I wouldn't be too concerned as renewables and nuclear technology should be at the point where it would be able to pick up the slack - we know the end is coming and we can prepare for it.

An interesting thought experiment is whether or not humans (or some future species) would be able to reproduce the technological advancements that oil enabled given some sort of apocalypse scenario that resets us to year zero.

I remember watching a video in which it said how most current engineering jobs these days are really just destructive jobs.

They basically take an existing natural resource from the environment and turn it into another form of resource that human could make use of. But this in turn destroys that very same environment we human also live in, effectively wiping out ourselves in the process.

Those engineering jobs basically only convert one form of resource/energy into another, but they actually didn't create anything new out of thin air themselves.

I think it is fair to say most engineers do not violate laws of nature.

Oil isn't somehow magical in any manner - everything that oil does today can be boiled down to supplying kinetic energy. We don't use its chemical properties in any special way, it just happens to be among the most efficient in terms of calories per kg. With advances in battery tech, and large-scale shift to renewables, I think running out of oil is largely a non-issue in the long run (of course we'll have pains in shifting, but there will not be any long term drawbacks)

The biggest issue is actually food - most of the seeds grown today are engineered to depend upon fossil-fuel based chemical fertilizers, and cannot actually survive on their own without both the chemical fertilizers and a large helping of herbicides/pesticides/fungicides (many of which are also produced by the chemical industry). Break that dependency and you have to undo the Green Revolution that multiplied agricultural output by 10x. Do that and instead of the world's current food production being able to support a population of 9B if they were all willing to eat a vegetarian diet, you'd be looking at 900M, i.e. about 85% of people on earth would have to die.

I suspect that if you took away all the demand for oil from powering cars, though, there'd be plenty left at reasonable prices for growing food and maybe even flying planes. So you do need some fossil fuel production, but get rid of its use in automobiles, heating, and electricity and the remaining reserves can be allocated much more efficiently.

Oil is not used in the production of fertilizers.

Here's a quote I found in [1]

"The macronutrients required by plants are N (Nitrogen), K (Potassium) and P (Phosphorus). Oil is hydrocarbon, made from H (Hydrogen) and C (Carbon). There are no plant nutrients in oil.

Nitrogen fertilizer (N) is made from ammonia, which in turn is manufactured from natural gas, not oil"

[1] http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2005/08/28-isnt-fertiliz...

> We don't use its chemical properties in any special way,

We do, 99% of plastics is made using fossil fuels. Big players are trying to shift to sustainable alternatives though, for example LEGO: https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news-room/2018/march/pfp

It is pretty useful as a base for all kinds of chemicals. All plastics for example are made from oil.

> We don't use its chemical properties in any special way, it just happens to be among the most efficient in terms of calories per kg.

As far as I am aware a lot of oil is used as raw material in chemical industry, not only as energy source.

are sure? how many plastics including textiles would have to be replaced if we did not have the chemical properties of oil to create them? Any idea? I bet you are wearing at least one item of clothing with a textiel created with oil chemicals..such as nylon or others

There are processes that create crude oil given energy and some basic resources.

How would you argue that the answer is not, "no"?

I mean, we only really started to use oil industrially in like the mid 1800s, right? We'd already developed a lot of technology, doesn't seem ridiculous to think we could have gotten from there to here without oil. And maybe we'd have developed biofuels sooner?

To me as a casual observer it has always been obvious that the price of energy over the long term is going to zero. Ultimately all provided by renewalable sources.

Sure the price of certain forms of energy (wood fire, oil ...) may go up over time but while that happens cheaper sources appear and ultimately take over.

"Renewable" doesn't mean "free energy". Constructing renewable energy sources (wind, solar, etc) takes more energy than constructing an equivalent non-renewable energy source - this is the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). There's also space limits - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o

What's apparent to me is that we live in a unique era where energy is abundant and cheap, which may never be repeated (unless fusion power is developed).

His conclusions seemed suspect to me - I remember doing out the calculations myself and came out with the conclusion that a 50x50 mile solar array in the Arizona desert could power the U.S. A 150x200 mile array in the Sahara could power the world. These are large arrays - they would be visible from space - but they are far from "country-sized", and quite doable if production costs come down (which they are - solar and wind are now cheaper than coal).

(You can check my math yourself: total world energy consumption = 109,136 TWh [1] / 8760 hours/year = 12.45 TW / 15 W/foot solar panel output [2] = 830B square feet / 27878400 ft^2/mi^2 = 29772 mi^2 = 150x200 mi array.)

Working through his math, I think the problem is that the UK is unique in a.) having a high population density b.) with a large per capita energy consumption and c.) a lot of cloud cover. On his chart, only Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and Bahrain had it worse. The U.S. and China both had an order-of-magnitude better energy consumption per unit area; most of the world had two orders of magnitude. That's an argument for why Britain is fucked in the new globally-warmed, fossil-fuel-limited world, but not why the world is fucked. A lot of developing areas could see their energy consumption rise to rival the U.S. and still not bat an eye with solar power.

The EROEI of solar panels is between 8.7 - 34.2; wind is 20-50. [3] As long as this number is > 1 (which it is for nearly every energy source except biofuels) you can keep building production capacity indefinitely; you just invest the energy from previous capacity into building new capacity. Higher numbers of course let you do more other stuff while this is going on and build out faster, but it's just like capitalism. As long as you turn a profit on each panel, you'll have more as time goes on.

