Study Finds Future Oil to Come From Environmentally-Damaging Sources

That would suggest to me that we'll simply move on to other things. If the EROI is bad it will simply be too expensive to develop these resources on the massive scales that we'll need to to meet current and future demand. Thus, I would expect that demand will change and new technologies will supplant oil or increase the efficiency of the machines that consume it. Either way demand for all forms of oil will diminish. If not then we'll just run out of fossil fuels at a considerably faster pace than current projections and totally cock up the atmosphere in the process. I personally don't think that that will happen. I think that it's likely that we'll get the C grade that we always get. We'll develop some of these unconventional resources (the easiest ones with the best EROI) but technology will make further development unnecessary (read unprofitable). Once we get beyond the ICE we'll primarily need stuff like this for plastics. But there's an excellent chance that we could easily meet that demand with biomass-to-liquids (BTL). I do agree that if we continue consuming oil at the rate we're doing it now then in 3 decades a large amount of our oil will come from these sources. It seems unlikely to me that we'll get to that point, however.