'Conventional oil' bad.
Internal combustion engine fueled by refined oil bad.
Perhaps refining cucumbers or cabbages might be better.
What, pray tell, might the mighty Sphinx see in our future and don't tell me plugging in your car to a wall socket is the answer.
If only cars could run on bullsh-t!
"The mighty Sphinx." I like it.
The mighty Sphinx thinks China is getting wheels, India is getting wheels, and pretty much everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world has figured out they don't have to remain poor. Meanwhile, the world's marginal oil supply is located in mostly nasty, politically unstable places. Conventional oil will continue to get more expensive. Fracking buys us some useful time, but we still have a long term problem. Another three years and Obama will pass from the scene; with luck, we will then have a government that wants to grow the economy, not sabotage growth for the sake of a leveling agenda. When that happens, growth will resume, and so will the rise in energy costs.
If I had to bet today on transportation fuels a generation from now, I'd bet on third generation feedstocks for biofuels. Algae, or a microbial soup. This will not require prime farmland or potable water, it could be scaled up as needed, and the production potential is enormous. I haven't checked in recently, but the algae researchers a few years ago were talking in terms of a production potential of 10,000 gallons an acre per year. That is a game changer.
This is already being done on a pilot and demonstration scale. It's too expensive now to compete with oil on a level playing field. But conventional oil will continue to become steadily more expensive, and biofuels feedstocks and processes will continue to improve. The cost curves will cross.
Still on cars: Electrics are further out, but I would not be surprised if the engineers solve that problem as well. We need much better battery storage capacity to extend range, and we need a baseline generating capacity to feed the batteries. This would probably be nuclear, which we should be doing anyhow.
I have no animus against the oil industry, and I think oil has a long future as a blending agent with ethanol. But in the very long run, petroleum is probably too valuable as a chemical feedstock to be burning for fuel.