Oil

[The .50 Caliber Cow]

Pretend that yesterday the last drop of it came out of the ground. What is going to happen now?

Chaos?

New social order?

Oil hoarding?

War?

You decide.

[sub][sub]Moo! [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9iIgQN5uZE][/sub][/sub]

 

[Hero in a half shell]

I would say that coal and gas would become tonnes more expensive, and renewable energies would suddenly get a whole lot more funding. There'd be dams and tidal barriers, wind and solar farms popping up all over the countryside ruining saving our delicate environment. Ideally more funding would also be put into nuclear, but thanks to Fukushima and the ever present hippie protests about it that won't happen.

Plastic will probably become a luxury, we will resort back to glass bottles, wicker carrying bags, most of the other uses of plastic will revert back to metal (eg. drainpipes, car panels) or wood (eg. window frames)

The biggest shakeup will be transportation, as no more oil means no more petrol. Cars will have to go electric, and Biofuel will become massive (which will probably, and with great irony, destroy all the rainforests with palm oil plantations.) What will happen to large ocean cargo ships and liners I have no idea, but transport fuel will get an awful lot more expensive (maybe we'll see nuclear powered cargo ships) We could even see a resurgence in steam powered trains, carrying goods cross country/continent.

I think basically a lot of things will have to revert back to their technological level a hundred years or so ago, for better or worse.

 

[Thunderous Cacophony]

If you mean an instant, all-the-oil-disappears kind of thing, I expect panic and chaos. We are not at all ready to change to an oil-less world, especially on a dime.

If you mean that we still have our reserves of oil, but we are not finding new pockets of it, something closer to Hero in a Half Shell's suggestion; rapid shift from oil-based energy to non-oil-based, companies that run energy plants rapidly trying to re-purpose the plants to something like coal or natural gas, much less plastic being produced as companies try to make the most money out of what stock they have less, either chaos or massive government funding to converting cars to battery-power (or probably both), and a lot less international trade. And of course, plenty of wars over what supply remains, as smaller countries are pressured into giving up their stocks by countries like the USA, China and Russia.

Either way, not very good.

 

[Esotera]

In the short-term, chaos, but in the long-term, absolutely nothing apart from more expensive fuel.

We already have technologies that allow oil to be synthesised from algae, they're just far more costly than fossil fuels. We've also got biocrops, etc. Humanity would adapt.

 

[Rowan93]

Well, for one thing, all the places that we know still have oil will probably cave in because of it vanishing. Some of those collapses would be pretty impressive, especially if it includes the oil shale.

But ignoring that bit of pedantry... Panic, media-hyped super-panic, government-controlled panic reduction (media calm the f down, riot police stop the riots), rationing, impoverished couple of decades, clean energy forever after.

 

[Kinguendo]

I would don a red beret, because the time had come and the people would be ready to listen.

 

[Rawne1980]

Then the world shall be powered on love and hugs.

The hopes and dreams of children shall fuel our cars.

 

[Hal10k]

The "oil just up and vanishes" scenario is interesting, but ultimately useless, as the result of that scenario has no relation to what will actually happen as the natural sources of oil are used up.

As more and more oil deposits are used up, new ones become increasingly hard to find. Not impossible to find, because resources don't disappear overnight, but it does result in the process of finding oil becoming increasingly expensive. An increase in price usually leads to a drop in demand, but that doesn't happen with oil for the simple reason that it's still the cheapest, most convenient option. Substitutes exist, but they're more expensive and typically unavailable in many areas.

But eventually the price of finding new sources of oil will reach a point where using one of the substitutes becomes cheaper. As this happens, existing companies will remodel themselves and new ones will rise in order to distribute the existing substitutes, simply because they can now produce them more cheaply than oil. Since they'll be cheaper, customers who are not inconvenienced will start to switch over to the substitutes. This will put more money into the substitute companies, allowing them to expand and solving the convenience issue. Competition between companies will lead to R&D in pursuit of making these substitutes cheaper to produce, in order to undercut the prices of their competitors.

This is a ridiculously simplified market model, but I think it's an accurate depiction of the scenario.

I'm very sorry for being a colossal bore, but you read to the end of my post, so you really just brought this on yourself.