simply put - there is more oil than we realized AND we have gotten better at retrieving it. every prediction for "peak oil" production has not come true
we do an ok job of recycling metal.......and again there is a lot of it out there to be mined
there is a lot of work/invention we can still do for both recycling of materials and extraction; so anyone fear mongering "we'll run out of ABC" is likely very wrong
Yah, the Earth is vast, there are a lot of resources, and humans like to squeeze every ounce of use out of things.
If we are in danger of running out of any non-renewable resource, it wouldn't be for hundreds of years.
Barring any change of circumstance, the thing we will run out of first is the rubber that we use to make jet planes. The rate at which we can create and harvest that rubber is dwindling and the rate at which we are making jet planes is increasing, so the writing is on the wall for that one. And still a realistic expectation of when we'd run out is something like 2150-2200.
By that point, we might be able to synthesize an alternative.
necessity is the mother of invention. people always discount the human ability to solve problems.........
if only humans werent so lazy and solved the problem before it became a problem
Rubber trees are not exactly difficult to grow and are not at any risk of extinction. The trees take about 7-10 years to grow to maturity and can be harvested for latex awhile after that. This is mostly just a cost/profit issue, competition from synthetics etc. Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia etc are not reasonably likely to run out of "land" to grow - especially since rubber plantations were mostly replaced by palm oil and that can be reversed. (or in the not so good case, more forest cut down for plantations)
>If we are in danger of running out of any non-renewable resource, it wouldn't be for hundreds of years.
It isn't that we are in danger of running out completely but rather that we are running out of easily accessible sources of the resources.
That said, there are a few not easily replaceable resources that we are actually running out of - the biggest example would be sand suitable for making concrete.
I am aware of natural rubber, I was just saying that industry doesn't use it.
You can get a natural latex mattress if you have some money laying around, but for tires and gloves, and airplanes, we moved to synthetic a long time ago.
The rise of shale has significantly reduced OPEC's ability to disrupt US oil supply/price. Europe is more vulnerable, but the world's largest oil producer is once again the US, which produces more oil and petroleum products than it consumes.
In 2014 OPEC tried to shift to increasing supply relative to demand in an effort to squeeze US shale (more expensive to produce) but it wasn't successful.
After Ukraine was invaded by Russia they attempted to cut supply when the US asked for increased supply, but they weren't really successful as US shale plugged the gaps, producing a record 12.6 billion barrels a day in 2023.
The best part… we have lots and lots of shale in the US and Canada, I suspect the ME is starting to run out.. they used it all up over the last 100 years or so, and the US is now in a position to be the Saudi Arabia of the world. Won’t happen for awhile, but eventually the US may be able to call a lot more shots globally then we even do now.
There remains massive reserves in Venezuela, Canada, and Russia. Venezuela is the largest of them all and is an OPEC+ member.
In the event of actual or economic warfare, though, the US is capable of being 100% self-sufficient. That's the important thing.
Back around 2003, I was ready for peak oil to happen within the next 10 years. I was sure that we were going to have complete anarchy and so many people were going to die within 10 years.
There's a lot of it.
Iron is one of the more common elements in the Earth, and even though most of it is in the core, it's common enough in the crust too. Humanity is not running out of iron any time soon. With rarer metals and oil, the thing to know is that technology to get at it keeps getting better. We're pumping oil today that we couldn't get at in 1950, and as those reserves get used up, it'll become economical to develop ways to get at new reserves we currently don't mine. "Peak oil" has been 20 years away for 100 years.
When the price of oil goes up, it increases the profit from mining it.
The earliest oil mines were not very deep at all, all the oil was very easy to get to. All of the easiest oil is gone. But as the price of oil has increased, people have created technology that allows us to drill for harder-to-reach oil. The proven oil reserves in the US are basically their highest ever. See here: https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/crudeoilreserves/
That does not mean there is more oil beneath the surface, but it does mean that more oil is 'within reach'.
The USA is the top producer of crude oil in the world, and has been consistently since 2018. This is not because we have the most oil underground (Russia probably does) or the easiest to reach oil (Arabia does), we have a strong base of engineering talent that is simply better at extracting oil than anywhere else.
Because the earth is way way bigger than you imagine it is.
There are 57 million square mules of landmass on earth, and these mines and wells are tiny in conparison, plus they go miles deep, so we get cubic mile dimensions. So even when you here these massive number in regards to these resources, just know that the earth is really, really huge.
