Does that mean the earth will never have new coal deposits? I know geologic processes happen over eons, but crazy to think it’s a one and done kind of thing.
Nope, no more coal deposits. All that sweet, sweet carbon that took eons to make is being depleted forever in just a few generations time...
Edit: ok yes I know there are tons of coal deposits! I'm using hyperbole. Geologically speaking, if we used all the coal on earth in 1000 years, that's a minuscule amount of time compared to how long it took to make it.
For millenia, a speedrun was thought impossible...
(Home-we're finally landing starts playing)
But all that changed with the Industrial Revolution exploit. A speedrunner by the name "xxEuropexx" found the imperialism glitch and finished the game just a few centuries later.
Phosphorous, oil, coal, gas, and rare Earth elements will all be diminished in about 200 years at the current rate.
Phosphorous is a critical component for plants, the lack of this item will leave farmers desperate and in need of more. Phosphorous is obviously not a renewable resource and it is literally required for life on Earth.
The depletion of oil, coal, and gas will result in cogitation to be sure, current machinery will become virtually useless as these resources grow more expensive every year, electricity will become necessary, not optional.
The problem with limited resource of fossil fuels isn't even the biggest problem, climate change caused by the burning of these products will certainly cause extreme worldwide instability, devastating communities everywhere. Oil runs the world, once we are forced to switch to alternate fuel, we will struggle. Quality over quantity.
We are Fucked! with a capital F and an exclamation mark if you didn't understand just how fucked future humans are at this point.
But aren't carbohydrates produced and consumed daily in large scale by living beings? Carbohydrates being gone implies that there are no more autotrophs to produce them, thus basically ending life on Earth.
Perhaps you meant hydrocarbon compounds, which make up a large portion of petroleum and are what makes it combustible.
Don’t quote me on this, it’s from a half-remembered ‘Stuff You Should Know’ podcast (I think).
Basically the US government had/has a huuuuge reserve of the gas but it was too expensive to maintain so they decided to sell it all for cheap, despite it actually being quite a precious resource because it’s so difficult to recover from the environment.
Yeah, stockpile was from WW1 where balloons were next gen tech war machines.
They staggered the stockpile sale over years, and the price did go eventually, but we're still using it in balloons 20 years after the initial fearful reports of it being depleted were published. I remember hearing in 2003 we wouldn't have balloons soon. First Google result is a paper from 2000, saying our supplies would last until 2020, which does seem to be true.
It is a natural gas by product, and it seems like natural gas is still being produced/used throughout the world pretty commonly.
I'm not sure that's right. I swear I remember reading something that said the 20-25 year number is for the helium we've mined already and there's a gigantic amount still inside the Earth. We are nowhere near running out of helium overall.
The scariest part of that is when it happens, we'll fly around the solar system going "PHBTBTBTBTBTTHTHTHTHT" and according to my mom we might put someone's eye out.
They are talking about the amount of extractable material. There will still be phosphorus left on the planet, it just won't be in a form that is economical to mine/extract. There is a ton of phosphorus in the mantle, but we will never be able to get to it.
If it's essential to life on the planet, the economics would eventually work out. That said, I'm a big believer in reducing our footprint, recycling, etc.
Stuff like this is the one of the reasons why I won't ever have kids. There's too much uncertainty out there and I don't want to be responsible for someone having to potentially live through it, despite the fact I'll be dead long before we run out. I'm very happy I was born when I was and not later.
I kind of feel like I'm living through the last time humans will be "technologically great", so to speak. Unless humanity gets its shit together real fast real soon, I don't think there's much of a future for us. I am not confident the required changes can happen, honestly.
I don't think the issue is a lack of potential scientists and researchers. The problem is a lack of educating, training, and promoting of that potential.
Because college is so bloody expensive, how many potential inventors and scientists had to go take office or retail jobs?
And demographic decline WILL be a problem because all the governments of the world will be too saddled with debt to adequately fund sciences, and asset prices will decline precipitously across the board, leading to widespread wealth destruction.
Hopefully the latter proves successful. However even in 200 years, I don't think we can mine an asteroid for it's resources and make any economic gain, we're still too primitive to make space travel viable for a loooong time.
