G'day,

I was having a debate with this character on these forums by the nickname of "wesmorriss", unfortunately it got a bit rude in the end (some people!)..

Anyway, part of the argument that we had, which funnily enough is in a thread in the "pseudoscience" section under the title "Bush Hurricane Conspiracy", led to an angle where I said:

“Remember that once oil supplies come to a hault - there won't be ANYTHING left for us to use, this will collapse the manufacturing industry COMPLETELY, no more appliances for you and me or your grandchildren!

Wesmorriss, responded that :
That's not necessarily true at all. An oil-free economy could definately support manufacturing. My guess is that regardless, my children will have appliances. Of course that's just a guess.

How true is the above statement ? As far as I know, most of the things we have around us wouldn't exist without there being oil around to manufacture it...

Are you referring to oil as material or oil to run the machines needed for manufacture?

If the first one, then you could always fall back on syntethic or natural products as a substitute for oil. Of course it might be mre expensive than using oil, but there would not be that much of choice, right?

Second possibility would be no big problem, just use alternative powersources.

Pretty much the material , so would we have to make stuff like computers, cars, tables etc. out of metal or can they synthetically produce all of this ? otherwise it's gonna be an issue when oil supplies start running slim yeh ?

Fact is, there is no good alternative source of energy that can compare to the widespread usage of oil, and the extreme efficiency of oil. Everything else is much more expensive, dangerous, more pollutive, and/or impractical. Right now there is no working model for a switch to an alternative energy source that could provide any kind of mass production and distribution, so it is highly unlikely that when oil production cannot meet demand, and the price skyrockets, we will be able to continue these practices.

There are always alternatives. At the moment oil is the cheapest option.

Sure there are alternatives, but none of those alternatives can support our economy and populous. So what happens then? Poverty, resources stretched thin over a giant population, eventually populous gets down to a controllable size, and we work our way out of the depression...

Fact: Necessity is the kother of invention.

Even if the alternatives to oil we have now are too expensive/dangerous/whatever, when we have no other choice we will improve the alternatives. Its what always happens.

W00t!!! 222 posts!

99% of oil is craked down into fuel for cars and such... nomaly only 10% of oil out of the ground can be used as gas in cars the rest is karosine/dessial and the like along with other parts used in making plastics. but when crude oil is cracked at 1500 degrees it brakes down the larger malaucles into what are cas can use. So really if we stopped using oil for fuel we could still make plastic all we wanted.


Not to mention they have proven that natral gas/oil can also be made by artifical means. The have proven that around 13/39 miles down under ground that under that pressure calsite along with water and heat brakes down into methain gas. And will keep braking down tell the water supply is gone or the rock is gone. The estimate that other gas/oil products are formed under that pressure when metain is put under pressure to make up new hidrocarbons.


here is a artical about it not the one I wanted but it will have to do.

http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/usgs.html

If we all stopped using cars,wed still be making plastic and what not but wed have by-products doing nothing and pollution.Thats the main problem is plastic is one of the byproducts of making petrol and other stuff

You can make tv's and computers out of wood,you could use sheet metal,computer cpu boxes are mostly metal anyway,save wood for speaker enclosures.

But youre fucked when it comes to CD/DVD's,but id imagine wed be using microdrives.

No oil=no petrol so no cars,i cant see electrical cars working out,itd be cheaper to improve public transport via trains,which are electrical,so build an extensive tram system where roads are.

No oil=no fighter planes or rockets etc,so the bonus is nobody can really blow each other up properly.Its like "oh no iran is threatning to catapult grenades at america,oh mummy im so scared"

Basically no oil and were fucked cos we rely on it too much,its worth more than money,if it runs out it wont be the end of the world,but itd be pretty major.

Almost every current human endeavor — from transportation, to manufacturing, to electricity, to plastics, and especially food and water production — is inextricably intertwined with oil and natural gas supplies. Oil is also required for nearly every consumer item, sewage disposal, garbage disposal, street/park maintenance, police, fire services, and national defense. Thus, the aftermath of Peak Oil will extend far beyond how much you will pay for gas. Simply stated, you can expect: economic collapse, war, widespread starvation, and a mass die-off of the world’s population.

http://lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/PageOne.html

Well looks to me like its an increase population problem that would lead to our future downfall,so keep the population below 5 billion at all times might solve it.

I propose making it universal law that youre not allowed to have more than one child,or itll be forced,there could be some sort of administration that keeps a balanced male/female ratio,possibly via applicants who are required to have a male if they have a female,its terminated,probably have better detection by then.

