[theBuckwheat]

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Fossil energy has everything to do with the issue. The world is consuming petroleum at (roughly) million times faster than it was formed.
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Nonsense. What counts is the price of fuel in the form and quality necessary for the application, whether it is #2, Jet-A, 100LL, auto, boiler, etc. In a free market, there is no better signal of supply than price.

Where will this fuel come from? We are *awash* with hydrocarbons. Some areas of the US, like Illinois, eastern Utah, western Colorado, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, etc are almost floating atop deposits of coal and oil shales.

If this is not enough, one firm, that is presently converting hundreds of tons a day of waste from butchering turkeys into biodiesel, claims there are enough usable hydrocarbons in *sewage sludge* to replace our present level of oil imports.

The only issue is our will to convert these hydrocarbons to the desired form. It should be no mystery that a high market price for crude oil does wonders to resolve that issue.

[razved]

Price is an abstraction in an economic system loaded with subsidies, tax credits, etc.

We probably have enough coal to last 3-4 centuries if we assume that it doesn't have to replace some of the energy of petroleum, NG, and LPG. We depend on coal to produce electrical energy. Zero-sum game time again. Eventually, decisions will have to be made about what must be sacrificed.

Exploitation of shale oil (btw, neither oil nor shale) requires large quantities of energy and water. The area in which our largest deposits of kerogen exist, i.e., the Green River Basin, is arid. What will be the source of input energy over the long-term.

The show-stopper is ERORI, or energy return on energy investment. That killed the embryonic shale oil industry
in the early 80s. If the ERORI is negative, no amount of financial sleight-of-hand can change the fact that we would be consuming more energy than could be produced.

Consider a variation on the theme. The Canadians are producing heavy grades of oil from tar sands in Alberta. They are limited by the rate at which they can "mine" the material and by a long-term source of input energy. They have been using natural gas. But when NG supplies begin to decline, what then? The U.S. would have to face that problem , too. U.S. per well NG production has been declining for several years.

Economics are a function of resources. Ultimately, resource availability is the controlling factor.