I agree with terbium. For chemical reagents at the laboratory scale petroleum is not a significant, specific factor for cost or availability. However, for the large-scale production of industrial chemicals, there are many places where petroleum is a crucial feedstock. As the cost of crude oil goes up, so will the cost of these mass-produced organic molecules, and alternate methods will eventually have to be developed to utilize things like coal, tars, etc which will require much more extensive processing and catalytic cracking etc.
Just looking down this list, a lot of plastics and synthetic rubber wll be strongly affected:
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/8025/pdf/8025production.pdf
Probably even more important than direct hydrocarbon-related industrial chemicals are things like fertilizer-production and aluminum refining, which are very energy intensive processes. These will get more expensive as electricity becomes a more and more expensive commodity.
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I must disagree with lugh when he says "The current petroleum supply situation is more the result of politics and economics, as opposed to any actual shortage." At the risk of going off-topic for the forum, I will try to make a brief response.
As far as the Cato Institute link goes, it is factually inaccurate, worthless ideological rubbish. Here's some more:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-341es.html
.
Another Cato analyst said "Technology exists now to produce in virtually inexhaustable quantities just about all the products made by nature - foodstuffs, oil, even pearls and diamonds... We have in our hands now - actually in our libraries - the technology to feed, clothe and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years... Even if no new knowledge were ever gained . . . we would be able to go on increasing our population forever."
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/bartlett/flatearth.htm
You can go to
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=4456
and find a dozen other thinktanks that will tell you the sky is purple and provide lots of references. It's basically propaganda for elites.
The fact is: the production of cheap, easily obtained / processed petroleum is reaching a peak and will soon start falling. This is not based on politics or economics, it is based on physics, thermodynamics and geological reality. This is ironically illustrated, for example, by the second link on the list -- (
http://energy.er.usgs.gov/products/papers/WPC/14/text.htm
) -- which concludes with the statement:
"If world oil consumption is assumed to increase, annually, by 1 per cent, the production capability scenarios for the two Non-OPEC producer groups permit us to track the likely production path of OPEC producers--it being the difference between Non-OPEC production capability and world consumption."the implicit assumption (I think it may be a form of dark humor by the report-writers) is that OPEC has the capability of producing an arbitrary amount of petroleum to meet geometrically increasing world demand, without considering the basic constraints of reality.
"The production paths... represent the high production capability scenario for the two producer groups--US and FSU and Other Non-OPEC (described above) as well as showing the resultant OPEC production. With this scenario, OPEC attains a 50% market share in 2015 at a production level of 38.5 MMBBL/D (an increase from present production of about 14 MMBBL/D). If the Non-OPEC production follows the low production capability scenario, OPEC attains the 50% market share in 2004; by 2015, it has almost 60% of the market, and would be obliged to produce 45.1 MMBBL/D (an increase from present production of about 21 MMBBL/D)." these numbers are absurd. there is absolutely no chance that OPEC will be able to more than double its current production of oil by 2015. in fact, there are already signs that some of the most important oil fields in the region are beginning to experience exhaustion; increasing measures have to be taken to keep them pumping at current rates. very few countries in the world have spare production capacity; for countries that still have some, like Saudi Arabia, the spare capacity can only decrease with time; all the major oilfields have been discovered and developed.
While its true that substitutes for conventional petroleum exist and could become economically feasable at some point -- (e.g. syngas from coal, tar sands, oil shale) -- there are serious drawbacks to the exploitation of these resources. Not only will the environmental damage be horrendous, but there are also problems with theromodynamic efficiency (EROEI) -- it costs a lot of energy to do the mining and processing of these sorts of fuels.
I'll cut this short, sorry for going off topic...
