puf_the_majic_dragon said:
well Duuuh :P every exhaustable resource in existence is only non-renewable because we haven't invented the technology to make it renewable. think star trek, with they're lil food synthesizer things. i believe that eventually we'll invent the technology to synthesize whatever resource we need. in that age all you'll need is a source of raw energy (the sun) and your synthesizer to make all the coal, oil, water, wood etc that you want. these resources are only non-renewable because we don't know how to renew them yet.
i should also mention that oil is renewable in the sense that natural processes do produce more oil, but at a rate far too slow for our current rate of consumption.
Well to take your thesis-that oil is renewable but too slowly- and continue in that vein we might alos observe that solar energy is renewable, but is simply too diffuse to be useful.
If one takes the solar constant to be 1366.1 Watts per square meter (extraterrestrially) which reduces at ground level to about 1000 W/m^2, then we note that the Earth absorbs sunlight over an area pi.R^2, but re-radiates infra red over an area 4.pi.R^2, then we would guess that the average ground level solar flux is more like 250 W/m^2.
More accurate computations suggest the mean value is actually 186 W/m^2.
If we get extremely generous and assume that we can actually mass produce a multi band gap solar cell with 25% efficiency over the solar spectrum, then we could generate about 46.5 W/m^2 on average over the planet
So it would take 21,500 squ meters to generate one megaWatt of electricity (continuously on average). That is about the area of three football fields.
If we collect the solar flux as thermal energy, we could do a different calculation with different efficiencies, and we would find the same result.
Renewable solar energy is simply too scattered to be useful except for niche applications.
If petroleum is simply another mineral dposit, and not squished dinosaurs, then it could be far more plentiful in the Earth's crust than we know.
So far as I know, nobody has ever proved that petroleum results from originally living matter whether dinosaurs or old primordial plants; that is simply conjecture and there is essentially zero physical evidence to indicate that origin.
That doesn't resolve the question of whether the planet can withstand continuous 'fossil fuel' burning, but it does change the possible lifetime of the oil age.
Saudi Arabia just announced that its oil reserves are now 70% higher than they previously were. That isn't a ten fold increase or even a 100 fold increase, but it does indicate that the search for more oil is far from over.
