When will the world run out of petroleum?

Not in my lifetime. Since I was in first grade the accessable oil reserves of the world have grown not shrunk. We have used an awful lot of oil since then.

As we advance technology to allow us to use what was once thought to be unattainable oil, more reserves come online. The biggest limiting factor is the cost. Once the price of oil gets high enough to sustain a new method of procuring oil, its use will become more wide spread.

With 141,000,000,000,000 (141 trillion) cubic metres of crude oil left it is unlikely that we will ever run out. It will just get really expensive as it will become more difficult to obtain but it will never run out.

In the early days it was cheap as chips to pull oil out of the ground and huge finds were made, particularly in the middle east where all they had to do was pump sea water in one hole and oil would come out another
Problem nowadays is all the good stuffs been sucked up and used for awesome stuff like drag races, going to work and NASCAR. All very worthwhile things.
But today with all that good stuff that was easy to get at gone up in smoke, its costing more and more to get the stuff out of the ground and into your tank.
Tar sands are great, but man it costs a butt load to get it out hey, and with demand set to increase to no end it doesn’t take a genius to see where the price is headed.
Will we ever actually run out? probably not, who will be able to afford it in the future is the question.
Oh and the wars, there will be wars for it as the supply dwindles, or more and bigger wars than there already is for it.

They say if we would stop making plastic bottles, it would last forever.

The cheapest oil is already gone. It will get more and more expensive to get the oil that is deeper, dirtier and more expensive to process. Oil companies and others boast that they have the technology to drill 5 miles down and 3 miles horizontally and make turns around ground formations to reach deposits. Those complex maneuvers cost money. They are not doing that because they want to. They are doing it because they have to.
When oil reaches $200 per barrel many of the alternative fuels that are scoffed at today will become economically viable. Oil will then be used for chemical processes like making plastics.

@worriedguy And some forward thinking companies are investing a lot of R&D into figuring out how to make plastics from renewable/plant/vegetable sources. Oil is to precious too burn for fuel certainly, and too precious for making convenient disposable items that only end up in landfills, I think. It should be reserved for things that can only be made from petroleum. And hopefully, in our future, we can do without it all together. Bottom line, it isn’t renewable.

@lillycoyote Exactly. The problem is consumers and manufacturers still go for price. When the price of oil reaches the price of alternatives people will readily switch. We need to do the R&D now so we are ready when it inevitably reaches that point.
As you said “it isn’t renewable.”

@Odysseus Have you got a source for your claim that there are 141 trillion cubic meters of crude left? According to the CIA website, as of 2010 proved oil reserves are around 1.4 trillion barrels (which is roughly 222 billion cubic meters).

If the rest of the world started to consume oil at the same rate per capita as the United States (23 barrels per year), we would run out in a little over 9 years. That isn’t going to happen, of course, but at the present rate of 4.5 barrels per person per year it will still only last 45 years.

Undoubtedly, more oil reserves will be discovered in the future, but the problem for the future isn’t the total amount of oil, it’s the cost of it. Massively high prices will have a similar impact on the world economy as a reduction in supply. Simple economic self-interest means we should be pursuing the goal of a less oil-dependent economy as fast as we possibly can.

We won’t actually run out any time soon, as others have mentioned, but functionally it might seem like it within a couple years. The idea of “Peak Oil” that various mineral scientists have been throwing around for 40 years basically comes down to the idea that as demand outpaces production, particularly when production is lowered due to reserves being harder to reach, the lack of supply has rippling effects throughout the oil based economy, effectively causing a collapse.

Yay!

Somewhat tangental to the topic, but when people think of oil getting more expensive, they immediately think of running their cars or sometimes think of plastics, but to me, the real danger is about food. Check this out if you want to know more.

As far as when peak oil will happen, it looks like it has.

How long will the remaining oil will last is an open question. Oil production will go on for a long, long time – but will we be able to afford to buy any of it? That’s the more practical question, no?

@laureth Great links. Are you familiar with Mike Ruppert? He’s been writing about Peak Oil since the ‘70s, and recently put out a video explaining why he thinks the oil economy has just entered the beginning part of the drastic decline.

The questions is: When will the world run out of petroleum that can be accessed easily?