Question: What wold we do if the world ran out of oil

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 19 Nov 2014:

We’re probably going to find out in the next 20-30 years!

Oil is hugely important to most countries. They use it to make different kinds of fuel, solvents, lubricants, plastics, and loads more. It’s also used to generate electricity in power plants. If the world runs out of oil, every engine that runs on petrol, diesel, octane, or any of the other fuels made from oil will be useless. Plastics would get really expensive (we’d be able to make some without oil, but it’d be much harder). Some kinds of science would be very difficult as solvents like hexane got harder to make (I’d be upset about that, I do a lot of science where I need to dissolve fats in hexane). And as most of the world’s oil comes from Saudi Arabia, politics would get rather nasty…

People often say “necessity is the mother of invention”, so I imagine having to actually live with the problems of running out of oil will force people to come up with solutions pretty quickly. There’ll be a whole lot of nastiness as lots of big businesses have to shut down or can’t afford the price of whatever little oil is left, but things will get better as long as there are clever people working on the problems.

There are already alternatives to some of the problems. Electric cars and engines that run on vegetable oil are out there right now, but big car companies have been fighting them for years now and they haven’t gotten the popularity they deserve. That will change as the fuel dries up 🙂

There are plenty of ways to generate electricity without burning oil, too. There’s wind and solar energy, you can use geothermal energy to make power from the heat beneath the Earth’s crust, and of course there’s nuclear energy (although that has some problems with radioactive waste). Governments don’t really want to hear about the problem though, and they haven’t invested nearly enough in new energy sources. Again, once they have no choice, that will change 🙂