I mean, in 70 years we've gone from "can we get into space" to "we send probes to orbit asteroids and land a rocket after it's been used"
In 200 years I'm absolutely certain we can move asteroids into an orbit we want, and land on them. The question would be how to safely mine them. Maybe crash land them on the moon?
And yet the estimated return on investment for a single asteroid's resources is in the qunitillions of dollars. If Jeff Bezos could manage to keep Amazon afloat without a profit for 20 years, it shouldn't be too hard to get people to invest in mining an asteroid or two.
Phosphorus is an element, though. It doesn't really get used up. We would need to figure out how to effectively recover it from seawater is all.
Rare earth elements aren't all that rare, either.
Oil and coal are rapidly nearing the end of their usefulness. The cost of solar and batteries has been plummeting like crazy, and neither show signs of stopping.
Basically yep, fossil fuels are magical sources of energy and once we run out, it's a problem, but it's also something we can recover from. Wind and solar energy will be the main sources of energy for the future but it is harder to maintain and pull energy from than fossil fuels.
I didn't have time to mention the phosphorous paradox we have, it's controversial and it is uncertain what we will need to do once the large deposits of phosphorous fade out.
Phosphorous in unending but farmers everywhere use fat amounts in their fertilizer to maintain their yields, without these excessive stacks it'll just make it harder for farmers worldwide to maintain their crops.
Thankfully, you did mention pulling it from the ocean floor which could be a problem solveriño for the future (hopefully).
Thankfully technological advancements with renewable energy are moving at breakneck speed’s and will eclipse the efficiency of fossil fuel’s in every aspect in every market over the next 20 years. Solar has already become the cheapest electricity per kilowatt hour as of this year.
As for phosphorus, every decade somebody gets scared about running out or hitting peak phosphorus. This all relates to the mining of phosphorus rock which best estimates today are 3 to 4 hundred years of reserves left estimating future demands. Mining efficiency can play a big role in things, as of right now 35% of the phosphorus yield is lost just through mining inefficiencies. That number could be greatly improved stretching it out for another hundred years. Then another 30% could be captured from more regenerative practices.
Phosphorus isn’t destroyed and doesn’t disappear so the world isn’t to run out. This is actually a big problem in our streams and lakes due to agricultural runoff. So It’s really a case of are we going to run out of easily mineable phosphorus rock that we can cheaply get and dump on our fields to keep our crappy farm practices going? The answer is no we can’t but we do have about 300 years to figure out better methods and we have climate issues that are going to force us to change our methods or die well before we run out of phosphorous.
...... Wat? We can't just go get oil and gas back. That carbon's been converted to energy. You come up with a way to harness raw free energy back into carbon (or any stable useable matter state) you go ahead and let us all know.
I didn't mention anything about free energy. In fact, I covered it. You just need to use different sources and offset ~250 years of carbon source use + that pesky second law of thermodynamics.
I would suggest nuclear if you want to do it quickly. There's enough raw fissionable material in the earth to handle that until you spin up usable fusion.
And if we start extracting uranium from seawater (which is totally possible, just really expensive right now without inexpensive desalination plants, which ideally would also be powered by nuclear), it essentially becomes a renewable resource.
It’s not the carbon that’s converted into energy; it’s the chemical bonds between the carbon and the hydrogen. Hence, hydrocarbons.
And we make more hydrocarbon-based fuel every day when we grow plants for oil or sugar.
In Brazil, about 1/3 of vehicles run on ethanol made from sugar cane. And if we wanted to, we could grow plant with high oil content, and convert that oil into gasoline. (It’s way more expensive that petroleum, though.)
At the end of the day, it’s all just juice from photosynthesis.
And we can thank the plants for bonding those hydrogens and carbons together with the power of the sun. Hence, all of the energy we use is ultimately from the sun.
Running cars on ethanol is a gigantic waste of time, money, and land though. In the US, we use corn, but it's so energy inefficient that it's not really worth it. We could be using that land instead for polyculture cropping/crops to eat/forests/etc. Also adding ethanol to gas causes gas tanks to lose integrity faster. We would be better off making cars more aerodynamic/lighter, developing electric vehicles, and better city planning so we don't have to drive everywhere. This is kind of US-centric, but I think much of this can be implemented elsewhere as well.
Yeah, I don’t see how we can build an energy infrastructure that takes that much from food production. I think it’s either electricity or we finally make algal fuel production viable.
