Exactly. Taken to its extreme, this is the argument in favor of the seeming paradox that we'll never run out of oil, despite the Earth having an obviously finite supply.
It's not that we'll never run out of oil, but if the price of oil rises to arbitrarily high levels then alternatives start to make economic sense. Those alternatives in the short term may be alternate sources of oil that were too difficult to extract earlier, but alternatives can also be completely difference sources of energy. And once economies of scale start to apply to those alternatives then their price starts to reduce, which further increases demand, etc. Not sure where the long term equilibrium price is for energy and it may very well be higher than in the era of cheap oil but I also don't think that it will rise to catastrophically high levels that were predicted by "peak oil".
None of "the alternatives" offer oil's tremendous positive energy (net current) surplus with a minimum of effort or technological capability.
Colonel Drake punched through 69 feet of Pennsylvania bedrock using 1300 year old Chinese salt-drilling techniques (and early 19th century cast iron well casings). Well Number 1, Bahrain, still supplied 35,000 barrels of oil per day eighty years after it was drilled.
Oil (and coal and gas) absolutely changed the world, and quite simply, they're not like other raw materials. They're not transformed by processing, they're consumed, they dwarf all other material inputs to the modern economy other than air and water (both of which are readily available from the envrionment ... usually). And we're using them at rates of 1,000 to 5,000,000 times faster than they were initially produced.
Energy itself enables complexity (though it's a, um, complex relationship). Bootstrapping the modern world happened only once, and under what appears to be a singular mix of conditions ranging from geological to philosophical, despite humans having walked over the very sources of our modern wealth in the Middle East, China, Britain, North America, and Australia for many thousands of years.
If you're curious about what equilibrium energy prices for energy alternatives -- fungible, storable, on-demand energy that modern civilisation requires -- might be, look to the best alternatives to oil and see what they run.
For biofuels, it's about $300 to $1,000 dollars per barrel. Keep in mind that the US presently returns slightly over $1,000 in GDP per barrel of oil consumed. In Europe it's typically higher -- $1,500 to $3,000 (in Switzerland). In much of the world it's far lower -- China and India are in the $400 - $500 GDP/bbl range. At $1,000/bbl, they would forego a tremendous amount of low-return (but vital to their burgeoning populations) economic activity.
Solar energy gives lower costs, but that's with tremendous fossil inputs to construction an absolutely enormous capital plant, dwarfing anything we've built to date. Human's largest current technological artifact mostly involved pouring hot tar over prepared ground, and that is a challenging expense and maintenance problem. Consider computer chips spanning tens of thousands of square kilometers, in wind, rain, dust, and hail.
You might want to think some over just what it is "cost", "value", "price", and "wealth" mean, represent, interact, and how we got to where we are. Mainstream economic thought strikes me as strongly lacking in substance here, evidenced by much of the long debate over the meanings of those terms. Their current generally accepted values are by no means the only ones proposed, though the debate now is largely quashed.
>None of "the alternatives" offer oil's tremendous positive energy (net current) surplus with a minimum of effort or technological capability.
It took only 20 years for fracking to go from an experiment to full scale commercial roll out. It's not an 'alt-fuel', but it is a technological advancement. I think you're discounting the force of human ingenuity when faced with massive demand, kind of like the Hunt Brothers.
The "Hydrafrac" process, as it is now being used, consists of two steps: (l) injecting a viscous liquid containing a granular material, such as sand for a propping agent, under high hydraulic pressure to fracture the formation; (2) causing the viscous liquid to change from a high to a low viscosity so that it may be readily displaced from the formation. To date the process has been used in 32 jobs on 23 wells in 7 fields, resulting in a sustained increase in production in 11 wells.
The myth that hydrofracking was researched only in the 1990s and brought into play in the 2010s is a as false as the idea that God created Earth and Man in His Image 6,000 years ago.
There's also the slightly inconvenient truth that fracked oil is not a sustainable replacement for conventional oil.
Nobody is pretending that the concept of fracking didn't exist prior to the 1990s. That's a straw-man you set up and knocked down on your own. What changed is the process for fracking was made drastically more economical. Further, we had no idea exactly where the largest shale oil deposits were in 1950; over 3/4 of the currently known major Texas oil deposits were still unknown as of that date, to say nothing of the fact that our understanding of how much shale oil there was in the US, was next to non-existent. Even just 20 years ago our understanding of that was horrible. The Bakken as one example was only briefly described in 1953, and wasn't taken seriously for decades because so little was known about the reserves there.
The cost of using fracking to extract a barrel of oil has dropped by over 90% in 15 years. The cost in 1950 would have been so astronomical as to be silly. It's like pretending deep ocean drilling would have been viable in 1900, just because they had theories about how to do it.
What your comment misses is the significance of the combination of directional drilling (i.e. horizontal) and hydraulic fracturing. The process of fracturing shale rock formations in order to acquire crude oil has been refined for decades. It will only get more refined.
Your speculations about the future seem logical, but they are speculations nonetheless.
>Nobody is pretending that the concept of fracking didn't exist prior to the 1990s.
