How can there be any oil left at this point? I cannot wrap my head around it — with all of the cars and airplanes, plus all of the plastic that’s also made from oil. How in the world isn’t it all gone by now?
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Because despite the fact that we’ve been burning through a lot of oil very quickly, there was a lot of oil there to start.
Oil is made over the course of hundreds of millions of years. So you had hundreds of millions of years worth of material compressing and transforming into the crude oil we see today.
The crazier part of the situation is that we have been able to meaningfully deplete oil supplies in under 200 years.
Consider the question why wouldn’t there be oil left? What math makes you think we’ve already used it all up? You’ll immediately have your answer. (Solution: the amount we started with > the amount we’ve used.)
There is a looot of oil. Some of it is just hard to get to, so we haven’t tried yet.
But make no mistake, we are seeing the end of the line. The sooner and the more with move away from it, the better.
They keep finding new reserves all the time. It’s just harder and harder to get to but it’s there alright.
almost 100 million barrels per day is used in the world, and they estimate about 1.65 trillion barrels left that we can reach with current technology. The world is very large and theres a lot of oil. Still only equates to maybe 40-50 years left of crude oil unless they can dig even deeper and find more, we are slowly but surely moving towards electrictiy and other forms of product that can be used in place of oil. So im sure if the human population isnt extinct in the next 50 years and with tech advancing daily we wont need oil anymore by then
I like how NOBODY ever talks about what happens when the FINITE amount is eventually depleted
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You are just underestimating how big the planet is. Supposedly, it takes about 1 cubic mile of oil per year to run the world. That is an area about the size of central park in Manhatten, that is less than a mile tall. Go look at google maps and type in central park. Then start zooming out, to see how small that is compared to the globe.
It is still a fuckload of oil, but the world is a fuckload bigger.
Earth’s been around for a looooong time, and everything that ever lived that dies eventually becomes oil or coal so there’s ALOT of it.
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