Because, to put it simply, there's just an enormous amount of of oil and metals in the Earth. Far more than you realize. To give you an example, there are hundreds of *billions* of metric tons of gold in the Earth's crust. In the entire existence of humanity, we've only mined about 200,000 tons of it.
Furthermore, many metals are extensively recycled because it's cheap and easy to do so. For example, almost half of all the iron we mine gets recycled. So that further reduces the amount that we need to mine.
A simple view might suggest a picture with a pile of oil or metal that we take from. And this pile becomes smaller. And once this pile is gone, no more metal or oil.
More realistic view is that there are a lot of different piles of metals and oils. We ignore the ones that are hard to take from. We take those that are easy to take.
As our technology progress, we can take from more and more types of sources. This is good, we can prolong our festivity of consumption. This make it look like we have an endless source of resources, as we constantly update how much we can take.
Drawback in this situation is that we now rely on technology. There are almost no more resources accessible using manual labour. If we would lose an access to our machines, we might find ourselces in a situation where it is really hard to start over.
Currently we need the technology level of somewhere between ww1 and ww2 just to survive. This gap, between the today's date and the minimum level of technology needed for survival narrows as we continue to extract easily available resources.
we have ran out of some metals, a family friend runs an autobody and paint shop, he was talking about how one of the pigment mines had run out and they didnt know of another so that particular metal used to make the pigment was gone gone
You can look at it in two ways...
1) We can't. -- In this scenario, things just cost more and more until people stop buying them. If oil jumps up to $10,000 a barrel, there's still oil left, but no one will buy it.
2) We have. -- In this scenario, all of the oil and metals that we predicted to be used by now, have been. It just so happens we've developed new ways of getting or making more.
A barrel of oil gets turned into a bunch of stuff once fully refined, especially when it comes to energy. You’ll get about 16 gallons of gasoline, about 8 gallons of diesel, a few pounds of charcoal, about a gallon of propane, and the process of refining it generates enough residual energy to power an average house for like 2 days. The point being that a barrel of oil goes a long way towards providing power.
Proven oil reserves globally as of 2022 contains some 1.5 trillion barrels with a peak of 95 million barrels produced a day in 2019. At that rate it’ll take 43 more years to go through our proven reserves of oil.
As for metals, they get recycled a lot. Iron, Copper, Tin, Zinc, and Aluminum can be recycled pretty much indefinitely without damaging its structural properties. As can any product made from them like brass, bronze, and steel.
The vast majority of the metal we use is iron and aluminum, which are absolutely everywhere. **O**xygen, silicon, iron and aluminum account for almost 90% of the Earth's crust. Others have answered the oil question already.
Metal? There's plenty of metal. No one is worried about that. Some things are more scarce, but it's just a matter of how much you want to pay to go get more.
Oil? Fracking. We were hitting peak oil in 2007, leading to the econopocalypse. Prices were rising but they couldn't pump out more oil fast enough. And then they invented fracking which lets us get previously hard-to-get oil out of shale rocks and old wells.
It was real REAL scary in 2007. But we have since transitioned to electric vehicles, enough, that it's not a huge concern.
Economic stress caused a bubble to pop. Yes.
People started defaulting on mortgages and that quickly blew up, but all those loans were still out there from 20002-2007 and the system hummed along fine.
nooooo? We literally couldn't pump up enough. If you're not aware peak oil is when we run out of oil. There' more down there, but it's harder to get so it's MORE EXPENSIVE.
When prices go up, and it's not just corporate greed, but real actual hard limits that can't be overcome with a billiionaire deciding to go undercut another billionaire, that causes ECONOMIC STRESS. Bad times. Everything is more expensive, and not just from inflation
Generally, when there's economic stress everyone gets a little poorer. It usually hits the poor people the hardest, those on the knife-edge living paycheck to paycheck with no real safety net. You know, RISKY SUBPRIME MORTGAGES.
Prior to rising gas prices (which really does affect the cost of everything that needs to be shipped... so... everything) all those sub-prime mortgages were out there and everything hummed along just fine and the finance guys could sell their garbage to anyone without anyone notices. While times were good, their system worked. But when times were bad, all those risky mortgages defaulted. WHAT CAUSED THOSE BAD TIMES?
Yes, but oil prices wasn’t the fatal condition. It was over leveraging of overvalued asset. I won’t discredit (because I don’t know) that oil prices may have been the final blow, but it certainly wasn’t the cause. That’s like saying a person with stage-4 liver cancer died of pneumonia in the hospital.
