CrustalTrudger t1_j06ess3 wrote
One way to approach this is through consideration of the idea of "peak oil", i.e., the idea that at some point there will be a peak in oil production that will never again be reached. The reasoning behind this is a mixture of the finite nature of oil reserves and the economics of oil extraction. One important component of the peak oil concept, which also reflects a misconception within your question, is that we will never ever get the last drop. There will always be petroleum left behind in a reservoir because at some point the cost of extraction greatly exceeds the price to extract that oil. If you look through the linked wikipedia page, you'll see how this plays out when a new way to extract oil becomes available. Specifically, the original peak oil prediction suggested that oil production would peak sometime in the early 1970s and this basically held until about the mid 1990s (in this plot the red is the projected production based on the peak oil concept and the green is actual global production). So what happened in the 1990s that allows production to go back up? A few things, but primarily development of technologies that allowed us to start efficiently extracting petroleum from reservoirs that were previously non-viable (primarily directional/horizontal drilling coupled with hydraulic fracturing that allowed us to extract oil from "tight" reservoirs, but others as well). This highlights that it's hard to project out when we will actually effectively run out of oil because we fundamentally don't know the future in terms of development of new ways of extraction (and to a lesser extent the discovery of additional reservoirs, though both the rate of new finds and the general exploration process is a shadow of what it was in the mid 20th century).
The other important side is demand. Circling back to the beginning, oil companies are not non-profits, they only extract oil if it's economically viable (and profitable) to do so. If factors reduce demand (e.g., taxes on petroleum to reflect the huge environmental cost of continuing to burn oil/gas, decreasing prices of alternative energy sources, etc), demand for, and thus the price of, oil will drop below a point where it's economically viable to extract whatever is left in reservoirs. Analyses attempting to work in some of these ideas of changing patterns in demand and viable energy alternatives still consider the peak oil concept, with some projections now pointing to a peak in production in the mid 2030s (e.g., Delannoy et al., 2021). But again, a lot is riding on projecting out a variety of pretty hard to predict things (basically anytime one group of variables is "collective human behavior", projections are going to be a bit tricky).
The final point to consider is that if we consider some hypothetical where we really go for getting as much remaining petroleum as we possibly can and burn it all, even without considering the "what do we do now for energy" challenge, this would basically be a "let's shoot for a RCP 8.5 scenario", which would make for some pretty hellish conditions in the future, to put it mildly.
TerpenesByMS t1_j0a0rf2 wrote
Truly, the biggest variables are:
- The economics of green energy
- Geopolitical circumstances (conflict, sanctions, etc.)
Everything else is details: Returns on new petroleum recovery tech is likely diminishing. New well finding is also, as you mention, unlikely to add a large boon either.
I really hope Peak Oil is by 2040. otherwise we're boinked.
cbelt3 t1_j0a6neq wrote
“Peak Oil “ by M. King Hubbert. A brilliant man, and fun to chat with when I met him in the 70’s.
Kindness_3024 t1_j09n08l wrote
Thank you for that cogent explanation.
jwatt38 t1_j06n7o5 wrote
Wasn’t there something years ago about old pockets had refilled somehow and it changed how we think the oil mechanism works? We thought it was dinosaurs and swaps and bogs + time and that was part of the “we will run out some day” thinking, but then these old pockets had filled back up and scientist weren’t sure how that happened considering we got no more dinosaurs etc. and if I’m remembering right this discovery sort of shook up the whole industry and time lines.
CrustalTrudger t1_j06pp3y wrote
I'm not aware of anything like this and I've worked adjacent to the oil & gas industry for all of my career. The vast majority of petroleum is derived from photosynthetic marine organisms (algae, phytoplankton, etc). Maybe you're thinking of the theory that some amount of petroleum is produced through abiotic mechanisms, but these ideas have been thoroughly discredited and have never yielded a successful find (e.g., Glasby, 2008). Even if we ignore that, the concept of depletion and peak oil is arguably independent of the formation mechanism of oil, i.e., it's more controlled by production (in the sense of our extraction) of oil than the way in which oil is formed (e.g., Höök et al., 2010).
jwatt38 t1_j06tdec wrote
So I probably never heard the follow up to what I was talking about. It seemed wild at the time but I don’t remember anything after that. I consume a ton of articles and crap, I get stuff mixed up, I don’t follow up. I appreciate the reply and cited sources. The Glasby 2008 reference seems about right for the time I heard something about all that. Btw I also appreciate you not being a dick in your reply as so many folks can be on the ole Reddit. I live in the Texas panhandle, oil, gas, water are all pretty common topics here, but I’m most certainly on the outskirts of knowledge. Thanks again for citing sources to read later.
cejmp t1_j076det wrote
>I'm not aware of anything like this and I've worked adjacent to the oil & gas industry for all of my career.
Some of the fields in the South Delta block in the GOM were reporting increasing reserves back in like 2003, Devon Energy. I can't find anything with Google about it, but we were working for them. It could have been South Marsh Island, I don't remember.
michaelrohansmith t1_j09825i wrote
Maybe oil is slowly soaking out of other areas into the places we collect from.
fman84 t1_j07jpg7 wrote
I remember something like this as well. Oil does not come from dinosaurs but is actually from tiny sea life like plankton. It settles on the sea floor and over millions of years of heat and pressure it changes to crude oil. I recently read an article that talks about samples being taken from various places around the world showing new oil forming. Logically we know that life in water has not stopped so there is a constant supply of new organic material being deposited that will eventually convert to oil. It just takes a very long time. Likely there are layers of organic material at various stages of conversion.
Belzeturtle t1_j08kxnj wrote
>We thought it was dinosaurs
No one thought that ever. Oil was produced from marine organisms, not dinosaurs, about 300M years ago, which was about 70M years before the first dinosaurs.
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