Once we run out of oil will many countries in the world revert back to an 18th century lifestyle with candlelights...

What if oil was a renewable resource?
We could extract carbon from the air and use it to create synthetic oil. I know there must be lots of drawbacks or we would already be doing it.

The whole appeal of oil is that its just there in large quantities and you take it and burn it. If you have to synthesise it, nuclear and solar/wind blow it out of the water

This guy gets it. Oil is continually being produced by nature in large amounts.

>What if oil was a renewable resource?
Strictly speaking it is.

>We could extract carbon from the air and use it to create synthetic oil.
We ca already. The US military has experimented with it. And it works. You extract CO2 from the air and heat it with H2O to create syn gas and then make hydrocarbons.
>I know there must be lots of drawbacks or we would already be doing it.
It takes an absolute enormous amount of energy to do it.

>It's unlikely we'll go back to nuclear power because of muh radiation
It's not like we are gonna run out of fossil fuels anytime soon, and by the time we will, we may even have fusion or large-scale solar, but assuming we did run out of them prematurely, people would 100% rather go back to nuclear than sacrifice their way of life.

By the time oil runs out we should be seeing more results from fusion. Once we have fusion, we should be good.

We wont run out of oil until long after we have fucked the planet beyond all repair. Dont worry senpai.

Let's engineer enzymes to fix carbon from the atmosphere and spit out useful hydrocarbons. Like photosynthesis but it produces oil.

Like what if we could genetically modify Archaea to use carbon dioxide instead of biomass in methanogenesis? So we would have an unlimited supply of carbon neutral natural gas. Then we could run the entire world on natural gas!

We'll switch to alternatives when it's economically viable.
This will happen when oil becomes scarce.
PROTIP: oil is not scarce, the supply is controlled to keep the price up.

Enzyme alone will not fix this. The process is necessarily endothermic. That follows since burning hydrocarbons is exothermic. And you have to put back the same amount of energy and then some to account for entropy and inefficiencies.

>Every petroleum engineer in history is wrong
riiight

Everyone outside the west. Basically anyone who can't afford hydro, solar, geothermal and nuclear power. You, as a westerner, won't notice much and neither will people inside nuclear-capable countries like Israel or China.

However, the third world will completely and totally collapse. Their most valuable resource (or at least their most readily exportable resource) gone, their half-functional regimes will stop operating as they run out of money as brownouts begin. Transport gradually becomes more expensive, bringing their fragile economies to a complete halt. The cities descend into chaos, unable to feed or power themselves.

But isn't there plenty of thermal energy in the environment?

No, but you will.

Yes, and they will all want to come and live in your countries.

We are already doing it
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_to_liquid

strictly speaking it isn't renewable since it takes millions of years to form back into hydrocarbons. that doesn't fit with the definition of renewable energy
this happens. we do this. it's called ethanol

That's nice, but the current efficiency of using biological processes to turn CO2 into fuel is probably awful. It would be really great if there was something that could create a lot more fuel per square km per year, either something biological, or some process that could be powered with electricity. That way, we could just put a bunch of solar panels in some uninhabited area with lots of sunlight, and we wouldn't have to worry about large scale energy storage and long wires, like we normally would.

The growth of trees is an endothermic process too, but it still works, because they get a fuckton of energy from the sun. The point of using engineered organisms is achieving higher efficiency, because plants didn't naturally evolve to create the most biomass out of a given amount of CO2 and sunlight. It would also be nice if the end product was closer to usable fuel than it currently is.

Thermal energy is the hardest form to turn to useful energy. The temperature in the normal environment is not enough.

>strictly speaking it isn't renewable since it takes millions of years to form back into hydrocarbons. that doesn't fit with the definition of renewable energy
There was no qualifier about the reaction path, ONLY about the end product. And since you can synthesise it is is renewable enough.

>The growth of trees is an endothermic process too, but it still works, because they get a fuckton of energy from the sun.
Correct. That leaves you with a lot of saccharides but not quite oil.