Planning to study petroleum engineering, how will this affect my salary as world oil reserves run out.?

Hi, I really want to become a petroleum engineer.. but i heard that world oil reserves will run out in about 50 years... will my salary increase as the resource becomes more and more rare... or will I lose money as the petrol will be replaced by an alternative.... thanks in advancePlanning to study petroleum engineering, how will this affect my salary as world oil reserves run out.?
There will not be a sharp cut off point. Starting in the near future (or perhaps in the recent past), oil will be increasingly difficult to find, and increasingly expensive, and hopefully the cost of alternatives will go down. So usage of oil will hopefully decline in the future years, never quite reaching zero, but more used for plastics and other such uses as opposed to being used for energy.





Re your salary, who knows? There could be more call for petroleum engineers to better use the remaining oil, or to better access it.





Or, there may be less research as the number of wells decreases, and less need for engineers.





It may depend on your specialization and flexibility.





.Planning to study petroleum engineering, how will this affect my salary as world oil reserves run out.?
';Easy to access'; reserves may run out in about 50 years, although I personally think that figure is very debatable, as the definition of ';easy to access'; depends on the current state of technology of extraction! In terms of actual oil reserves there are in fact more identified ones now than there were 50 years ago.





So although it doesn't make fashionable headlines, I personally doubt that there is any genuine risk of oil running out in our lifetimes.