According to that article in 20 years time there will be 8 billion but 4 billion of those will starve to death,and a further 2 billion die via war.

So it seems there needs to be a radical system for universal birth control.

We could also aid the system of advanced mortality rates by putting drugs in shops,drugs no longer being a crime will reduce prison overloads,so its personal choice like alcohol,upshot is you reduce crime,plus you reduce populations cos they are stupid enough to OD.

Death penalty to all murderers,rapists and paedophiles,cutting down on prison overload and population.

Carefully reduce the population=reducing oil consuption/food consuption=no war and no famine or any horsemen of the apocalypse.

The end of 'petroleum man' in general is well recognized and accepted. It will happen, but it will be a slow phase out. Alternative sources of energy such as biofuels and green sources such as wind and solar could be put into practice fairly quickly, but today, they can't compete with the price of oil. Petroleum is still king because its the least expensive alternative for energy and plastics. Numerous efforts are underway to create lower cost alternative sources. The result - the cost of alternatives is coming down as petroleum continues to rise. Where they meet, you will see a fairly rapid change over to the new sources. I used to be concerned about this issue, but the more I find out, the less I worry.

i've heard that forty years ago they predicted we'd be out of oil BY NOW. Now we're saying it again, we'll be out in a few decades or so. Whatever...
but if we run out of oil, it wouldn't be like sudden every pump on earth started slurping like a straw. It would be a gradual drop in supplies as oil fields gradually start running out of black gold. This means a gradual increase in price, which in a free-economy system would stimulate the mass production and serious investment of technology and resources into other means of energy and materials, simply because big companies are greedy bastards and want to reap the benefits of making a cheaper product than the other guy. I think we'll have a pretty noticable economic slump, but it'll pick itself back up, assuming we're correct in how much oil we've still got going to begin with...

i've heard that forty years ago they predicted we'd be out of oil BY NOW. Now we're saying it again, we'll be out in a few decades or so. Whatever...
but if we run out of oil, it wouldn't be like sudden every pump on earth started slurping like a straw. It would be a gradual drop in supplies as oil fields gradually start running out of black gold. This means a gradual increase in price, which in a free-economy system would stimulate the mass production and serious investment of technology and resources into other means of energy and materials, simply because big companies are greedy bastards and want to reap the benefits of making a cheaper product than the other guy. I think we'll have a pretty noticable economic slump, but it'll pick itself back up, assuming we're correct in how much oil we've still got going to begin with...

Yeah its cos of equiptment to drill to the depths,if we have better equiptment to reach those depths we might be ok,its still an IF its getting harder to get oil,except in kuwait and other middle eastern countries.

I had a chemical engineer tell me once that "Oil is way to valuable to be burning" - that as a resource for cracking into the chemicals to make plastics, medicines, chemicals and etc -- its irreplacable.

By then Human kind will be gone ! Wiped off this rock thanks to a nuclear war with another superpower.

a swedish company is currently moking computers that use wooden cases instead of plastic and metal, so in future all we will need is:

metal(we can recycle so theres no shartage there)
silicone(thats pretty abundant)
wood(easily sustainable)
latex(comes from latex trees)

and since we will hopefully be using hydrogen by then, we will have no fuel shortage

Yes but we will still have an energy shortage, unless we convert completely to nuclear power or discover a new energy source between now and then. Unfortunately there is also a peak on uranium, and it is difficult to mine, so that is not a permanent solution either, and we all know that nuclear plants are radioactive for thousands of years after they are abandoned. Not to mention the amount of nuclear waste that would be created.

The possibilites with hemp have never been fully explored. At some point we may end the insane war on hemp and use it again.

There are three steps on the path to petroleum withdrawal.

1. Migrate gasoline-fueled motor vehicles to run on alcohol. Cars already on the road can be converted at some cost. New cars can be built with engines designed for alcohol at a lower cost.

Alcohol isn't free and it will never be as cheap as gasoline in the U.S. But I believe it can be produced and sold at a price that would not seem astronomical to the rest of the world, considering what people in Europe pay for gasoline. And it delivers adequate power. If you want a big alcohol-burning V-8 engine to tear up the road and you can afford the alcohol, you could build it with no major engineering problems.

Alcohol can be easily made from almost any crop simply by fermentation, similar to the way you can make booze out of almost any crop. Potatoes, corn, rice. Especially crops that contain a lot of sugar like beets.

Steadily migrating the U.S. auto fleet from gasoline to alcohol would probably cut our petroleum consumption by more than half. It's almost conceivable that we could produce that much alcohol domestically by paying farmers to grow beets instead of paying them not to grow wheat.

