Abiotic Oil Vs "Oil From Dead Organisms"

[EmperorNero]

@LogisticEarth

• First you agree with me, that we can manufacture pretty much everything we want if we have enough energy. Then you state that oil is finite after all. What now? I thought you agreed that resources are not really finite.

Natural. Reserves.

“Resources”, reletive to humans, aren’t finite. However, pre-existing natural reserves are of a finite nature. This doesn’t mean that we can’t MAKE more oil, but we can’t just pick it up out of the ground forever. Think of it like buying a house and finding a large refrigerator full of beer in the basement. You can keep drinking that beer, all at the low-low cost of just walking down into your basement. But eventually that fridge will be empty, and if you want more beer, you’re going to have to work to buy some, or brew your own, or whatever.

I mean, are you somehow not understanding that idea and think that natural reserves ARE unlimited, or are we just talking past eachother? Or are you saying that we can keep inventing, for example, more and more efficient vehicle engines which use less and less gas, making the amount of oil we consume negligible? If it’s the latter, then there’s a finite limit to that also, there’s only so many joules in a given volume of gas.

I was talking about natural oil the whole time. I am saying that pre-existing natural reserves are not economically finite. So I’m not talking about adding oil through depolymerization or other synthetic processes. I’m not talking about more efficient vehicle engines that shrink consumption either. And for the sake of simplicity, let’s forget about new findings as well. I’m saying the stuff in the ground is not finite. That is because “oil” is not one material, it’s different stuff over time. Oil is really more of a statistical category than a particular material. And we keep adding stuff to that category, meaning it is not really finite. For example: Say there are two trillion barrels of oil on the planet, not just proven reserves but including all the oil that would be worthwhile to extract but that we haven’t found yet. Now some guy invents a filter that makes oil exploration from certain types of less porous sand possible. Now there’s two and a half trillion barrels of the stuff we can extract as oil. We created more oil! And that means it’s not limited. Because for something to be limited, it has to have a limit, and I just showed that there is no limit. As long as we have improving technology and capital investment, we can push the limit ahead of us. So it’s not like beer in a refrigerator at all. Even though we’re using up something that’s pre-existing, there doesn’t have to be a limit to production, because we can keep using up different stuff. Sure, the overall amount of stuff on the planet is finite, but the planet is pretty big.