Reserves of Fossil Fuels.
By Emil Bedi, CANCEE and Hakan Falk, "Energy Saving Now".
Fossil fuels are
valuable natural energy sources which required several millions of years for
their creation but are now rapidly being depleted. The prominent worry that
fossil fuels will run out was reported almost 30 years ago by the influential
book Limits to Growth. This book reported a series of computer simulations of
future resource use in which world fuel consumption continued to rise
exponentially. The predicted result was an ultimate collapse in fuel supplies,
regardless of the amount of fuel assumed to be available.
These
fears came into sharp focus in the 1973 fuel crisis, when the member nations
OPEC were able for the first time to co-ordinate their policies and raised the
price of oil dramatically. One of the factors which gave the OPEC states the
power to exert their influence so strongly was that the USA, formerly a major
exporter of oil , had become an importer. United States had used up most of the
easily obtainable oil from the Texas oil fields.
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The shortage expected in the dramatic concerns of those days do not
seem imminent at present. The general principle that the amount of fossil
fuels remaining is ultimately limited and cannot last for ever is
obviously true, but estimating how long they will last is not a simple
process. In any year, newly reported figures for „proven reserves“ of oil,
gas and coal are available. Proven reserves are generally taken to be
those quantities which geological and engineering information indicate
with reasonable certainty can be recovered in the future from known
deposits under existing economic and operating conditions. A useful figure
of the merit for fuel reserves is the reserve/production
ratio. |
If the proven reserves remaining at
the end of any year are divided by the production (consumption) in that year,
the result is the time that those remaining reserves would last if production
were to continue at the then-current level. According to the British Petroleum
statistics the reserves/production (R/P) ratio of the world’s fossil resources
is estimated as:
 Like the fossil fuels,
uranium is also one of the depletable natural resources. If uranium is only used
in a once-through cycle where it is burned in a reactor only once and disposed
as a waste thereafter, confirmed reserves are destined to be depleted in the
next 60 years.
The reserves/production
ratio for any region also gives an indication of the dependence of that area on
more favoured regions. For example, for oil, the reserve/production ratio was
less than 10 years for Western Europe and for North America it was about
25 years. Obviously, both regions would be in dire straits if they could not
import oil from Middle East, where the ratio is nearly 100 years. The Middle
East has some 60 % of the world’s reserves of oil, and Saudi Arabia alone
contains about 25 %.
For gas the situation
is somewhat different, because of the massive reserves in the former Soviet
Union. This region holds some 40 % of the worlds reserves of gas, and another
40% of gas is in the OPEC region. The world as a whole is greatly dependent upon
a limited number of regions which have most of the reserves. The
reserve/production ratio for coal are much larger and much more evenly
distributed. Unfortunately, coal has disadvantages compared to oil and gas. Coal
burning creates more CO2 per unit of energy released than is the case with gas
and oil, and more sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.
OIL SUPPLY
 At some moment during the next five years, we will have
consumed more than one half of the total usable fossil oil on Earth. To date, we
have extracted 807 billion barrels of crude oil. Only an estimated 995 billion
barrels remain that can be extracted at current production costs. If the
world-wide rate of oil consumption remained a constant 24 billion barrels of oil
per year, we would run out of oil in 2040. But consumption is not static-it is
increasing by about 2 percent per year. It seems clear that demand for oil will
overshoot supply well before 2040. At some point between 2010 and 2025, all fuel
from fossil oil will be too expensive for the average consumer to afford.
Exactly when that point comes will depend largely on the actions of Middle
Eastern countries.
 Exploration for oil, the most important fossil fuel today,
is a very expensive business. The amount of exploration is dependent upon
economic conditions, particularly the price of oil, and upon political
conditions. The world’s proven reserves of oil have increased from some 540
billion barrels in 1969 to just over 1000 billion barrels in 1992, but this does
not mean that potential reserves are unlimited. The earth has been surveyed in
great detail by the oil companies, and the easiest, cheapest and most promising
reservoirs have all been found.
 Except
for the huge pool of oil in the Middle East, the world’s most readily
exploitable sources of oil and gas have been used up. It is only because of this
that such difficult sources of oil as the North Sea and Alaska have become
economically viable - that is, the price of oil has risen enough to make them
worth exploiting. In physical terms, the more difficult reserves require deeper
holes or extraction in more difficult environments, and the use of more
materials and effort to supply the same result.
NATURAL GAS SUPPLY
| In 1970, world-wide annual consumption of natural gas was 850
billion cubic meters. Today, annual consumption is over 2000 billion cubic
meters and is increasing at 3.5 percent per year. A 3.5 percent annual
increase in consumption will deplete natural gas reserves by 2050.
However, the increase in consumption of natural gas is accelerating at an
astonishing rate. Cheap supplies of natural gas will be depleted by
2040. |
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| This fact is recently completely neglected by power companies which
are building new natural gas power stations to give customers in their
area cheaper and cleaner electricity. Experts believe that by 2010, the
supply of electricity from new natural gas power facilities will jump to
100,000 megawatts in USA alone. Natural gas power plants are attractive to
investors. They have relative short pay back time (an average six year in
the USA) and can produce electricity for a cheap rate of two to three US
cents per kilowatt-hour. It seems clear that the demand for natural gas
fuel will increase in the near future but will slow down in the second
half of the next century. |
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