Gas prices are still high, diesel is at a record high, and the reserve has shrunk more than 30% in six months. While the reserve held around 415 million barrels of oil in February, it now holds less than 285 million barrels of oil — lower than it has been since the early 1980s.
These rapid drawdowns of oil threaten the salt caverns’ structure, says Samantha Gross, director of the energy security and climate initiative at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan policy think tank. As the reserves get lower and lower, the physical facilities can get degraded, Gross says: " You can damage them by pumping too much out of them."
If it were possible, why did it take fossil fuels for humanity to reach 8 billion people?
Reminder: all of human history and technology up to 1850 was solar and wind powered.
I think nitrogen fertilizer made that possible more so than oil
Keep in mind that most energy at the time was mechanical, not electric. Electrification as we know it, even in factories had not taken place yet. We didn’t even know how to use solar panels for electricity generation, so at best solar energy was used to heat water. Windmills ran water pumps but were not powerful enough to run any kind of industry. If you wanted heaps of energy you needed to build next to a river and use the flowing water to drive water wheels or similar.
Fossil fuels - oil, coal, gas - are comparably easy centralised energy. Easy to dig or drill for, easy to store and transport and then convert into mechanical and later electrical energy. You could have a coal mine in one place and the refining industry in another, power houses and industry in remote places even. Trains could run on coal and made long distance and large scale transport possible.
While dirty, the industrial revolution would not have been possible without easily accessible coal.
Electrical energy is 90%+ efficent at converting to mechanical work. Combustion is 25% efficient or so.
WTF? This doesn’t make any sence. How did fossil fuels help people reproduce? And I would say most of technology was powered by humans, the rest by coal. Also, in 1850 the oil was much more accessible, but now it is way harder to drill out. And even if fossil fuels were the best, that doesn’t mean they remain the best forever.