Oil is probably a finite resource. I’d say we have 75-100 years to get fusion power and real sustainability. And some oil will always be needed for chemicals and plastics unless we have so much fusion power that we can simply make them from thin air economically. That is also way off.
Why worry about any of this at all? Don’t we have only 11 years left anyway?
No need for fusion which will take decades to breakeven if ever. Man has already mastered the atom. Fission can power humanity for hundreds of thousands of years. Even without fast fission breed reactors, fuel reprocessing, and or particle accelerator driven breed/burn reactors. The amounts of uranium in the oceans is so best we can use the once through and bury the wastes for as long as humanity exists. Even without waste partitioning or MOX fuel reprocessing the volumes of wastes are so dense for $150 a kg you can put as much as you will ever make in shale, granite or basalts below 1000 meters. At typical burnups of 45 gigawatt days per metric ton of fuel even $500kg uranium costs under 4 tenths of a US cent per kilowatt hour in fuel costs. Disposal is already payed for with a tenth of a cent charge to the US government. $150 kg is 150,000 a ton in waste costs, at 45GWd/mtU that’s 1.08E9 kilowatt hours worth over 20 million dollars per ton of fuel in power sales at the basebar cheap rate of $20 per megawatt hour. Typical power sales rate for wholesale via ERCOT are $50_80 megawatt hour peak rates into the $150s lately. Wastes is a political problem not costs nor technical both favor direct geologic disposal. When you can make 20+ million in revenue off a 150,000 cost it makes deep sense to reprocess at $1000 kg in heavy metals to partition wastes and recover MOX fuels.
https://newatlas.com/nuclear-uranium-seawater-fibers/55033/
“So as the cost of extracting U from seawater falls to below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power”
Thear are the kind of wells I still 5 rigs at a time off megapads. Shale is perfect to lock up wastes in. It’s impermeable, geologically stable and chemically inert.
I’m a petroleum geologist. Including bitumen,tar sands, heavy oil think Venezuela, shale oil not oil shale, and all conventional oils the planet has about 160 years left at 2018 levels of consumption. Add in oil shale and you add another 20_50 years but the EROI of oil shale can be negative and the emissions from retorting or in situ combustion have to be considered. I’m not talking co2 but real pollutants of SOx,NOx and all the heavy metals in the tailings, ash piles and stack exhaust as particulates. Oil shale is dirty business. Even if you retort in situ the ash is now exposed underground without containment if there is no cap shale layer water can and will leach the metals into the overlying strata and eventually communicate with groundwater. Oil shale is a bad idea. Most tar sands are as well from a in ground contamination view point. Shale oil is relatively safe as long as full containment of the drill string is maintained with triple redundant cement casings. Micro seismic shows fracs almost never extend vertically more than a few hundred meters and when you are targeting shale 2000+ meters down the risk of communication to ground water is near zero.