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Re:The sky's gone dark by DanBC on Thursday October 01, 2015 @01:48PM (#10313015)
> I think we'll be way past the need for oil, long before we run out of it.

Oil isn't just used for fuel. What will replace the oil products in pharma, plastics, etc?

Re:The sky's gone dark by zrail on Thursday October 01, 2015 @01:59PM (#10313144)
Plastics are probably the largest semi-direct user of hydrocarbons other than energy production, and according to the US Energy Information Administration [1] plastics used the equivalent of 2.7% of the total oil consumption in the US in 2010.

If we just stop burning the stuff we'll have enough for other uses for a very very long time.

Re:The sky's gone dark by Tuna-Fish on Thursday October 01, 2015 @02:48PM (#10313622)
We can synthetize all petroleum products from carbon feedstocks, so long as we can pay the energy cost. This is generally true of almost everything these days -- all resources that the modern economy depends on are substitutable or synthetizable with energy.