[nobodyknowin]

It might even be sooner than that.

Once oil gets too expensive to pull out the the ground, mining plastic from landfills and decomposing it back to the hydrocarbons might end up big business.

The natural gas/ ch4 production follows a pretty well known curve, at about 40-50 years it's nowhere near as potent. And with the push to keep organics out of the modern landfills that might get even worse.

[bluGill]

We can make plastics from bio sources, or directly from elemental carbon. Oil is a lot cheaper, but we can do it. In WWII the Germans were running on synthetic gas. Last I checked you can buy synthetic gas - at about 5x the cost of standard pump gasoline. (synthetic gas has more energy per gallon so sometimes it is used in a race)

[skybrian]

Energy has a lot of dark horse candidates and it's hard to pick winners. But one that sounds interesting to me, though it's still early, is pulling carbon directly out of the air using solar energy [1].

On basic principles, it sounds a whole lot easier than mining landfills? But that's assuming the capital costs can be lowered enough. (Solar costs keeps dropping, they figure out the other costs.)

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/01/terraform-industries-conve...