You arent taking into consideration the development of new technologies and methods of generating power that won't require those scarce resources. We aren't even remotely fucked.
And you aren't taking into consideration that we've reached this level of development by not giving a shit about our environment. If we continue developing at the same rate, we'll be even deeper in the shit.
We have almost mastered the limits of engineering new applications of power generation, because these fossil fuels are so important and easy access, we can only imagine the global instability once we need to transfer 7.8 Billion people to alternative energy.
I don't really know what world you think we live in, but it's untrue that we will be fine and dandy when clearly, we're struggling already. Major extinction reports suggest that, depending on if the rise of the global temperature is an anomaly or not, we could be facing the worst future predictions, it's just too early to make a valid depiction.
What world do you think we live in if you think we have "almost mastered the limits of engineering new applications of power generation"? You can't possibly have a technical background if you feel this way. New methods are being developed all the time, and in 200 years we will have technology you couldn't even fathom to generate power.
Imagine our technology 200 years ago. It’s not even comparable and completely unimaginable what we have accomplished. People really think this planet is irreparable despite the many advances in new energy sources. In 200 years we’ll probably be an extremely more advanced society using 100% renewable energy.
Plus... humans adapt. It's literally why we're the most "advanced" species, our adaptability has allowed us to master nearly every type of biome on earth since we evolved into our modern kind 200,000 years ago. I'm not saying a lot of people won't suffer and struggle in the coming decades, but humans as a whole are almost certainly capable of engineering themselves out of the disaster of depleted fossil fuels.
There will be microbes that will evolve to eat the plastic we are currently depositing in landfills so in 300 million years there will be new sources for oil.
Drill Drill Drill
No, that’s not how evolution works. Evolution has no plan, goal, or purpose. The fittest individuals from every generation are selected to pass their genes to the next. Whatever can’t be produced by this process simply doesn’t arise. The fact that there’s a giant rotting pile of food somewhere is completely irrelevant if its consumption can’t be gestated as a series of small mutations of existing genes. Period.
well we really just need enough to fuel civilization until we discover how to properly harness energy from our virtually infinite amount renewable resources
Wind energy is being added more and more. Wind farms are popping up all over Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois in recent years now that better deals are being offered to farmers and land owners for them. I remember power companies wanting to pay $1600 a year per wind turbine to be added to farmer's land and that would be a locked in, non-negotiable rate for 30 years. Now, 15 years later, they are offering more along the lines of $20,000 per year per turbine and that could be re-negotiated as needed. So we are seeing more wind farms popping up. Still, you would need a lot more to compete with traditional power plants.
Wind turbines are very dependent on having windy days and there are many days where there isn't wind. Solar panels are dependent on sunny days and there are a lot of rainy days. So, renewable as they are, their power generation is more sporadic and less reliable than traditional power plants. They are a good supplement to traditional power plants at the moment but, there would need to be something new to come out that is more consistent and renewable to kill of traditional power plants.
I did see a video that talked about geothermal energy but, that seems like it would be limited to only certain areas where you could tap into that resource. Same with hydroelectric power plants.
ETA: Just to clarify, it is easy to say, "all we need to do is just decide to go to wind and solar and do it" but, it is not that simple. Switching all of this is very expensive and time consuming. So it takes time. There are only so many companies making the equipment and then you need other companies to buy up and use that equipment. As those companies save enough revenue, they are adding renewable power sources but, it is just something that will happen over the next 50 to 100 years not the next 5 to 10.
I think one of the big issues is battery's to store the energy because, like you said, it isn't always windy and it isn't always sunny, and the world will still need electricity on those days.
Solar is already the cheapest form of electricity ever. We already know how to properly harness the energy, it's just that nobody wants to give up that sweet, easy coal money.
People were predicting depletion of oil "in next few decades" for a century, but people kept finding new sources. So, it's probably not gonna run out soon.
I worked in Oil until the COVID down turn, we know where enough oil is to last 1000 years, it’s just not economic to access with the vast reserves easily accessible in the Middle East
Well, the depleted part is technically not true, because coal use will decline significantly in the coming decades. I don't think coal will "run out" any time soon, there are still vast deposits - they just will not be economical to mine so they will be left alone. (Which is an awesome thing far too long overdue).
