^^^Clearly does not understand where oil comes from.


No one really knows how long oil reserves will last. A quick google search said liquid oil reserves will last somewhere from 50-100 years. There's also oil contained in rocks and sands that could be extracted but this requires a lot of processing and is more difficult and expensive to get to. This will likely be used at some point but will drive up oil prices significantly. As far as the bp spill goes, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the world oil reserves. The environmental impact is much greater than the miniscule impact it has on oil costs or how much oil we have on the planet.

The real question isn't how long oil will last though. It's a matter of when is it going to get too expensive to run our economy off of. If a gallon of diesel costs 20$ it will be pretty hard to maintain the shipping and trucking industry as it is today. We'll probably have some oil reserves for a 1,000 years but your not gonna be driving to work on gasoline if a gallon costs 10, 20, 50 bucks or more.

IMO the best solution is to develop mainstream electric vehicles. We still need to figure out cleaner and more efficient sources of electricity though. We need to shift away from coal and more towards nuclear and solar power. Hopefully we'll figure out a viable fusion energy source some day in the not too distant future. That would pretty much solve our energy problems.

thanks for the first decent answer

thread was really aimed at the fact that at school, im sure i was taught there was like 100 years of oil left, max
and then somewhere else i read that bp lost like 100 billion dollars with it all gushing out... havent done the maths myself, but how many years do you think 100 billion dollars of oil is
surely we now have that many fewer years

A huge amount of oil has come out of the bp well for certain. However, it really doesn't mean squat compared to how much oil the world uses. Current estimates on global oil consumption rates are about 75million barrels per day. I think the estimates for the bp spill are something like 50-100 thousand barrels a day maybe more. Even if you assumed 150,000 barrels a day from the bp spill over 90 days that is 13.5 million barrels. This is a huge amount of oil to be dumped into the gulf and certainly is worth a lot of money to an individual company.

Compared to the global consumption rate though this is nothing. It's not even 1/4th of the amount of oil the planet uses every day. We haven't lost any years of oil use, we've lost less than 6 hours. The biggest impact of the spill is the environmental damage and the economic damage to the gulf region. It will take many years for the gulf to recover.

there are still trillions to be made.
i predict that the transition to more viable energy resources will be very slow.