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

[2] https://www.solarpowerrocks.com/solar-basics/how-much-electr...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inve...

Your figure of 15W/sq foot assumes no gaps between panels - hard to imagine on a 50mile+ array. The bigger problem is that it assumes overhead, direct sunlight. You'd have to cut that at least in half ;)

Yes, the UK does have issues by these metrics, and the US is in the unique position of a huge per capita energy consumption and huge land reserves. Therefore, it is somewhat feasible in the US to just keep building wind and solar farms. However, I wonder how the economics of the non-renewable minerals needed would affect the price. It also doesn't (as far as I know) take into account all the extra infrastructure required to support the fluctuating nature of renewable energy sources.

Also, with a higher cost to manufacture these energy sources, it's inevitable that the cost to consumers will rise.

The gaps easily get canceled out by using newer solar panels; I took the low end of commercial solar power outputs I found on the web, many of the more recent ones do 20W/sq foot or more. 25% gaps seems generous.

I thought about the rare-earth issue, but there's a simple solution that bypasses both it and the energy-storage issue: use solar-thermal plants instead of photovoltaics. These require only mirrors and steam turbines, both made out of abundant materials. Efficiency is actually higher than photovoltaics (30% or so), and energy can be stored as heat for up to 5 hours before it's used. (Ironically, they have the same issues relative to photovoltaics that photovoltaics have over fossil fuels; in theory they're simpler and more environmentally friendly, but implementing the theory correctly requires solving a number of engineering problems that together make them cost more and generate more hiccups than photovoltaics have.)

The higher cost isn't actually true anymore, for photovoltaics and wind at least. Solar hit grid parity with fossil fuels in late 2015, and is now actually cheaper than coal power plants. This (rather than subsidies) is why the coal industry is in deep shit: it just doesn't make economic sense anymore, and the electric industry is rapidly switching over to renewables & natural gas.

The EROI literature suggests EROI needs to be much higher than 1 to sustain economic growth. Also, some estimates of solar panel (PV) EROI are as low as 3. This short article addresses both of these points: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

> To me as a casual observer it has always been obvious that the price of energy over the long term is going to zero.

This is not at all obvious to this casual observer. Earth radiates heat away at a constant rate. We can never produce more energy than the earth radiates away, for obvious reason. With current trajectories we will release more energy than earth radiates away in less than 200 years. I'm not sure how the price of a limited resource can go to zero, but I'm also not very well versed in economics.

Earth radiates heat away at a constant rate only because Earth's temperature is approximately constant. Actual black-body radiation is governed by the Stefan-Boltzmann law [1], and is proportional to temperature^4. A small increase in temperature significantly increases the amount of energy radiated, which then serves to moderate the temperature.

In practice, the total energy consumption of the Earth is bounded by the amount of solar energy that falls on the earth, which is about 100,000 times greater than current total world energy consumption. For what civilizations might look like that exceed that, check out the Kardashev scale [2], which classifies civilizations by the size of the astronomical object whose energy they harness. Type 1 civilizations harness a planet, Type 2 harness a star, Type 3 harness a galaxy. We're a lowly Type 0 civilization, which means that we have not yet attained the technology needed to make full use out of all of our planet's resources.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body#Radiative_cooling

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

As I see it price is driven by our ability to consume energy and our ability to produce. The first part will peter out (you can only use so much heating, only so much transport) whereas the second part continues to grow long before we hit any sort of fundamental limit.

>A small increase in temperature significantly increases the amount of energy radiated,

The temperature in the formula is given in Kelvins, so for all practical purposes (300K less than 10°K variation), the 4th power means every degree increase the amount of energy radiated by ~1.3%

I think you meant going to infinity.

The Canadian & Venezuelan oil sands have about 4 trillion barrels of "Original Oil in Place". At current oil prices and level of technological development, only about 10% of this oil is considered recoverable and as such counted as reserves. But technology marches on, and if we start running out of oil from other sources, so will oil prices. So really, the world has hundreds of years worth of reserves.

Much more concerning is that we have to keep ~80% of those 52 years worth of oil in the ground to keep climate change under the 2 degree goal...

> Much more concerning is that we have to keep ~80% of those 52 years worth of oil in the ground to keep climate change under the 2 degree goal...

Says who?

What I am the most worried about the depletion of oil is that most people assume it will be a bell curve, like US' (conventional) oil production was.

Thing is, it was a bell as people switched to other more profitable sources of oil as US' oil was becoming more expensive. I fear the depletion of world's reserve could look a lot more like a cliff.

The absence of alternatives changes a lot the fundamentals of the problem.

the seneca cliff: https://thesenecatrap.blogspot.com/

Good luck making plastic.

There is already bio-plastic, it's just expensive because oil is super cheap.

Planes? There's no other alternative than biofuels unless you are happy landing every 2 hours.

Nuclear works too. The Burevestnik apparently (accorfing to WP) is flying a tubojet or turbofan nuclear engine.

Also conventional fuel can be made from pretty much any carbon using https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proc...

Hydrogen would also work vas a fuel.

Biofules are easy to make from crops. Getting jetfuel aka. Diesel from fatty seeds is trivial.