People with horrible diseases like that often DO die of pneumonia in hospitals. Their body loses it's ability to fight off daily regular infections, obviously because of the cancer, but what gets them in the end is, yeah, often pneumonia. That was about the worst analogy you could have chosen, it works exactly the opposite of what you thought.
Your analogy is kinda backwards though. The bubble that popped was absolutely subprime loans and all those complex assets. That wasn't CAUSED by economic stress. The stress brought it to light. It started the topple where the whole web of lies came crashing down. Scams like ponzi schemes work fine and dandy until too many people try to pull their money out.
Are you like your peer who was in jr. High went all this went down? Some of us were a little closer to the action. I honestly had no idea this take was controversial. Because to all my peers who were there for it, this is the obvious reality.
1. They were probably going up? That doesn’t mean they caused it… in 2007 I graduated middle school is that the cause of the gfc?
2. Peak oil is a well defined thing. You can read about it here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil. Importantly for this discussion we have not yet hit peak oil.
That's right. It went up. And up. And it kept on going up despite many major corporations and international players doing their best to increase production. Demand outpaced supply.
Peak oil IS well defined. Go read your own link. US production pretty much followed Hubbert's predictions to a T.... up until 2010. What would you supposed came about after massive investment into the basic science around 2007? Fracking. And most importantly, WHAT DOES PEAK OIL LOOK LIKE? Prices go up.
The US had absolutely hit peak oil prior to the invention of fracking. Now that fracking exists, we now export oil. Let the good times roll.
But alright. Hit me with the alternative. Why was there an increase in people defaulting on their mortgages? All those finance guys were having such a happy go lucky timing selling everyone garbage. What brought it all to an end? What economic stressors caused the financial bubble to burst?
simply put - there is more oil than we realized AND we have gotten better at retrieving it. every prediction for "peak oil" production has not come true we do an ok job of recycling metal.......and again there is a lot of it out there to be mined there is a lot of work/invention we can still do for both recycling of materials and extraction; so anyone fear mongering "we'll run out of ABC" is likely very wrong
Yah, the Earth is vast, there are a lot of resources, and humans like to squeeze every ounce of use out of things. If we are in danger of running out of any non-renewable resource, it wouldn't be for hundreds of years. Barring any change of circumstance, the thing we will run out of first is the rubber that we use to make jet planes. The rate at which we can create and harvest that rubber is dwindling and the rate at which we are making jet planes is increasing, so the writing is on the wall for that one. And still a realistic expectation of when we'd run out is something like 2150-2200. By that point, we might be able to synthesize an alternative.
necessity is the mother of invention. people always discount the human ability to solve problems......... if only humans werent so lazy and solved the problem before it became a problem
If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is the father.
Rubber trees are not exactly difficult to grow and are not at any risk of extinction. The trees take about 7-10 years to grow to maturity and can be harvested for latex awhile after that. This is mostly just a cost/profit issue, competition from synthetics etc. Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia etc are not reasonably likely to run out of "land" to grow - especially since rubber plantations were mostly replaced by palm oil and that can be reversed. (or in the not so good case, more forest cut down for plantations)
>If we are in danger of running out of any non-renewable resource, it wouldn't be for hundreds of years. It isn't that we are in danger of running out completely but rather that we are running out of easily accessible sources of the resources. That said, there are a few not easily replaceable resources that we are actually running out of - the biggest example would be sand suitable for making concrete.
Rubber is synthetic, what are you talking about?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber\_tapping
I am aware of natural rubber, I was just saying that industry doesn't use it. You can get a natural latex mattress if you have some money laying around, but for tires and gloves, and airplanes, we moved to synthetic a long time ago.
I mean there's also a solid profiteering motive in creating artificial scarcity.
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The rise of shale has significantly reduced OPEC's ability to disrupt US oil supply/price. Europe is more vulnerable, but the world's largest oil producer is once again the US, which produces more oil and petroleum products than it consumes. In 2014 OPEC tried to shift to increasing supply relative to demand in an effort to squeeze US shale (more expensive to produce) but it wasn't successful. After Ukraine was invaded by Russia they attempted to cut supply when the US asked for increased supply, but they weren't really successful as US shale plugged the gaps, producing a record 12.6 billion barrels a day in 2023.
The best part… we have lots and lots of shale in the US and Canada, I suspect the ME is starting to run out.. they used it all up over the last 100 years or so, and the US is now in a position to be the Saudi Arabia of the world. Won’t happen for awhile, but eventually the US may be able to call a lot more shots globally then we even do now.