2. Migrate diesel-fueled motor vehicles and stationary engines to run on vegetable oil. This is technically easier than the conversion from gasoline to alcohol. You could mix the fuel in a diesel vehicle's tank about 50/50 with corn oil and it would probably run with no modificiations. The modifications to run on 100 percent veggie oil are pretty straightforward, as is the redesign of future models to use it instead of petroleum.

If you could actually permeate this plan into factories, power plants, and furnaces, it would cut our remaining petroleum consumption by more than half again. 1. and 2. together would probably cut it by 80 percent, which would leave us self-sufficient on our own petroleum reserves for a long time.

All that would be left is chemical engineering processes like the manufacture of plastic. If the price of the raw materials for plastic went sky-high, you'd see a quick changeover from throwaway plastic packaging to other materials. And you'd also see a lot more attention paid to recycling plastic instead of trashing it. It's pretty practical to re-use plastic now. When the price skyrockets it will be routine.

3. Let people who could work at home do so. Most of us spend our workdays looking at a computer and talking on the phone. I don't know about you but I've got several of each of those devices at home. I could do my job and only have to go into the office one or two days a month. Sure, some occupations require being on site, but if you get the rest of us off the road those people won't have such a commuting nightmare. And people will no longer have to crowd into cities, making them so unpleasant and raising housing prices into the stratosphere.

Doing this right now would cut our petroleum consumption by 60-70 percent, without any expensive re-tooling.

In summary, as petroleum reserves dwindle and the price keeps rising, some alternatives that are practical right now but just too expensive will become more attractive. And telecommuting will become every worker's right instead of a reward for the unimaginative drone.

The exhaustion of the world's petroleum will not mean the end of civilization or even World War III. Unless of course the Bush Dynasty and their puppeteers, the house of Saud, are still in power and they've convinced us all that to be patriotic we have to drive 100 miles to and from work each day in an SUV.

Fraggle Rocker I'm afraid you've overlooked the most important aspect of no oil. ENERGY!!

Without oil we do not have electricity to power anything! Almost 90% of our current energy comes from oil! I'm also afraid you have grossly overestimated how much of our oil is used solely by cars. The reality is that autos only accounts for about 10-15% of our oil consumption! If we stopped driving alltogether, that would still leave us with 70 million bpd demand, which would still be growing!

The problem with converting autos to alcohol is the amount of land that would be needed to grow the crops and produce that much alcohol. For a single citizen to drive 10,000 miles per year, assuming they get 30 mpg, they would need 11 acres of farmland to themselves! Current estimates show that there is about .6 acres of arable land per capita, I know that not everyone drives also but the majority does.

I certainly hope that no oil doesn't lead to world war 3, unfortunately if you look at human's track record it does not paint a very optimistic picture. I wish with all my heart that humans could find a way to work together to solve this problem, but that kind of unity is unprecedented.

hydrogen, people. by extracting it from seawater we can use it as a fuel and lower the sea level

But we'd need either state sized solar panels or millions of wind/ wave turbines to get the hydrogen. Or else build scores of nuclear power stations, which still leaves the old waste problem, let alone handing power to countries which have uranium supplies.
Essentially we shall have to do all of the above. Considering that agriculture takes up a great deal of energy (oil) we shall have to focus much resources towards freeing up oil for the most necessary things such as agriculture. Pesticides, fertilisers and petrol for the tractors. At the moment the supermarket based distribution system uses gigantic amounts of petrol ferrying stuff all over the place, when you could get the meat and milk from your nearby farm.
Moreover, with such an increase in oil prices, we coudl force ourselves to use less for packaging etc. But all that will destroy whole tranches of industry that rely upon high turnover in volume, concentration and economies of scale. Economics will go into reverse as it were. We would all have to put up with less stuff, less gubbins, have to make do with a new suit of furniture every 10 years, rather than 5, no new clothes every few months. In fact a lot of the high tec end of the clothing market would go bust. We would have to use older fabrics such as wool and silk and suchlike.

Really, theres enough that would have to change that someone should write a wee SF book with it all in the background.

No oil=no fighter planes or rockets etc, Not true, really. Most ICBMs use other fuels, like hydrazine. Air power is important enough for considerable investment here. And turbine engines are more versatile than conventional ICEs as far as fuel options.

The End of Oil has been disputed. However, I can see peak oil happening, which will definitely affect the world. While it may not become expensive enough to be completely replaced, alternative energies will most likely be very competitive. And even if the price does go down later, the progress made with the alternatives will keep them going.

