Give it 30 years or so and it won't matter, oil won't exist anymore. Therfore alternative energies will have to be reasearched sooner or later.

I don't want to go offtopic for too long, but the way I see it is not a matter of "sooner or later", it's a matter of "soon or we're screwed later". If we only act when oil prices are exorbitant, at that point there's no time or energy to update the energy infrastructure.

PS: Oil will still exist, it's just that it may be too expensive to extract. Soon thereafter it may become energetically not worth it (i.e. it would require more energy to extract it than the energy recovered from it).

You got that right.  Once all of the easy-to-obtain oil is gathered up, all that's left is oil-shale.  While there is a lot of it (especially in the US) it is by far the hardest to extract like you said.  It would be nice if it was easy to get, since it would be an abundant alternative resource to be inplemented until we get used to renewable resources like wind, solar, etc.

Extraction of oil from shale is terrible, even worse than oil sands. It returns less energy and uses extreme amounts of fresh water which is also a scarce resource vital for human survival. Wikipedia has a good article about it, with lots of references.

If there's a world war 3, I wouldn't be surprised if it's fought over oil, water or both. Increasing population and decreasing resources just can't end well. I'd love to be sure that we're taking enough steps to solve/mitigate the problem adequately, but I'm not.

@NJ5: Fresh water is easy to produce, though. Just take sea water, boil it, and collect the steam.

Takes a fair amount of energy that, plus you've actually got to do something with the salt.

Also, no one can accurately predict what will happen in the next 30 years, so I'd say that it is best to spread our bets as it were, and get our energy for as diverse sources as possible.

 Just pass me the chips.

Anyone got any vinegar?

haha, fair enough

Think about that... If the shale is located inland (as most of it probably is), we're talking about transporting millions of gallons of sea water every day for thousands of kilometers, and then using massive amounts of energy to boil it... This would make extraction even more expensive and decrease the EROEI further (from what already was a pretty low EROEI to begin with).

The US and Russia will war over 9 tankers loaded with toaster struddle. This will occur in 2034. Mark my WORDS!!!