Re: The year is 2050
>>Probably the same places it is coming from now, generally oil reserve quotations are based on those reserves with a 90% probability of being recovered.
Not really...
>>In reality it is a small fraction of all the oil that is down there, with constant advances in technology and the economic factors that govern what is economically viable the probabilities are that we will continue to use oil coal and gas for far longer than the predicted life of current oil reserves.
Umm....
Primary extraction will pull up to 40% of the oil using the least amount of energy to do it
Secondary extraction can pull up to another 50%, however the energy required to do it is significantly higher
Tertiary methods can get up to 60% of the original oil
Do do you notice anything? 40% + 50% + 60% = 150% which of course makes no sense, you can't extract more oil than exists, yes absolutely there are new fields, and yes absolutely there are better methods (and new higher energy methods) of getting more oil, the peak oil estimates are getting better, and as we aproach the ability to extract the magic 100% the estimates will (barring a hither to unknown source) we will know how long the oil will last saying tings like "In reality it is a small fraction of all the oil that is down there" is merely based in wishful thinking.
>>There are also ways of propelling a rocket without using anything remotely connect to fossil fuels such as Lox/alcohol
Have a guess where most of the liquid oxygen for rockets comes from...... Yup fossil fuels, oh yes you can just suck oxygen out of the atmosphere (like membrane compressors), but they are far more costly.
Which kind of drives me to the final point "the economic factors", ERoEI (energy returned on energy invested), you simply can't just keep putting the cost of fuel up if it costs more to extract, because a big slice of the cost to extract is on energy expended, so if the price of that goes up so does the price you have to sell it for, and so on, until the feedback loop spirals out of control, one reason why solar energy is viable now is because it takes less energy to produce the panels than you'll get back (over time they save money), non rechargable AA batteries cost more in energy to produce than they produce, but as the original energy comes from elsewhere it's OK (well, stupid from an energy conservation perspective, but OK)
So, are you right about 2050 fuel being from the same place? probably, even if we have hit peak oil already, if we consume oil at our current rate we have 150 years left, lets say we can extract 100% of our known oil - that's 300 years, lets be optimistic and say we can find as much oil again, another 300 years? maybe, let's hope that we have an alternative when it does run out.