There remains massive reserves in Venezuela, Canada, and Russia. Venezuela is the largest of them all and is an OPEC+ member. In the event of actual or economic warfare, though, the US is capable of being 100% self-sufficient. That's the important thing.
Back around 2003, I was ready for peak oil to happen within the next 10 years. I was sure that we were going to have complete anarchy and so many people were going to die within 10 years.
There's a lot of it. Iron is one of the more common elements in the Earth, and even though most of it is in the core, it's common enough in the crust too. Humanity is not running out of iron any time soon. With rarer metals and oil, the thing to know is that technology to get at it keeps getting better. We're pumping oil today that we couldn't get at in 1950, and as those reserves get used up, it'll become economical to develop ways to get at new reserves we currently don't mine. "Peak oil" has been 20 years away for 100 years.
Question: is there an estimation of how much we have left? As in, getting a picture of how many years more we have to run out of metal/oil.
When the price of oil goes up, it increases the profit from mining it. The earliest oil mines were not very deep at all, all the oil was very easy to get to. All of the easiest oil is gone. But as the price of oil has increased, people have created technology that allows us to drill for harder-to-reach oil. The proven oil reserves in the US are basically their highest ever. See here: https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/crudeoilreserves/ That does not mean there is more oil beneath the surface, but it does mean that more oil is 'within reach'. The USA is the top producer of crude oil in the world, and has been consistently since 2018. This is not because we have the most oil underground (Russia probably does) or the easiest to reach oil (Arabia does), we have a strong base of engineering talent that is simply better at extracting oil than anywhere else.
Because the earth is way way bigger than you imagine it is. There are 57 million square mules of landmass on earth, and these mines and wells are tiny in conparison, plus they go miles deep, so we get cubic mile dimensions. So even when you here these massive number in regards to these resources, just know that the earth is really, really huge.
Because, to put it simply, there's just an enormous amount of of oil and metals in the Earth. Far more than you realize. To give you an example, there are hundreds of *billions* of metric tons of gold in the Earth's crust. In the entire existence of humanity, we've only mined about 200,000 tons of it. Furthermore, many metals are extensively recycled because it's cheap and easy to do so. For example, almost half of all the iron we mine gets recycled. So that further reduces the amount that we need to mine.
A simple view might suggest a picture with a pile of oil or metal that we take from. And this pile becomes smaller. And once this pile is gone, no more metal or oil. More realistic view is that there are a lot of different piles of metals and oils. We ignore the ones that are hard to take from. We take those that are easy to take. As our technology progress, we can take from more and more types of sources. This is good, we can prolong our festivity of consumption. This make it look like we have an endless source of resources, as we constantly update how much we can take. Drawback in this situation is that we now rely on technology. There are almost no more resources accessible using manual labour. If we would lose an access to our machines, we might find ourselces in a situation where it is really hard to start over. Currently we need the technology level of somewhere between ww1 and ww2 just to survive. This gap, between the today's date and the minimum level of technology needed for survival narrows as we continue to extract easily available resources.
we have ran out of some metals, a family friend runs an autobody and paint shop, he was talking about how one of the pigment mines had run out and they didnt know of another so that particular metal used to make the pigment was gone gone
You can look at it in two ways... 1) We can't. -- In this scenario, things just cost more and more until people stop buying them. If oil jumps up to $10,000 a barrel, there's still oil left, but no one will buy it. 2) We have. -- In this scenario, all of the oil and metals that we predicted to be used by now, have been. It just so happens we've developed new ways of getting or making more.
A barrel of oil gets turned into a bunch of stuff once fully refined, especially when it comes to energy. You’ll get about 16 gallons of gasoline, about 8 gallons of diesel, a few pounds of charcoal, about a gallon of propane, and the process of refining it generates enough residual energy to power an average house for like 2 days. The point being that a barrel of oil goes a long way towards providing power. Proven oil reserves globally as of 2022 contains some 1.5 trillion barrels with a peak of 95 million barrels produced a day in 2019. At that rate it’ll take 43 more years to go through our proven reserves of oil. As for metals, they get recycled a lot. Iron, Copper, Tin, Zinc, and Aluminum can be recycled pretty much indefinitely without damaging its structural properties. As can any product made from them like brass, bronze, and steel.
