About how long do we have until we run out of petroleum as a planet.?

Question

About how long do we have until we run out of petroleum as a planet.?

Answer 1

i have no idea but dont worry because we have many other other ways of getting electricity and stuff that cars can run on

Answer 2

No one knows, and anyone who claims to is either a fool or a charlatan.  I do know that some people have been predicting the end of oil for 40 years.

Answer 3

petrolleum will finish till 2075 till we dont use some other fuels like ethanol.Some countries are already using etanol like brazil.Some countries are even trying to develop hydrogen cars.If the all other methods become successful there can be petroleum on this planet.

Answer 4

the amount that US uses it NOT LONG.

Do you know that in the uk  petrol prices go up when America has their holidays, as there becomes a shortage?. perhaps that answeres the question of fuel shortage around the word.

Answer 5

Pretty much never. There is plenty of oil down there, in the rock, it is just getting more expensive to find it and pull it out of the rock. As the supply constricts prices go up, as prices go up both conservation and exploration begin to make economic sense, so both start to occur more. This drives demand down and increases supply, (as new areas are discovered, and more expensive ways of pulling oil out of old areas become economical... go Google "Secondary Production"). This results in lower prices, and the whole cycle repeats again.

If you study the history of the oil and gas buisness you will see that this has happened several times already, through several  boom and bust cycles. The way they generally work is this.

Oil is discovered (Spindletop, East Texas Field, Saudi Arabia, North Sea, wherever).  Lots of new oil comes onto the market, people start making money, this encourages more drilling. These people make money, which encourages more drilling.  Dentists and Actors and people who know NOTHING about the oil buisness start to get in on it to make money. It becomes a bubble... like tech stocks were in the 90s, or housing was until a few months ago. Everything is really really good in the oil patch for a few years.

As time goes on, too many wells get drilled. More oil comes onto the market than can be used, prices start to fall. All the dentists start to loose money. People are stuck in these investments, they HAVE to complete the wells, just so they can cut their losses if nothing else. Even though there are too many wells, and everyone knows it, they still have to complete the ones they are working on. (A lot like the housing market is today).

(Go read THE PRIZE, this has happened several times in the history of the buisness.)

More oil comes onto the market. More than people can use. Prices fall. They stay down for a few years. People get used to the cheap energy, so they start to use more of it. (This is where SUV's come from... gas prices were low in the late 80's early 90s so people started to use more gas... basic economics).

Gradually demand creeps up, (SUV's) and then demand meets available supply, then prices start to go up as demand outstrips capacity. (This is where we were a couple of years ago.)

When prices get high enough that it becomes economical to drill and explore for oil again, people will do so. Once prices get high enough people start to drill more wells, and the whole cycle starts all over.

The only thing that chages in between cycles is the cost of drilling the wells.  We are NOT running out of oil. We are running out of EASY TO GET TO oil.  It is not that there is no oil left on Earth. There is PLENTY of oil out there, it is just that the oil that is left is in harder (more expensive) to get to places.

Some oil is  hard to get to because you need expensive technology to get to it. That is simply a matter of price.  Right now the oil companies are finding great amounts of oil in the deep water parts of the Gulf of Mexico, places we didn't have the ability to drill in years ago, heck we couldn't even explore for oil out there years ago.  It is not hard to get that oil out, it is just EXPENSIVE to get that oil out. (It is a lot easier to drill a well in  middle of a cornfield in Kansas than in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico where the water is two miles deep and you get the occasional hurricane.)  It is simply a matter of price. Same is true for Alaska... we have the technology to drill up there, it is just more expensive than drilling in other places.

Some places are hard to get to because of political problems. Many of the problems are due to envornmentalsits.  For example there is a LOT of oil off the coast of southern California... so much that it NATURALLY seeps up out of the rocks and washes ashore... bits of oil have been seeping out of those rocks since before the Spanish came.  Thing is the envornmentalists will NEVER let an oil company drill out there. Same is true for the north slope of Alaska, or the coast of Florida... there are most likely large deposits of natural gas off of the U.S. East Coast, but the enviros won't let us drill for it. Clinton locked up enough natural gas to keep the USA going for several decades in "wilderness areas" he declared (mostly in the Rockies)  just before he left office, as a pay off to his enviro backers.  Heck Antarctica is an entire frigging continent where not one well has ever been drilled... just think how much oil, gas, and money is locked up under all that ice!

