To be pedantic, in N years we will run out of fossil fuels - or at least, fossil fuels that deliver positive EROEI. In the 1950s, petroleum was recovered at roughly 100:1 EROEI. Today, the Canadian tar sands are about 3.5:1, and they're profitable. The good oil is already long gone.

Peak oil is a matter of when, not if. It is not an infinite resource. The interesting (and worrisome) question to me is if we'll be able to convert the transportation grid to predominantly electric (and thus powerable by solar/wind) before we hit a global peak and start losing maximum recoverable oil at 3-10%/year, which will cause intense price spikes and resource wars, due to inelastic demand.

The good oil is not already long gone.

There are massive areas off US coasts with proven reserves that are legally untouched (CA moratorium after Santa Barbara spill only allows for marginal/incremental pumping). In the time between those reserves being shut off and now, the economics of retrieving that oil changed completely, and there is now a ton of "easy oil" off the california coast.

Nobody's arguing that oil is not an infinite resource, but I can point to a single location that contains immense amounts of easily tappable oil.

While the original motivation for the CA moratorium was ecological, these days it's (implicitly) economic. All CA has to do is wait until the price spikes start happening, and dribble out oil at very high prices while hoping there isn't another Deepwater Horizon.

fwiw, I did a little investigation. Total California offshore resources are estimated 4-6B bbls, mostly heavy oil. Contrast this with the 71B bbls estimated remaining in Saudi Arabia's Ghawar field (after almost 70 years of production!). There are dozens of fields in production throughout the world that are larger, many an order of magnitude larger, with better quality oil and far less risk.

(I can't tell if you're an expert in gas/oil, or not. I work with a lot of people from the gas/oil industry, so I'm not an expert per se, but I do read a lot about the industry).

The proven reserves for California are based on historic estimates, they haven't been thoroughly re-evaluated, and were based on previous extraction technologies (before side-drilling etc). The current position of my friends who do oil/gas analysis is that California proven reserve estimates are at least 1 order of magnitude below reality mainly because people aren't actively looking because of the moratorium.

That doesn't change the heavy vs light oil problem, though (probably). Heavy oil is harder to pump, harder to handle, and more costly to refine.

The point of all this is that California's offshore fields aren't all that special, and they aren't "easy oil". If they were, any environmentalist resistance would have been defeated long ago.

> with better quality oil and far less risk.

I know you said this in reference to Californian oil, but it also applies to Saudi oil. The number of dollars paid isn’t the only cost of using that oil.

Well, that's true of fossil fuel in general. There's a significant political and environmental cost, and those costs are both increasing. Oil fields belong to whomever owns the guns surrounding them, and the money goes to the kinds of social projects preferred by the kind of people who put guns around oil wells.

> while hoping there isn't another Deepwater Horizon.

At least install an effective blow-out protector.

Offshore drilling in an earthquake zone is not "easy oil". It's a disaster waiting to happen. I do agree that, if we are desperate, we will use it anyway. But I don't think that's good or healthy or responsible.

offshore drilling in an earthquake zone is an engineering job. it's done all the time, costs a bit more, but doesn't dramatically increase risk.

Even if your definition of "oil left" is when EROEI hits 1:1, that still doesn't mean we're out of oil, since there's applications for oil that don't involve extracting energy for it. So it'll continue to be mined even when we're losing energy by doing so.

Now, I probably should have picked a better comparison, since oil really is zero-sum in ways that needing to grow more food isn't.

The point is that in an alternate universe where agriculture was 40% less efficient it doesn't follow that there would be 40% fewer people. Rather, more of the gross world product would be spent on agriculture, since there's a lot you can do to throw more money at the problem to increase yields, and pricing would do a lot to increase the efficiency.

Well, sure. Earth's population has grown roughly 100% in the past 50 years, largely due to the advances of Green Revolution agriculture. This isn't just nitrogen fixing. It's advances in mechanization, transportation, finance, preservation techniques, and more. All of those things would have happened (more or less) even without fixed fertilizer.

I disagree with the idea that there'd be proportionally less meat, for a couple of reasons. First, a lot of grazing-animal meat (beef, basically) comes from land that is unviable for plowing or other vegetation farming. Second, in the absence of inexpensive chemical fertilizer, manure would be a much more important fixer, just like it has been for thousands of years.