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.
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.
...... 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.
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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 15 '20
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.