Oil is a very useful thing. Human civilization uses it as fuel and as raw material for the production of synthetic materials, plastics, dyes, polymer films, and many other necessary items. Yes, before oil’s industrial use, everyday life was much harder than it is now.
Just imagine for a second how many things around you are made from black gold. Clothing, construction materials, smartphones, computers, and other gadgets; household chemicals; supermarket bags…
And cars, after all, not only contain plastic made from oil but also run on fuel derived from it.
It makes you wonder how much life will change when this black blood of our planet runs out. How much longer will it last?
Oil is a non-renewable resource. Yes, it continues to gradually form in the depths of the Earth’s crust even now, but it takes a considerable amount of time for the organic matter beneath our feet to turn into oil.
In fact, scientists still don’t fully understand how it is formed, which makes it hard to say exactly how long the process takes. New oil deposits may have formed tens of thousands of years ago, while the age of known oil fields is about 60 million years.
As you can imagine, the growth of oil formation lags far behind the pace of consumption. So expecting new oil to simply appear is unrealistic.
News reports frequently mention that oil reserves on the planet are about to run out, and humanity is facing a severe crisis. Online articles speculate how much longer this resource will last—5, 10, or 20 more years.
Perhaps the most plausible estimates come from the company British Petroleum.
Their experts believe that the planet’s known oil sources will be depleted in 50 years.
The key word here is “known,” as the company’s reports refer only to the discovered oil reserves, not all of the planet’s oil. So giving an exact estimate is impossible.
But don’t worry: if you think about it, even in half a century, oil is unlikely to run out. First of all, as old fields are exhausted, humanity will explore new ones. Additionally, new technologies will likely emerge that will allow access to reserves that were previously considered unprofitable to extract.
Secondly, at some point, using hydrocarbons as fuel for vehicles will simply become uneconomical—since we wastefully burn half of the world’s extracted oil in the engines of our iron horses.
The shift to nuclear energy, renewable energy sources, and biofuels made from plants will enable us to stop refining liquid hydrocarbons into fuel. This will significantly reduce oil consumption and allow it to be used where it is truly needed. For example, in pharmaceuticals and the production of plastics, films, and polymers.
Furthermore, in addition to oil formed from organic remains, there are also abiogenic hydrocarbons in nature. These were formed from deep carbon deposits that have existed since the Earth’s formation.
In a similar way, oil has appeared on other celestial bodies where life never existed. For example, the largest moon of Saturn, Titan, has entire lakes of liquid hydrocarbons containing methane, ethane, propane, and other compounds.
According to data collected by the Cassini–Huygens probe, there are 300 times more hydrocarbons on Titan than in all the known reserves on Earth.
Finding abiogenic oil on our planet is difficult because it lies very deep, but scientists believe that humanity is capable of doing it.
And finally, there are already methods for turning solid plastic waste back into liquid hydrocarbons. This means we can make oil from plastic and then convert it back—while also cleaning up the planet from garbage at the same time.
Just look at the huge waste dumps and imagine how much black gold is buried there, which could be put to much better use.
In short, if humanity starts using hydrocarbons—and other natural resources—wisely instead of wastefully burning them in furnaces, we won’t run out of oil.
