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oil
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.It's hard to say when it will 'run out', ie when we can no longer economically recover oil. At the moment, it's not about running out, it's about recovering it economically. When you lift oil out ' ground, you lift a lot of water too and sometimes if it's in very deep water you can incur very high rig expenses. A technology called 'subsea' is taking off at the moment which makes us able to plant wellheads on the seabed and then pipe the oil up from lots of these to a big rig in shallower water, as opposed to rigs directly above the oil well, with a wellhead on the rig. So we can venture into much deeper seas. Also, a team at Edinburgh Uni has pioneered a cheaper 'conductivity' based method for testing for presence of oil, which will make it all a cheaper enterprise.
But 'oil running out' is still put at 30+ years away, and the main pressure is not from lack of oil, but from environmental pressures to find greener alternatives.
This discussion will be 'academic' in 20 years anyway, when we've found a better way to do it, or oil on Titan, or both.
well we'd better get moving thencause 30 yrs is not long for greedy humanity that don't want to invest cause tomorow it won't bother me i'll be dead !
there has been the sugestion of running cars on rubarb alcohol that is very apetising (for the enviroment of course) because it will be an entirely natural process. we will just have to go back to what we used once upon a time before plastic
I remember in the 70's hearing that there was only 30 years of oil left and wondering if I'd get the chance to drive a car!
Seriosly though I'd say it'll be either a biodiesel based on a crop such as rapeseed oil that is carbon neutral. Although how we'd ever grow enough to satisy the world's ridiculous addiction to air transport I've no idea!
Or Hydrogen - You'll have to create hydrogen by the electrolosis of water - you'd power this by fusion reactors such as ITER http://www.iter.org/ - The predicted radioactive waste from fusion comes mainly from decommissioning and would be safe to handle in about 100 years rather than thousands.
A more pertinant question might be will we be able to survive the environmental impact if we do burn the remaining oil?
We're running out of time
Obtaining hydrogen from hydrocarbons is not much of an option. OK there's coal and gas but they're all fossil fuels.
In Canada they've produced up to 710 litres of ethanol per hectare - We use nearly 50 billion litres of petrol and deisel per year in the UK alone.
I haven't had time to work out the exact area of crops we'd need to produce the equivilent energy in hydrogen but I think you get the picture.
Geothermal is another option but I think we're closer to fusion than geothermal in areas like the UK where the gology in unfavorable.
Either which way hydrogen is the way forward for portable energy in cars etc. Getting hold of it in a large enough scale is the challenge.