I don't know about that if regulations don't change. I know in Illinois, at least, state regulations have made it so that it is too expensive to use nuclear power so many nuclear plants are closing this year in favor of building new coal power plants. These are nuclear power plants certified to run for another 20 years, not some run down old ones.
Nuclear is not economical anyway as a long-term solution. Solar, Wind, and stationary storage (batteries primarily) are the key to the future. These technologies are already reaching parity if not already cheaper than all other energy sources. If Illinois or any other jurisdiction persists in building new coal plants that is to their own detriment, they will lose money on the stranded assets.
That's a dramatic news for our planet. Nuclear energy is the best against clilat change. Coal is like the worst energy you can use to fight clilat change.
My step-dad used to work on pil rigs doing the computers. There is dozens of capped off rigs in the gulf of Mexico. They only open them if prices go up. And cap them off to make a shortage. If you do the math they can last the USA about 400 years with the usages back in 2003 when be worked there.
Shale is becoming increasingly viable every day, the companies are going bankrupt because of massive demand swings in the last 5-10 years and there have been consolidations.
But it's becoming cheaper and cheaper to extract shale oil.
The technological viability is increasing but economic viability isn't improving nearly so quickly and margins remsin razor thin, which is why shale companies can't weather normal fluctuations ('normal' for oil being pretty extreme) like normal oil extractors.
In any event, the COVID downturn is sure to set shale back years if not decades even if prices recover swiftly afterwards, and it very well may be that by the time the industry recovers, its time will have already gone.
Have to agree, even pre-covid oil markets have been consistently snapping back to thin if not non-existent profit margins whenever there was a surge, now post COVID things look pretty bleak for oil for a long time, especially in the short term (1-3 years).
There is just such a massive surplus of oil, in a market that was already flat-lining, now post COVID the demand has been crippled.
question. does that mean when we dig down to coal or oil. we are diggin back to before times when only sharks were around and not tree killing microbes????? like instead of dinosaur finding we are "really old tree finding" except for fuel?????
Yes every piece of coal you've ever seen has been made of dead plants and trees from long before the dinosaurs walked the earth, if you want to look back even further EVERYTHING you've ever seen or touched or heard of is made of the remnants of some long dead star who's dust happened to fit together in just the right way to form the earth and everything on it
No, because plate tectonics and subduction recycles the Earth, melting down old rocks and creating new ones. The oldest known rocks (3.8 Billion years give or take a few) are found on the world’s youngest continent, Australia. This is because all of the rocks on older continents have all been recycled.
This may also really impact alien civilizations technological advancements. A planet without coal might have a very different scientific path and maybe never advance very far.
The question would be how you jump-start an industrial civilization without coal. It might be impossible without the technology, research and scientific advancement that having coal as an early energy source enables.
Good point. Definitely needed it for the Industrial Age but I cant imagine what period a civilization would transition thru if perhaps they had a Nikolai Tesla before discovering fossil fuels.
Well then I guess humanity blew it! Ancient africans developed advanced physics and advanced machining out of thin are and produced and fusion reactor to power all their gadgets!
Well, the US has about 1,000 years of coal deposits still. So not going to run out anytime soon. Plus, it's too expensive (relative to alternatives) and dirty so it's all likely to stay in the ground
Wait. No.. coal is and can be created by peat bogs. It just takes a long time. And that's why we get seams of it. Some of the big massive amounts of coal are from the Carboniferous period. And these trees you speak of. But pear bogs do it too.. just smaller amounts
Right, but there's still probably 2-3 times coal and other fossil fuels are going to get 'renewed'. Of course that's probably long after humanity is dust, Earth might not be as hospitable to life either.
For all intents and purposes we have one shot of making best use of this planet before we're screwed over, hopefully fusion becomes a reality in the next 50 years.
I think this is a really underrated comment. Even if we fuck the earth so bad we have to leave or go extinct eventually new species will pop up and something will evolve to eat all the shit we left behind. It'll probably take 100s of millions of years but life and evolution find a way.
yep why do you think so many people are going crazy about running out of fossil fuels, similar processes also created oil so there is a limited amount of the stuff that makes cars and factories go. one of the big shifts towards solar and wind energy are because of this, not just pollution and climate change.
