[bluGill]

I've seen articles from the 1880s claiming oil will run out by 1890. 140 years latter...

Yes we can run out of oil, but nobody really knows if or even when that will happen. Right now I'm guessing we won't run out because wind and solar is so much cheaper for most purposes everyone is shifting anyway - this will take decades to play out.

[mschuster91]

> Yes we can run out of oil, but nobody really knows if or even when that will happen.

We can run out of cheap and accessible oil very, very fast if the shitshow in MENA continues to escalate. Qatar already lost 20% of their LNG capacity in a single strike.

The US may have enough domestic oil production to sate its domestic demand, but the prices would still skyrocket even for them. Europe meanwhile, we're straight fucked here. Technically the oil hasn't run out, it's still in the oil fields of the journalist-butcher country and other sheikdoms, but that doesn't matter if it cannot be pumped out any more because the wells got blasted to pieces or if it cannot be transported thanks to Iranian mines, Europe is still running out of oil in practice.

[myrmidon]

What does "Europe running out of oil" mean to you? Gas at the pump for >10€/l, potentially with some rationing scheme? Do you honestly think that's gonna happen?

It is easy to get infected by the media narratives that are notoriously biased towards maximum drama, but I firmly believe that we are not gonna escalate into such a scenario.

There's always options; sorting priorities because of price, radical electrification of transport, or, at the extreme end, picking up coal hydration again (worked well enough to keep the Nazi war machine running for quite a while, with much worse access to crude).

For comparison: Copper prices did increase by 500% since 2000, but people barely even care, and that's how I would expect "shortages" to typically go.