then no cars would be running,alot of people would really work by hand

This almost happen if not for Henry ford.Little known fact ..they used it to spay the gravel roads and nothing else.Good ol Henry bought as many oil sites as he could find and begin processing it as a fuel source.I cant tell what the world would look like who could?But we would be without allot of textiles,machinery and pretty much a third world country.In some areas of the USA oil burned freely from natural events such as lighting or ground fires.I don’t think the subterranean deposits would be affected.When they shaft a field today they have to fill it in with water as not to leave a void.

Well, all whales would be extinct. Petroleum was first utilized in the 1800’s as fuel for lamps. Prior to the discovery that petroleum could be refined into lamp oil, whales were the primary source. The entire whaling industry of the 1800’s collapsed due to competition from petroleum.

It is hard to say what other effects oil had on civilization. Cars could have (and were) run from vegetable oil and alcohol. It is likely that the world would have never experienced the population growth that we have seen in the last one and one-half centuries if oil were not available. Cheap energy is the primary reason modern agriculture has become more and more efficient, and using 19th century farming methods would likely result in less than half the amount of food available today.

Most of the industrial revolution may have never taken place, and World War 1, if it even took place, likely would have been won by the Germans. It was primarily oil produced in Texas and California that fueled the Allied Armies of World War 1 and 2. (The US was once the world’s largest oil exporter) The primary reason the Germans and Japanese lost was lack of petroleum fuel for their military. The main reason the Japanese used kamikaze pilots was lack of fuel for planes to return home. It is likely that the US would not be a world power, as most of the wealth of the US was built on oil when the United States was the major supplier of oil to the world.

If railroads were still powered by steam engines and coal and wood, it is likely that the world would be a much dirtier place (have you ever seen the smoke from a steam engine?), and that deforestation of the American West would have created climate change much sooner. The railroads were originally given vast tracts of forest land in order to provide fuel for the trains. These lands today are in many cases still in forest, and are utilized by the timber industry. In some parts of the west, almost every other township (a township is 36 square miles) was once railroad land.

Suburbs would likely have never been built. Modern suburbia is built on the assumption of easy traveling, using cheap energy. You would probably live in a crowded apartment building in a city because the ability to travel quickly might not be available.

Without oil, or with very expensive oil, most of the products we use today will be impacted. We simply can’t grow enough corn and soybeans to replace the oil we presently use. If we start making plastics out of soybeans, or corn, to replace oil, we will have even less left over for fuel and food. If we don’t have plastics, we can’t have computers as we know them. The internet would grind to a halt without oil. Roads and rooftops would have to be made of concrete (using coal as an energy source) and ceramic tiles. Coal mining would likely be much more extensive than it is today. Your electricity supply might get shut off much more often, as the natural gas fired power plants that supply peak electric supply would not exist. Nuclear energy might be much more common, but much more expensive because all the materials used to build a nuclear power plant must be mined, with mines powered by oil or coal.

Airplane travel might not exist. One of the problems that an airplane must deal with is the ability to carry enough energy with a low enough weight to be able to fly. Coal doesn’t work too well for airplanes. Neither does biodiesel or alchohol.

As for question 2: If oil was never pumped, it would still be leaking naturally onto the surface of the earth as it has for millenia. Thousands of barrels of oil leak naturally out of the earth, and evaporate or are biologically and chemically broken down and returned to the atmosphere. In California for example, billions of cubic feet of natural gas and thousands of barrels of oil seep naturally into the environment, and many of the seeps are believed to be as old as 30 million years. Oil is a natural part of the environment, and is a part of the Earth’s carbon cycle that moves in and out of the atmosphere and biosphere as a natural part of the planet’s geochemical cycle. Almost all of that oil was once in the planet’s atmosphere as carbon dioxide, and was simply stored by plants and animals and geologic processes. Oil is truly stored solar energy, combined with a certain amount of geothermal energy, that has been stored naturally by the planet.

Question 3: That is hard to say, as even with estimates of 3 trillion barrels of oil in the earth, and at least 1 trillion of those used already, there are always new technologies that can extract more and more hydrocarbons from the earth. Even a depleted oil field today still often has as much as half of the original oil left behind. As recovery methods improve, that oil may someday be available. As we learn to utilize things like coal bed methane, oil sands, gas shale, oil shale, and other sources we may begin to add to that 3 trillion barrels. As oil prices rise, many otherwise uneconomical technologies become available. Estimates of the amount of methane hydrates in the ocean floor are huge, but it is still unknown if we will ever utilize them. The real problem with peak oil is not the lack of oil supply, but the price and the rate at which that oil can be supplied to the world. At present, the oil industry is actually struggling to produce as much oil as the world wants to buy, thus the high price of oil today, that is likely to get higher. The world really does not have to fear burning the last drop of oil- the world has to fear paying much higher prices for energy, and the impact that will have on our lifestyles. It is no coincidence the the largest economy in the world (the US) also has the largest energy consumption. At present there is a direct correlation between Gross Domestic Product and the amount of oil used in the United States. Improving that efficiency will be a big challenge. The biggest impact of higher energy prices may very well be shrinking population, as most our improvements in productivity that have led to higher populations are the result of cheap energy.