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Originally Posted by trippytaka
That's the multi-trillion dollar questionL: what do we do when Oil is at prices high enough to demand $5 or 10 / L? Do we finally stop driving? Will there be loads of people who can't afford certain luxuries made from oil? And there will be underclasses who can't afford the every day products, the necessities from oil.
What about food production? what happens when 60, 70, 80, 90% of people can't afford food because of the run on effect? Do we let them starve? What about if they are Australians?
All very interesting questions.
I hear a lot of people in the media and just in general slagging off EVs and alternative fuels etc. But at the end of the day, it would be kind of nice to know that there was a solid plan in place for when the **** finally hits the fan
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There's actually no shortage of oil in the world, there's thousands of billions of barrells of oil locked up in oil shale deposits around the world, BUT there's three major problems:-
1. There appears to be glaring mis-match between depletion of significant conventional reserves predominantly in the middle east, middle / later part of this decade and when these new oil shale reserves can be tapped.
2. There are massive environmental issues with extraction of oil from shale deposits.
3. Oil shale extractionis expensive and even if somehow we can juggle the demand / supply issues later this decade and obviously we have too, oil shale extraction on a massive scale implies at least $200 per barrell oil.
Here's the sad and inevitable fact - We won't run out of oil, we'll run out of oil that a very significant proportion of the public can reasonably afford to buy and it WILL happen later this decade.
What happens when it costs $10 a litre for petrol and that implies $600 to fill my thirsty supercharged beast, well rather sadly we are then forced to consider cars like the subject of this thread. Said supercharged beast is relegated to a once a week drive on the weekend
The food issue is just too tough to consider, allready around a third of the world goes hungry every day..oh dear, that can only get worse.
On the plus side, people will have to dramatically re-think their lifestyles, that cheap flight to London for $1,800 return will probably be completly out of the question in the future, your holiday will probably be somewhere nearby to your local community but is that really so bad ??
People will get back into cycling, there are allready electrically assisted and full electric push bikes, they'll become far more common-place, people will shop locally, work locally or commute on electric powered trains and so on.
If we had too many of us could do without cars, or learn too.
But as alluded too yesterday Australia has a unique advantage, very abundent LPG reserves. I've done some reasearch yesterday and it appears N.Z. are basically self-sufficient in LPG for most of the year, (there are some imports from Australia during peak winter demand but it isn't much. There appears to be about 20 years LPG supply presently existing in proven reserves in N.Z., counting existing plants that convert natural gas to LPG, an expensive process that partly explins the much higher price for LPG in N.Z.
Australian LPG reserves are vast and very, very abundent, there's far more than 20 years cheap supply, any thinking Australian will realise this should be a serious consideration in their next vehicle choice.The new Liquid injection Falcon is definitly an option I'll look at down the track when it comes time to replace my SC beast.