Again folks - there is plenty of oil. It is just that the stuff in the Gulf is starting to run out.
The next largest reserves of oil are located in North and Central America. And we aren't talking small change - more than half of all the world's oil.
Once OPEC is replaced by Halliburton and its subsidaries as the ONLY source of oil on the planet it is going to be a very different world! Terrorism would then be defined as offering a barrel of oil in a free market for a fair price. Venezuala would find itself the 51st state (as would Canada, tho they wouldn't notice).
Of course you can actually grow a diesel bio-fuel without waiting for the stuff to be buried for 100s of millions of years. But I suspect that the United States of Halliburton will use the former USAF to bomb the field crops of nations in the 'Axis of Weevil' - any state that didn't purchase 'Freedom Gas' and lubricate with 'Liberty Grease and Oils'.
Re:
Ray wrote: What will happen when the oil reserves are gone? Will we have another raw material that will replace oil?
Yes. The stone age didn't end for a shortage of stone, and the oil age won't end for a shortage of oil. It will end because we find something better. Candidates right now include nuclear fission, gas, coal, and some regenerative energy. In the long run, nuclear fusion may become viable too. Running out of oil is not on my list of things to worry about, and the recent rise in prices will not put it there.
a large percentage of oil is into feedtock for plastics etc. This will put an ever larger load upon agricultural base products and will, exluding catastrophic desertification, require increasing yields of stuff like soybeans for non food uses.
In US the available arable land is being developed into non ag uses .Soybeans, unlike wheat, arent desert tolerant. SO, I see that water availability will be an increasingly stand -out "minimum resource" (as in SHelfords law). We dont use "dual water sytems in Us or Canada or Europe like they do in Asia, but it will have to become a more common design feture in new buildngs and housing,.
Desal, as the noble experiments have shown is wayy toenergy intensive for what you get. (Its actually easire to tap sub oeanic springs or skim fresh water off the top of brackish in large Bays
Bingo F-man!!! Fresh drinking water IS the resource of the 21st Century - not oil!
Still, we have a BIG condundrum. Without oil derivatives you can't blast off into Space. Whoever has the oil will eventually own Space - no?!
