Oil might last a lot longer than you think at first. Even at the proven oil reserves of 2016 the oil would last for 47 years (https://www.worldometers.info/oil/). Additionally, new reserves could be found. Another potentially very large source of oil is coal. You can make oil from coal via the Fischer-Tropsch technology. As there already are considerably more proven coal reserves than oil reserves, this would probably push out the point of "no oil left" a lot further.

That is not very long not even one generation.

There is a possible future where we mostly stop using oil for transportation, and then prices fall as supply exceeds demand. In the long term we'll eventually run out, but in the medium term, oil may become rather cheap.

If we continue to use transportation fuels made from oil, though, prices will likely remain high for the foreseeable future. There are likely to be weird fluctuations, though. (Remember when oil prices went negative a short time ago because there weren't enough containers to store it?)

Hydrogen proponents have - just like nuclear proponents - latched on to climate change as their best bet for increased funding.

The world needs to be able to make fertilizers for industrial agriculture after we run out of fossil fuels. We currently do this using hydrogen split from natural gas in the Haber-Bosch process. In order to decarbonize agriculture, we have no choice but to make hydrogen at a scale large enough that it becomes attractive for a number of other applications such as steel and cement manufacture, shipping, and aviation.

Hydrogen is inevitable.

"latched on"? That was always the point of hydrogen. Have solar power stations "latched on to climate change" too?

The greater, more immediate problem than running out with fossil fuels is that their pollution is killing people and lowering Earth's ability to sustain life. Around ten million people a year die just from breathing air, which is increasing and only one way they're killing us. Plastic is another.

You could see the price decline if electric vehicles replaced the ice vehicles fast enough. That, however, seems unlikely to happen.

I think there will be an inflection point in the not too distant future where EVs become cheaper than ICE vehicles, and that will cause an abrupt change in consumer behavior. Major changes seem impossible until they happen, and then afterwards people say "what took us so long?" if they think about it at all.

Batteries are the main problem right now; everything else in an EV is pretty simple and cheap. Apparently there are some major patents on lithium iron phosphate batteries that are about to expire; hopefully that means we'll have a lot more production outside of China. LFP batteries don't require cobalt or nickel, so they can be made in higher volume with fewer resource bottlenecks.

They're also more resistant to thermal runaway, so they can be packed more efficiently into a vehicle. This makes up for their somewhat lower specific energy.

And they have very good longevity.

I don't have a crystal ball, but if the demand for oil drops I'd expect prices to hold steady or rise. The economies of scale do a lot for big extraction operations.

I’m always blown away by how inefficient drilling, refining, transporting oil is compared to solar panel to battery. Even if you include the energy used to make the battery and panels… it’s a 1-off thing vs an everyday thing.

Markets don't optimize for efficiency, they optimize for cost and scalability. Efficiency is only useful as a proxy for cost, but it isn't strictly true that a more efficient process is cheaper than the less efficient alternative.

Making solar panels is way easier cheaper and more scalable than drilling oil.

Not sure about batteries, but it seems to me given giga factories exist that it is way more scalable than the refinement and delivery process of oil.

Put another way: delivering you a car once every 5 years is way more scalable than delivering you energy in the form of oil every week.

Drilling for and transporting energy in the form of liquid fuel has been cheaper and more scalable than transporting it in the form of electrons since the industrial revolution. It's part of why we pipe oil and gas across continents: because a pipeline is delivering continental-scale power that a HVDC line just can't compete with, for a number of reasons. Electricity is generally last-mile delivery by comparison.

This is changing with cheap solar and higher capacity HVDC lines, but in order to truly compete with fossil fuels, renewables need a scalable storage medium, because a fundamental weakness of electricity is that it has to be consumed when it's generated. Batteries just don't scale to this level, in my opinion. Sure, gigafactories exist, but it doesn't really compete with being able to add hundreds of GWh of storage at a time in the form of salt cavern hydrogen storage, of which the US has more than 330GWh already in operation. They're just different scales.

