Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
7
Although fossil fuel reserves are very large, they are, by nature, exhaustible. As we
have discussed previously, the expected life of presently identified reserves is 41
years for oil, 63 years for natural gas, and 147 years for coal. Among them, oil is
clearly the more convenient to use because it can easily be stocked and transported.
Present transportation systems are almost entirely dependent on the use of petro-
leum derivatives.
What experience shows is that production is peaking in a number of countries,
raising questions about the “end of oil.” Non-OPEC, non-FSU (former Soviet
Union countries) oil production was first explored at the beginning of the last cen-
tury and peaked around 2000. It is currently declining, according to many sources.
Estimates state that approximately one-half of the existing oil reserves, 0.92 tril-
lion barrels, were used up between 1860 and 2006. The remaining 1.03 trillion bar-
rels remain to be explored.
Nevertheless, the issue of how large oil reserves are is a very controversial one
because oil exploration is intimately linked with the technologies involved as well
as costs.
The “end of oil” means that nonconventional reserves will have to be tapped
and explored at greater cost. Enhanced-oil-recovery technologies will be needed
for deepwater exploration to recover oil reserves in the Artic, heavy oil bitumen,
and oil shales.
The use of such resources might result in additional environmental problems
such as large oil spills in offshore exploration, very well illustrated by the recent
Gulf of Mexico BP disaster. The extraction of shale oil in Canada is another ex-
ample of fossil fuel exploration that led to new environmental problems.