The other political problem is that lots of overseas governments are FUBAR. Venezuela is sitting on some very large oil deposits, but they are in the process of becoming a Communist state, and they are stealing the oil facilities from the U.S. Companies that built them. Nobody is talking about drilling new wells there, or expanding operations. Mexico did the same thing back in 1943, and Russia is doing it too, on the oil projects in Sibera and the Pacific Coast.  Any oil that is under those rocks is going to have to wait till after grown ups take over the government, because no oil company in their right mind is going to spend a ton of money to drill there, just to have the government come and take it all away.

There is oil in Nigeria, and off the West African Coast, but there really isn't much of a government there either... lots of corruption and terrorists keep kidnaping US and UK oil workers and threatening to blow up pipelines  to get the ransom that the companies pay. It's a cost of doing buisness, but all in all the companies would rather be drilling in Canada where such things don't happen. Same is true for Iraq and Iran.  Nobody is going to invest  twelve gazillion dollars in a new oil field/pipeline/refinery  just to see some guy named Muhammed blow it all up with a truck bomb.

So to answer your question, GEOLOGICALLY there is plenty of oil on Earth.  We are NOT running out of oil, and probably never will.  There are huge areas we haven't had, or don't have, the technology to explore in. As the price goes up it gets worthwhile to look for oil, and drill for oil, in more and more of these hard (expensive) to get to places, but the more we look the more we keep finding.

What we HAVE run out of is oil that is cheap to produce, easy to get to, and in a politically acceptable place to drill,  There is plenty of oil down there, in the rock, it is just getting more expensive to pull it out of the rock.

What is going to happen next? Well it depends. If people get angry enough about $8.00 gasoline they might just force the enviornmentalists to sit down and shut up and make it legally possible to build more refineries and force Congress open up new areas for drilling. IF that happens lots of wells will get drilled, the market will flood with cheap oil, and prices will come back down. Not to $1.00 a gallon, but they will come back down.

If however the enviornmentalists win that POLITICAL battle then the price won't come down. Then when gas hits $10.00 a gallon people will start doing things that don't make economic sense at $2.00 or $3.00 a gallon... like use more expensive light bulbs, drive expensive hybrid cars, and put solar cells on your house. These things are money loosers when energy is cheap... energy has to be expensive for them  to make sense, but they are things a lot of the enviros want to force you to do anyway.  If you can't afford an expensive hybrid then you get stuck doing other things they want you to do...like take the bus to work, keep the A/C off in the summer and put up with the heat and keep the heater off in the winter and put up with the cold.

Ironicly Greenpeace and the Sierra Club serve the same economic function as OPEC; they artificially restrict the oil supply and keep prices higher than they would be in a free market.

The big oil companies have figured this out, (even if voters haven't) and are happy either way. If the enviros loose, then the oil companies get to go drill for oil in a whole lot of new places and make a ton of money selling lots and lots of cheap oil. If the enviros win then the oil companies don't get to drill for oil, but they still make a ton of money selling what little oil they have left at ever increasing prices, and by making "green"  projects that don't make economic sense if oil is cheap, but do if oil is expensive. (like windfarms and such...).

In short they win either way.

And that is why we will never run out of oil. As the supply constricts prices go up, as prices go up both conservation and exploration begin to make economic sense, so both start to occur more. This drives demand down and increases supply, resulting in lower prices, and the whole cycle repeats again.

Answer 6

probably not long. maybe 15 years. when thinking about this question one must consider that there are more cars on the road now than every and that trend will not decrease. industrial powerhouses like china and india with a rising amount of middle class population will increasingly see the use of cars in their everyday life. china and india both with 1.2 billion people have a largely untapped market. america has only 300 million people although we have nearly 900 million cars imagine if everyone in china and india had cars it would consume 10-20 times the oil we currently consume on earth today and would deplete reserves at an alarming rate. that is why we are studying alternative fuels that are sustainable such as hydrogen because petroleum will not be here forever and it will get increasingly expensive and harder to find as the years progress.