That’s really weird comparison to say “it’s been cheaper since new technology didn’t exist”… well of course.

I’m not sure where salt cavern hydrogen came from…

Batteries 100% scale better than gas, you don’t need gas stations and we already have electricity running across our cities.

We have plenty of lithium and it’s recyclable, unlike oil.

I’ma but lost at your point to be honest… my whole point was you don’t need to transport energy (plug a big solar panel into a car), to which you responded by saying transporting energy is inefficient???

>That’s really weird comparison to say “it’s been cheaper since new technology didn’t exist”… well of course.

It's still cheaper today. HVDC might eventually be cheaper, but that isn't the reality right now. Hence, your argument for batteries and electricity being the more scalable option is factually incorrect. We use other vectors for transporting energy long distances -- ones that scale more effectively -- and then we convert it to the form needed at the point of use. Why is this important? Because...

>my whole point was you don’t need to transport energy (plug a big solar panel into a car), to which you responded by saying transporting energy is inefficient???

You effectively always need to transport energy to the point of use, whether the transport vector is as electricity through a cable, or fuel in a pipe. Different methods come with different trade-offs. Electricity is good for relatively short distances, because it's typically hard to store for long periods (relative to energy stored in chemical bonds, for example), and is better used as it's generated. This is why we use oil and gas pipelines in the first place; if electricity were a better vector for long-range energy transport, we would use it as such. But we don't, because it's not the right tool for the job.

>Batteries 100% scale better than gas, you don’t need gas stations and we already have electricity running across our cities.

Except they demonstrably don't. We have a billion cars on the road, the vast majority of which use gas. We use the same stuff to run ships and planes, and we even use it as a chemical feedstock to make fertilizer to grow the food we eat. Acting like batteries scale better than fossil fuels, when not everyone has a place to park and charge their car overnight, is a fairly insular take. BEVs don't even meet all of the use cases that standard cars and trucks currently do, and that's before getting into all of the other transport applications that fossil fuels enable. No one is trucking goods across the Nullarbor in a battery electric truck any time soon.

And to be clear I'm not saying that we don't need to get off of fossil fuels, or that batteries aren't part of the solution -- rather, I'm saying that scalability matters, and we shouldn't pretend like batteries have anything even approaching the scalability of fossil fuels, because it blinds us to the bigger picture. They don't, for many reasons, which is why it'll take multiple solutions working in tandem to fill the voids left behind when we inevitably move away from fossil fuels.

>I’m not sure where salt cavern hydrogen came from…

You mentioned battery storage when talking about scalability.

On a grid level, scalable energy storage is being able to add 100GWh at a time through a salt cavern, not 500MWh batteries here and there. Batteries have a place, but they're mostly load shifting on short time scales, and don't scale to the size of a grid. You can't use batteries to smooth out weather patterns that can last for weeks, and it's probable we never will. We have more scalable solutions for that.

At the transport level, scalability means low cost, high endurance, and low downtime; batteries can only make tenuous claims for any of these, and are still outclassed by fossil fuels. We'll see how it shakes out in the future, but let's not count our chickens before they've hatched.

You are effectively saying: the thing we’ve been scaling 100+ years scales better than the things we’ve been scaling for 20 years. I agree.

But, put 100 years of scale into solar/wind/batteries and the world looks very different: we’ll easily have 1 billion BEV and they’ll easily traverse the Nullarbor.

I think scaling looks very different in the renewable space, I think adding 10Kw a billion times over is the better way to scale, and have a truly distributed energy network.

Large scale power generation should be for large scale industry.

If you wired up enough panels around the world… you don’t need a lot of storage (except for balancing) because the sun is always shinning somewhere.

Regardless of what the solution looks like. My original point: drilling, refining and delivering oil globally is no where near the efficiency of local generation and consumption.