When oil, coal and uranium run out...?

Question

Will we go back to riding horses to the local market to buy our food? Or will we maintain our current lifestyle using wind, solar and hydroelectric power?

Answer 1

We currently use about 25 billion barrels of oil per year (and rising). Exploration finds about 5 billion barrels a year, staying fairly constant. That's due to improved technology, but much of the newer discoveries are not easy to get at. So we're using reserves, and despite claims that it "reproduces", and "we'll always find more", the cut-off, when the demand exceeds supply, is, by most estimates 20 to 30 years away.

There are colossal reserves of coal in the ground; again, it's down to the cost of getting it out. Not just dollar/pound cost: digging up 1 MegaJoule of coal energy is a bit pointless if you expend 1.1MJ doing it!

Uranium, realistically, would never be depleted in any foreseeable timescale, as the quantities actually used in energy production are very small. Again, is the energy and cost of making it safe to use worth what you get out of it?

I believe the answer to your question is a combination of more efficient usage, including, as you say, buying local produce, and new technologies.

The greatest hope is nuclear fusion: very clean and potentially limitless. However, the standing joke is "Nuclear fusion is the energy of tomorrow. And it always will be!".

Answer 2

There are so many untapped energies in the solar system. I recon we will descover a few that will stop us going back medieval times. Water fueled vehicles. The science exists and the only bi-product is oxygen. Could we not have discovered it years ago. Uranium will never run out. If we could harness the power of the oceans tides we wouldnt need another power station anywhere else. Time will tell. I think before that the planet will be beyond repair anyway thanks to the last 80 years of us being here and presedent Bush isnt doing enough to help, muppet! I also think there are other things that will destroy us before then. Just like the dinosours were made extinct, our time will come. Humans are the destroyers of our own planet. Only parasites destroy there host. Nuff said, next!

Answer 3

Renewable energy is the future. Fossil fuels will eventually run out. Unfortunately, long before they do, we will have serious environmental problem with so much CO2 in the air. We will move away from fossil fuels before they run out. We will continue to use regular solar, wind, hydroelectric, etc until more powerful forms of renewable energy are readily available. The earth's core is hot enough to provide plenty of power if we can learn to tap into it. Solar power is a lot more powerful in space. If we can learn to harness it out there and send it down to earth, that will provide a lot more power. Fusion is also another power source that could be in our future. We do have options, and which ever ones we end up using will be more advanced than the previous forms of of power. We won't go back to horses.

Answer 4

Facts:

The US has 200-300 of "easily" recoverable coal reserves remaining.

The "peak oil" theory has surfaced in nearly every decade since the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania. Some people seem to think we "always" have 10-20 years of oil left. As technology improves, more harder to recover fields are discovered and older fields are pushed further and more oil is recovered from them. Demand is increasing, so the question remains, where is the limit? The same will apply to natural gas in the near future.

Uranium and nuclear power: The stockpiles of plutonium and uranium from warheads have been used for fuel for reactors for years - they supplied about half the world's feed. These stockpiles are nearly depleted. However there are large untapped uranium reserves. The problem, at least in the US, is NIMBY - who wants a nuclear reactor in their town???

Hydrogen - the environmentalists' joke. And how, you ask, do you get a large supply of hydrogen? You have to break it from more stable compounds - water (H20), or hydrocarbons (like oil). Both take huge amounts of energy to do (so in the first place, hydrogen is NOT energy efficient to produce). So, how do you produce hydrogen from, say, water? You have to use nuclear power to run the plants. Otherwise, you are just burning more coal or natural gas and making more greenhouse gas and wasting energy.

So, with coal and uranium at least we have 300 years to find other sources of energy, if not the grandkids are back to the stoneage.

Answer 5

My belief is that we are approaching a technology singularity which will occur within the next forty years. As we reach that point a number of technologies will become available the first and foremost will be nano technology allowing control of molecular and atomic structure. If you think of a single germ infecting a body making it produce waste material by the bucket full. Imagine another germ that invades and makes the body young or allows it to feed by absorbing sunlight. We would be able to grow petroleum or any other energy fuel although I think we would not need it. I think this will happen before those energy sources mentioned run out. The main problem will be using these technologies wisely.

Answer 6

I think it will be a combination of the two. We will still be able to have high-tech products through the use of renewables, but we will also have to learn to do with less.

Half the population of the world is rapidly industrializing, and they want the things that we have had in the 'west.' Demand is going to go way up.

**********Update

Some responders are saying "we will be long dead" or don't worry about it there's centuries of coal left. This may be true, but that's not what the asker asked.

**********Update 2

Hydrogen is not an energy source, people! Hydrogen is an energy storage medium, like a battery. You have to MAKE the hyrdrogen. This takes energy. Then you have to compress the hydrogen, this takes more energy still.

Where are you going to get the energy to make the hydrogen?

Answer 7

WE will be long dead ( there is enough Uranium for a few century's at 100x our present consumption ) ( it only seems rare because we don't mine and refine it for power production on a large scale - and we are on the verge of building reactors that can safely produce an infinite amount of fuel for the old fashioned models we currently use )

but the reality is that our future energy source will be something that we can't even imagine at our current level of technology

Answer 8

The UK has 300 years of coal left that we know about. In the 40s they were taught oil would run out in 10 t0 20 years, there's more oil now than ever and it's still being found. It's self producing and will never run out.

Answer 9

Probably neither. I think what we will see is the emergence of hydrogen as a viable fuel along with its use as a supercooling agent for power stations and a fuel to turn the generators. Interesting article in Scientific American about this.

Answer 10

If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and if time always progresses clockwise and never reverses, and time derives its energy from some source and produces an action, just where is the "reverse effect" happening? i.e., as time progresses, it must also decrease somewhere, like in a 8 shaped sand clock.