Reserves of Fossil Fuels

Fossil fuels are valuable natural energy sources that 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.

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: 40, 62, and 224 years for oil, natural gas, and coal respectively.

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.

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