I do not think that is a fair statement. I'm a radio jukie (mostly NPR, but non-profit radio, in general). I certainly get the idea from these sources that fracing is something new. My father was fracing wells in Saudi Arabia in the '60s and my grandfather was drilling wells in OK in the 20s, so I have some background, FWIW.
One is that it took sixty, rather than twenty years, for fracking to move out of the experimental phase.
The other is that 32 job on 23 wells in 7 fields, in 1949, constituted production-scale operations.
You haven't asked, but I'll volunteer: what changed to make hydrofracturing commercially attractive were the combination of a global oil shortage, and a massive price spike, in 2007-2008. The fracking boom started shortly afterward. It's now in tremendous trouble on account of those same price dynamics, given its high costs of operation. You've got fracking operators with significant debts they need to service, with their only recourse to continue flooding oil and gas into markets which don't want the product.
New rig counts are down and have been down for the past few years -- you're not seeing new drilling, and the former boom towns of South Dakota and West Texas are going bust.
Bakken Shale hydrocarbon was being explored by 1909.
Schmoker, J. W. "Use of formation-density logs to determine organic-carbon content in Devonian shales of the western Appalachian Basin and an additional example based on the Bakken Formation of the Williston Basin." Petroleum geology of the Devonian and Mississippian black shale of eastern North America: US Geological Survey Bulletin (1909): J1-J14.
It wasn't an area of active exploration, nor was off-shore deep-sea drilling, again, until the price of conventional oil drove new prospecting offshore. The first 40-50 years of offshore development were decidely shallow-water. Gulf Coast rigs were often only in knee-deep, or at best a few fathoms, of water. Not in thousand-foot depths.
But yes, as of 1900, the prospect of deep-water offshore drilling had in fact been contemplated:
Horton, Edward E. "STATUS OF DEEP WATER PRODUCTION SYSTEMS." (1900).
Britain certainly would have appreciated knowing she had abundant oil nearby in 1912 when Churchill committed to converting the Navy from coal (abundant domestically) to oil (not). But that didn't turn up until after the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks. It's also since largely played out.
Sunlight is still 2 orders of magnitude more important to the global economy. 7.68 billion acres * 100w/m on average is a mind boggling amount of energy. Plants are around 10% efficient at collecting sunlight so we they get 10W * 4046 m / acre * 7.68 billion acted under cultivation = ~310 trillion watts or 2.7 million terrawatt hours per year. Oil is ~1% of that or 20 thousand terrawatt hours per year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/me...
Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine", 2003, gives an excellent breakdown on how coal, oil, and gas are formed, their energy equivalents in current biomass, and a few other odd bits.
Yes, there's a lot of sunlight. But consider that 70% of it falls where you cannot walk, unless you carry your own cross, and much the rest of it is called on elsewhere in the ecosystem. That still leaves a great deal available to humans, but an order or two of magnitude less than that 1,000 times more than we need in a year.
Plants are far closer to 1-3% efficient at converting sunlight to stored energy, so you're off by an order of magnitude there.
I've scoped out the biomass equivalent acreage for US petroleum consumption under several scenarios, and it's not pretty. See the table about halfway down this page:
Consider that much the world would like to be at US levels of energy consumption, and the population continues to increase.
If you want to do some useful reading, start going through Vaclav Smil's books. Most ecology texts are also quite useful. Howard and Eugene Odum have written several excellent ones, both general to ecology, and specific to humans and energy.
Keep in mind that energy is among our immediate problems, but is hardly the only one.
Farmed plants use the vast majority of captured sunlight, but we don't ignore the food cost of cows and only look at meat when doing energy costs.
However, even if you use 2% that's still easily 20x the energy from Oil. Also of note, we eat fish grown that eat fish... that eat plankton so we do capture energy from the oceans just really inefficiently.
Yes, this may seem pedantic but recreating a western style lifestyle is hard in very large part due to indirect energy costs for meat. Buildings, transportation, or manufacturing can be 10x efficient corn and thus cows not so much. Yes, ethanol takes 40% of corn but cows take 36% and some leftovers from ethanol.
It reminds me of IPV4 addresses. All this panic about "we're going to run out and the Internet will stop working" yet we haven't seemed to run out. We keep finding more! And we have an obviously finite supply.
This isn't really true. ARIN keeps requesting the few unused large blocks from hoarders, but that's a dry well now for the most part. What happened was the cost per IP for businesses went up. We used to get huge blocks for free or cheap but now have an economic cost to keep usage low.
Also, some cell carriers, foreign carriers, etc are IPv6 with v4 gateways handling non-v6 traffic, so a lot of the demand that would have exhausted v4 completely just went v6 to avoid the hassle. Big roll outs can't expect v4 to work for them, so v6 is now the default for many of these carriers who are told by ARIN to go suck a lemon.
What you're seeing is a very slow and ugly move to v6 that's just enough not to cause a v4 panic. This is just the way its going to be for a long time. No one is just going to go to v6 as long as their existing v4 IP's are okay. They'll just go v6 when their requests for /8's, /12's, and /16's get denied.
Given high enough price we can't run out of oil either, as people could simply produce oil artificially with profit given high enough price. You could make oil from algae in bioreactors e.g. You could make it from coal as well. It is all about price.
