’s widely perpetuated, and it means that a lot of our thinking needs to change from “before the end of oil” to “proactively change towards a defined and sustainable solution” as we won’t be forced to stop using it as it won’t run out…

-- Voltaire