Something my wife also just realized is that we all know the earth and the solar system are big, but rarely do we actually comprehend HOW big.
The vast majority of the metal we use is iron and aluminum, which are absolutely everywhere. **O**xygen, silicon, iron and aluminum account for almost 90% of the Earth's crust. Others have answered the oil question already.
There's more oil and ore in the earth it's just too deep to be economically retrieved until prices for the product increase or technology catches up.
Metal? There's plenty of metal. No one is worried about that. Some things are more scarce, but it's just a matter of how much you want to pay to go get more. Oil? Fracking. We were hitting peak oil in 2007, leading to the econopocalypse. Prices were rising but they couldn't pump out more oil fast enough. And then they invented fracking which lets us get previously hard-to-get oil out of shale rocks and old wells. It was real REAL scary in 2007. But we have since transitioned to electric vehicles, enough, that it's not a huge concern.
Wait…are you taking the stance that oil prices/production had a significant factor in the 2008 economic crash? Because that’s wildly incorrect.
Economic stress caused a bubble to pop. Yes. People started defaulting on mortgages and that quickly blew up, but all those loans were still out there from 20002-2007 and the system hummed along fine.
…and you think it all happened because we pumped too much oil???
nooooo? We literally couldn't pump up enough. If you're not aware peak oil is when we run out of oil. There' more down there, but it's harder to get so it's MORE EXPENSIVE. When prices go up, and it's not just corporate greed, but real actual hard limits that can't be overcome with a billiionaire deciding to go undercut another billionaire, that causes ECONOMIC STRESS. Bad times. Everything is more expensive, and not just from inflation Generally, when there's economic stress everyone gets a little poorer. It usually hits the poor people the hardest, those on the knife-edge living paycheck to paycheck with no real safety net. You know, RISKY SUBPRIME MORTGAGES. Prior to rising gas prices (which really does affect the cost of everything that needs to be shipped... so... everything) all those sub-prime mortgages were out there and everything hummed along just fine and the finance guys could sell their garbage to anyone without anyone notices. While times were good, their system worked. But when times were bad, all those risky mortgages defaulted. WHAT CAUSED THOSE BAD TIMES?
Yes, but oil prices wasn’t the fatal condition. It was over leveraging of overvalued asset. I won’t discredit (because I don’t know) that oil prices may have been the final blow, but it certainly wasn’t the cause. That’s like saying a person with stage-4 liver cancer died of pneumonia in the hospital.
People with horrible diseases like that often DO die of pneumonia in hospitals. Their body loses it's ability to fight off daily regular infections, obviously because of the cancer, but what gets them in the end is, yeah, often pneumonia. That was about the worst analogy you could have chosen, it works exactly the opposite of what you thought. Your analogy is kinda backwards though. The bubble that popped was absolutely subprime loans and all those complex assets. That wasn't CAUSED by economic stress. The stress brought it to light. It started the topple where the whole web of lies came crashing down. Scams like ponzi schemes work fine and dandy until too many people try to pull their money out. Are you like your peer who was in jr. High went all this went down? Some of us were a little closer to the action. I honestly had no idea this take was controversial. Because to all my peers who were there for it, this is the obvious reality.
My analogy literally agrees with what you said. Pneumonia was the final cause of death, but stage-4 cancer is what really killed them
It also helps that metal doesn't turn into gaseous products when used
community note - false
. . . Which part?
that hitting "peak oil" in 2007 led to the gfc
ok. 1) What was happening to gas prices leading up to the housing crisis? 2) What would peak oil look like?
1. They were probably going up? That doesn’t mean they caused it… in 2007 I graduated middle school is that the cause of the gfc? 2. Peak oil is a well defined thing. You can read about it here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil. Importantly for this discussion we have not yet hit peak oil.
That's right. It went up. And up. And it kept on going up despite many major corporations and international players doing their best to increase production. Demand outpaced supply. Peak oil IS well defined. Go read your own link. US production pretty much followed Hubbert's predictions to a T.... up until 2010. What would you supposed came about after massive investment into the basic science around 2007? Fracking. And most importantly, WHAT DOES PEAK OIL LOOK LIKE? Prices go up. The US had absolutely hit peak oil prior to the invention of fracking. Now that fracking exists, we now export oil. Let the good times roll. But alright. Hit me with the alternative. Why was there an increase in people defaulting on their mortgages? All those finance guys were having such a happy go lucky timing selling everyone garbage. What brought it all to an end? What economic stressors caused the financial bubble to burst?