[joe_the_user]

The thing is that the supply of fossil fuel depends one's willingness to spend effort finding it. There's a virtually unlimited amount of methane on the ocean floor but harvesting it is not economically viable (fortunately).

US fracking technology allows otherwise unavailable heavy oil to be harvested but naturally at a higher price than Saudi light crude.

So solar tech, as it declines in cost, will replace a larger and larger portion of fossil fuels but not the entire spectrum of these some come out of the ground close to the form we need them in (solar asphalt is hard to imagine with subsidies).

[leonidasrup]

There is so much hydrocarbons and coal underground we would transform the Earths atmosphere to hell, if we would mine and burn it all.

"Natural gas and oil could last for about 50 years, uranium for around 100 years, and coal reserves, which are the most abundant, roughly 150 years at current consumption levels."

https://www.energyencyclopedia.com/en/physics-mysteries/147-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_rese...

In case of uranium, it's possible to extract it from seawater. This technology was developed and tested, but at current low prices of uranium it's cheaper to mine it.

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/regalbuto2/

[defrost]

> Natural gas and oil could last for about 50 years, uranium for around 100 years, and coal reserves

Out of interest, what common basic error is being made by Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D. from your link, aside from not showing his working or sources?

It's something worth getting on top of.

Here's an alternative link regarding Australia; https://www.ga.gov.au/aecr2025/uranium-and-thorium

couple of extracts:

  Australia’s uranium resources are expressed as Economic Demonstrated Resources (EDR), Subeconomic Demonstrated Resources (SDR) and Inferred Resources. Refer to Appendix 3 for definitions of these terms and further information on the National Classification System for reporting of Identified Mineral Resources.

  Based on 2023 production rates, Australia’s uranium reserves have an estimated life of 71 years.

What's all this fuss about words? What are resources, what are reserves? Do we really only have 71 years worth of uranium in Australia?

[leonidasrup]

For example better discussion about oil reserves: https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/how-much-oil-is-lef...

I just wanted to signify that there is so much available hydrocarbons and coal underground that humanity will run out of atmospheric CO2 budget before it runs out of hydrocarbons.

[defrost]

> humanity will run out of atmospheric CO2 budget before it runs out of hydrocarbons.

I agree that is very much all that's needed to be said.

I confess to a shuddering dislike of statements of the form "we only have {x} left", a dislike exceeded by my revulsion to statements of the form "we have {X} amount left in the crust or ocean - we can just use that".

Call it a side effect of a couple of decades of geophysical exploration work across the globe :/

[joe_the_user]

The reserves of any mineral are basically the amount someone spends the effort to find and document. And spending that effort is an economic decision. There's little economic incentive to find reserves beyond a certain period of time so the reserves of any mineral are going to be only fairly limited amount of years out.

[danans]

> solar asphalt is hard to imagine with subsidies

Arguably asphalt is exactly the sort of application we should be using petroleum for - keeping it sequestered in earth instead of burning it.

[defrost]

No - asphalt is bound together by bitumen, a sticky, waterproof byproduct of petroleum refining.

eg: You don't get asphalt without bitumen and you don't get bitumen save as a byproduct of a massive amount of fossil fuels being pulled up .. and inevitably increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

[danans]

> You don't get asphalt without bitumen and you don't get bitumen save as a byproduct of a massive amount of fossil fuels being pulled up

There are alternatives to virgin bitumen for binding asphalt, like recycled asphalt [1], asphalt blended with recycled rubber, etc. These could conceivably be used together with a smaller amount of virgin petroleum-derived bitumen.

1. https://www.nyc.gov/site/ddc/resources/features/july-2016-gr...

[defrost]

Indeed. There are also paths to tackling the impacts from concrete, from steel making, from livestock generating methane, etc.

The figure that has to watched, reduced, and ideally if possible made negative for a time is the rate of CO2 addition to the atmosphere; pulling up additional hydrocarbons already sequestered will always(?) lead to some amount of additional CO2 being set free as a gas.

The very existence of any bitumen (derived from buried hydrocarbons) is just a sign of the horse (previously sequestered CO2) having already left the stable (buried for millenia).