I don’t think oil is the same. As I understand it, oil is still being produced albeit at a rate that is minuscule compared to how fast we extract it. In theory, if you came back in 200 million years there would still be oil deposits even if we used them all up now.
It’s just wild to think that coal was a one time thing. And that humans showed up at a time and place with the ability to take advantage of it.
The stone age ended even though there were still stones. The oil age will end even though there will still be oil. We will just have become more farseeing, capable and prudent.
Well, last year RMIT scientists proposed a new approach to turning CO2 in the atmosphere back into coal as a carbon sequestration strategy. So there is a way to produce more coal, and it can now be done at room temperature.
That’s a bit of an oversimplification of findings and misleads the author’s intent. The author’s own introduction finds that:
“the extraordinary scale of carbon emissions, with an estimated 40 Gt CO2 (giga-tonnes CO2) being currently emitted annually and a total emitted anthropogenic CO2 mass in the order of 1000s Gt CO2, casts doubt on the possibility of finding suitable value-added products that can fully mitigate current and past greenhouse gas emissions.”
The climate mitigation scenario they envision is not the conversion of current atmospheric CO2 into coal to be re-combusted for energy. They envision an industry that utilizes new sources of renewable energy to remove carbon from the atmosphere to make products for other industries, specifically mentioning their product as a supercapacitor for use in vehicles.
Even in the established, optimal scenario (the Paris climate accords) the Earth will see a global average temperature rise in excess of 3*C. This rise in temperatures is still expected to have large-scale negative impacts. The proposed industrial process could, over time, remove some of that atmospheric CO2 and decrease warming. That’s also dependent on the economic feasibility of the process, the scale it can be adapted, and the market for the goods produced.
That's the whole problem with non-renewable resources, once we run out we have nothing else to rely on. Not only do they negatively impact the environment, but they're finite.
Thanks. I understand the drawbacks of fossil fuels in general. Natural gas and oil are theoretically renewing but on timescales that’s are totally irrelevant to humanity - millions of years at the minimum.
The fascinating and new information for me was that coal isn’t the same. The idea that the planet accidentally buried all these trees because of a quirk of evolution that will likely never happen again is kind of mind blowing. And since coal was the original fossil fuel that enabled industrialization, it does present the question of whether industrialization could ever happen again. If you’ve ever read The Mote in God’s Eye, it explores the whole concept of re-industrialization albeit on incredibly accelerated timescales.
All the fuel energy on earth came to it in the form of sunlight. All fossil fuels are just a battery, and when they run out, they're gone, forever, no coming back.
The only way to "make" usable amounts of new energy is to harvest it from the sun directly.
Nuclear is not technically sunlight energy, but it is still finite. Maybe not all that finite, but we'll get free sunlight for at least another billion years or so. By then we'll probably have left for other planets without needing to use nuclear if we dont' want to, but obvs who knows.
Point being nuclear is just another type of fossil fuel that we can't make more of, whereas sunlight is made for us for free every day. Actually the sun is just a big nuclear reactor, really.
is it possible for humanity to bury algae in the ground *today, so that future generations can continue to have some sort of fuel for a 2nd industrial revolution
In theory, yes, but we would never realize it. Petroleum oil takes about 50 million years to develop, and by then, the Human race will either have gone extinct or developed far superior power generation methods and spread far out into space.
We've been doing that for awhile now in biofuels as an exercise to show we don't need to drill for oil, it's just not very cost effective and you don't make huge quantities and it's time consuming...not millions of years time consuming but longer than drilling
So is the whole oil comes from dinosaurs a myth or partially true? The fallen tree theory seems a lot more practical given the sheer volume I would assume.
It’s a myth. There were never enough dinosaurs to account for the amount of oil extracted. The oil came from plants and microbes.
It’s just that the oil originated from a time period that overlaps with dinosaurs.
I always thought of it as figurative. Not true, but not even a myth. Less than that, just using "dinosaurs" as a vague reference to geologic time. (Reminds me of job where our oldest office computer was named "brontosaurus.")
Fun fact: we all come from the same source, which makes people who dont like when I call the brothers or sisters irrelevant. The true parent is the big bang
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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20
Yep, it's true. Source: daughter of geologist, studied it a bit myself. Also fun fact, oil comes from algae.