I am a real scientist with 20 years in the oil industry as a geologist,geochemist,and engineering plus hydrogeo. I can tell you with confidence that this planet has limited resources and at our current rate of consumption humans as a species run out of oil in 47 years, gas not long after as demand shifts from liquid to gas. Coal at present consumption rates will be used by 2060. This is with 6 billion people in energy poverty and 900 million living at middle class levels of consumption. When the other 4 to 5 billion and climbing population numbers demand access to resources at anything close to European middle class levels of consumption those years drop drastically. You might not like to hear the cold hard math numbers but that doesn’t make them less true. Simply put this planet cannot support 8 billion at anything close to European middle class levels of consumption even if we burned everything accessible. That is using 400+ million years of fossil sunshine in just under teams half centuries. The only sources of energy that can power 10 billion which is where the earth population will be at by 2060s is nuclear,solar, and wind. Only those three have the raw exajoules to supply ten billion people. Solar has enough in any of the deserts at a few percentages of land area to power all 8 billion people today. Millions of times the energy humans could ever use falls on our planet every year.
Nuclear power at present levels with once through PWR reactors uses the 8 million tonnes of uranium resources in 80 years less if you scale up nuclear power like China intends to do with 150 new reactors. Humans will have to reprocess and go fast reactors. At that point you go from 0.7% usage of uranium to near 100% a factor of 100 expansion of resources now you have a thousand years of energy at the scale needed for 8 billion or 10. People don’t want to openly say they want 6+ billion to live in energy poverty so they don’t have to change their sources of energy but That’s exactly what they mean in a practical sense.
Either way genX and certainly genZ will see in their lifetimes the end of cheap liquid hydrocarbons and that is from a petroleum geologist who has been on 6 of 7 continent’s exploring and producing total hydrocarbon systems.
So yes there are forever energy sources they are nuclear,solar,wind, and biomass that’s what our species has in the long term. Anyone who says there is no limit to fossil fuels aka fossil sunshine has an agenda or is willfully ignorant of the true numbers involved. Humans have burnt in 200 years what the sun and planet took 400+ million years to store, cook,migrate and, trap. Clearly if it takes millions of years for a total hydrocarbon system to accumulate the organic matter in a basin, then go through the hydrocarbon window at depth over more millions of years of emplacement. Burning that in a few centuries and expecting there to be unlimited reserves to be found at a future date is flawed thinking. The industry and 3D seismic has blanketed the planet with surveys every basin has been looked at save the ones covered in ice sheets the industry knows where and how much oil ,gas and coals are left that are recoverable at any price.
The fact is a small group of people 900mil or so consume more than the rest of the species combined that also clearly is not sustainable in longevity. Liquid hydrocarbons are more valuable as lubricants,medications,fertilizers,plastics and industrial chemicals like adhesives vs being burnt to the sky. Coal can be burnt once for power or used to make silicon cells to put in a sunny desert one has an EORI under one by definition since it took energy to transport the coal to the plant before you burnt it. Or that same tonne of coal can make SI cells that over their lifespan will return 25 to 50 times the energy it took to make them. Same.for wind turbines they have an EROI of 40+. burn fossil sunshine once or make a device that returns energy over a lifespan of use.
Nuclear power is even better ,burn coal to make concrete and steel which over the next 80 years as a reactor will make thousands of times the energy of just burning that tonne of coal up a smoke stack. This is how humans should use our blessings of millions of years of fossil sunshine anything else is foolish once you have the technology to do so, which in the 21st century we already do.
They are not forever resources if you run out of ways to collect them.
Seems the only solution is population control.
Don’t worry plenty of that on the way.
Thanks for the long winded reply.