There will come a time when there is no more oil in the ground that is economic to extract. Land transport can use batteries with current tech fairly effectively in many scenarios but aviation, as we currently understand it, needs energy densities that are not possible with batteries (and are unlikely with current mainstream battery tech). This claims to provide a way to get kerosene from the air using (thermal) solar power, which may become economical sooner rather than later if their claimed efficiency improvements come to pass and the price of gasoline continues to rise (which is very likely due to economic infeasibility of building any more refineries due to long payback periods)
> There will come a time when there is no more oil in the ground that is economic to extract.
The qualifier about needing to be economic is really important here. We will never really run out of oil, but we might run out of cheap oil.
As market prices for oil rise, more and more alternative ways to get at it become economical. Shale oil was one example of this process. (Another one is to create something like oil from coal. The Germans did a lot of this kind of thing in WW2, because they had access to plenty of coal, but were short on oil. Similarly, world coal reserves seem to be much larger than oil reserves.)
However, renewables are getting better and better and thus prevent energy prices from rising as fast as the cost of oil extraction will increase.
Thus eventually making oil uncompetitive, as you say.
