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Asked by willgidman1 to Indi, Jarv, John, Ken, Vicky on 12 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by pasha2.
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John Prytherch answered on 9 Mar 2012:
No one knows the exact answer to this because we don’t know how much oil is left in the world, more is always being found. However, we have already got and used a lot of the oil that is easy to get at. As oil gets harder to get to, it will become more expensive. Some estimates say that in the next 100-200 years, oil will be much too expensive to burn for energy or fuel, and will only used to make certain expensive plastics etc.
New oil is also being created, mainly from plankton and other small marine creatures being buried deep under the ocean. However, this happens at a much much slower rate than we are using the oil that already exists.
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Jarvist Moore Frost answered on 11 Mar 2012:
Ooh, this is a long way from what I know about! But I’ll try my best, as none of the other scientists are geologists either.
I think this is generally a very difficult question to answer. For starters, we are not going to suddenly run out of oil. It’s not like when I run out of milk – I always forget that I’ve finished it, and wake up and pour my cereal into the bowl to realise there’s none in the fridge! It’s more that easily accessible reserves will dry up and we’ll have to try ever harder to get our hands on the black stuff. In our capitalist marketplaces, this will be seen as the long term price of oil increasing.
As the price goes up it will make financial sense to extract ever more difficult sources of oil, including methods that involve transforming one fossil fuel into another, such as refining tar sands or producng synthoil from coal. Unfortunately, these are massively more environmentally damaging than finding normal oil – otherwise we’d be doing them normally, they’re more expensive because they’re inefficient.
Information about how much oil is left in known reserves is top secret. It has such political and financial ramifications for companies and countries that the statistics which are published are almost certainly lies.
Finally, we don’t know where all the oil is. We’re still finding it, and developing technology to extract it from ever more inaccessible places (deeper under the earth, and in deeper water of the oceans).
The big problem is that we may have enough oil, and certainly do have enough coal, for humanity to cook itself. The big question is whether we’ll ever be sensible enough to leave it in the ground, to leave it for people in the future to make stuff out of rather than waste it by burning it.
One thing that people don’t always realise is how important oil is to us, not as a fuel, but as a chemical feedstock. We make everything out of oil, all our plastics, all our medicines, clothing, even the chemical fertilizer that enables us to feed the world is derived from a fossil source!
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Ken Dutton-Regester answered on 12 Mar 2012:
To build on the other guys responses and adding a side story to this thread-
Currently there is a lot of research into alternative, cheaper and environmentally friendly fuel sources to get around the need to use oil. One method, which I think is particularly cool (genetic fan boy much?), is to engineer bacteria to produce fuel for us (also known as genetic engineering). Using basic molecular biology tools and methods, we can insert pieces of DNA into bacteria and hijack their systems to create a product, or in this example, fuel!
This is an incredibly hot and topical field at the moment and we are just beginning to see the methods required to do this become easily accessible. One thing that has been holding us back is being able to create large stretches of DNA of a specific sequence (or a synthetic sequence). Although we have been able to make small bits of DNA for a couple of decades now (from 15-200 letters), making sequences of a larger size has been difficult and expensive. That being said, last year researchers made up a ‘synthetic genome’ or a large piece of artificial DNA that they inserted into a cell to technically create an entirely new organism!! With this technology, they could add bits of DNA into bacteria to make foreign or unnatural biological products; one hope is to make a bacteria to come up with a new substance that might act as a fuel source.
This being said, the technology is not quite there yet and using this technology also has potential ethical considerations- for example, what would happen if someone modified a bacteria into a drug resistant flesh eating organism and spread it over a city?! (also known as bioterrorism- as it is, this would be a very unlikely situation but is on the radar of governments around the world, including America)
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