I recall someone on this forum suggesting biofuels, mostly alcohol from kelp. This would prevent problems with land use, and IIRC, it produces fertilizer as well.

We need to knock the price of gas up to $5 a gallon right now, tack a $3 tax on it - it would make people be more intelligent about how they use it, and the Billions of $ generated could be put into R&D for alternative energy sources. Waiting until gas HAS to go up to a rediculous amount will just set us up for being reactive instead of proactive.

It looks as though China is going this way - at least for the short term:

http://www.ocnus.net/cgi-bin/exec/view.cgi?archive=52&num=13667

We need to knock the price of gas up to $5 a gallon right now, tack a $3 tax on it - it would make people be more intelligent about how they use it, and the Billions of $ generated could be put into R&D for alternative energy sources. Waiting until gas HAS to go up to a rediculous amount will just set us up for being reactive instead of proactive.

Yeah i agree with grandad ^
cos if you dont then wed need to cut down on the population and thats just too difficult.

Youd not be able to cure a massive oil crisis where theres no oil,or where its hit "peak oil" everything would go to shit within weeks.

"GrandDad" - heh! Nope, far from it stud, but thanks! Population in all animal populations eventually culls itself. It won't be fun, so I hope I'm not around for it, but all species that overpopulate have mass die offs eventually as a result.

But also, changing consumptions patterns could make the same population more sustainable

It is entirely feasible to run efficient smaller cars on alcohol. The cost would be significantly LESS than gasoline, NOT MORE as has been suggested here. Currently in Brazil alcohol is less than half the cost of gas and Brazil would like to export it to US, but Iowa’s corn growers vote in US elections and produce some alcohol, for adding to gas, “gasohol,” whereas Brazilians produce a lot of cheap clean-burning alcohol, but only vote in Brazilian elections.

A few years back, 90% of Brazil’s new cars were designed run on alcohol. Currently the most popular ones are “flex fuel” models that run on either. These are not as efficient as the compression ratio is limited to the lower value gas requires. A computer uses sensor data to tell what is coming through the “gas line” (any mixture from 100% gas to 100% alcohol) and controls the fuel injectors to keep the fuel /air ratio correct. Next year, thanks to hydropower, biodiesel and alcohol, Brazil will be self sufficient in oil. Perhaps US will import the excess, if China does not use its hoard of dollars to bid higher, which brings me back to politics and the US trade policies, several of which were recently ruled illegal by WTO.

Same US politics (talk free trade, practice protectionism) are true of OJ, beef, cotton, chickens, fruits, steel, etc. Simple fact is US agriculture can’t compete against countries with cheap land, abundant water, much lower cost labor and a 12-month growing season without these tariffs. Tax supported farm subsidies that transfer money from the masses to the wealthy few, sometimes paying not to plant, also make the average Joe (and Jill) pay much more for food and clothing; but hey, the “wealth few” and their well-paid lobbyist got to live and it ain’t cheap to pay the mass media not to tell Joe and Jill where their taxes are going. (Excuse me, never meant to imply that payment was a bribe, it’s just that TV and newspapers must keep their advertisers happy. - you know how “the system” works don’t you?)

Obviously fact US steel can’t compete, is not due to climate – the US industry was not destroyed in WWII, so it is old and inefficient, not modern, with worlds highest cost labor, but I definitely stray form the thread now, so I’ll stop.

I think that there is enough coal in the Western USA to last us at least 100 years or so after the oil runs out. It is my understanding that cost is the main problem with using it now.

It is also my understanding that it can be used as a replacement material for petroleum in the manufacture of plastics and other synthetics. Industrial organic chemistry seems capable of doing all sorts of transformations given an initial raw material like petroleum or coal.

As mentioned by others, the petroleum will not run out at some particular time. As it gets scarcer, it will become more expensive, making replacement technologies feasible. If coal takes the place of petroleum, the transition would take place over a period of at least 25 years, more likely 50-75 years.

If the population can be stabilized at some reasonable number, recycling should be able to keep our civilization going for quite a while, assuming some suitable power source.

Perhaps we might be able to get more energy from the sun. Large parabolic mirrors in a solar orbit beyond the Earth’s orbit might do the trick. They would not have to be very sturdy: They would be weightless due to being in orbit. The sun currently puts out about 10¹⁵ times the radiant energy collected by the Earth.

In 100-200 years we might be able to develop a technology which uses the hydrogen available from Jupiter. There is so much there that a low efficiency technology would be feasible. If you used 90% of the hydrogen to power the technology and managed to transport the remaining 10% to Earth for use in fuel cells, it would probably be a workable technology.