Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
Just to play devil's advocate, there's some chance that oil will become less valuable at some point in the future, meaning anything not rendered represents an opportunity cost. As they say, a bird in hand is worth 2 in the bush.
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I have always believed that we ultimately will get every drop of all the recoverable oil we have today, and that may expand as we get even better at getting it. Maybe cars won't burn it after 50 years or so, but jets will, and all the rubber, plastics, and asphalt will use it. If anything cars not using the kind of "waste product" of gasoline, will result in a big surplus of it. Then they will build clean burning gasoline powered generators at the refineries to use that. It should be possible to make a more efficient and clean large scale stationary ICE compared to ICE used in cars with lots of low to high power usage and cold starts. Then when or if oil finally runs out necessity will be the mother of the future. If anything switching all the cars to EV will just drag out the whole process. Again IMO, that would be a good thing, sort of like flattening the curve and getting more time to adapt to whatever changes might occur.
In the mean time I do think we should continue to be as energy independent as possible with drilling on federal land and continue to develop our petroleum infrastructure. Trains are better than trucks but pipelines are better than trains.