Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Fossil Fuels
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How Much Is There?
u
The world economy runs mainly on fossil fuels
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coal, oil,
and natural gas
and as shown in the previous chapter,
they are the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions
outside the agricultural sector. They were made in geo-
logical processes that turned plants grown hundreds of
millions of years ago into the fossil fuels we use today.
High temperature and high pressure can convert a pre-
historic tree into a piece of coal, or under different condi-
tions of temperature and pressure into oil or gas. What we
are doing today is mining the fuels generated so long ago
at a rate much faster than they can be replaced by the
processes that produced them in the
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first place. This
means that fossil fuels are going to run out eventually
and the era of powering the world economy with them
will come to an end. The question is not if, but when, so
the movement away from fossil fuels that is required to
deal with climate change will eventually have to happen
anyway to deal with resource exhaustion. Think of this
century as a transition period in a move away from the
energy resources that have brought great economic
bene
ts, but have turned out to bring an unexpected
problem
global warming.
Some say the era of available and affordable fossil fuels
is coming to an end very soon, but the data on reserves say
this is not true about availability, although it is very likely
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