The
End of Fossil Fuels
It’s only a matter of time
Fossil fuels, as the name suggests, are very old. North Sea oil
deposits are around 150 million years old, whilst much of Britain’s coal began
to form over 300 million years ago. Although humans probably used fossil fuels
in ancient times, as far back as the Iron Age1, it was the
Industrial Revolution that led to their wide-scale extraction.
And in the very short period of time since then – just over 200
years – we've consumed an incredible amount of them, leaving fossil fuels all
but gone and the climate seriously impacted.
Fossil fuels are an incredibly dense form of energy, and they took
millions of years to become so. And when they’re gone, they’re gone pretty much
forever.
Clearly fossil fuel
reserves are finite - it's only a matter of when they run out - not if.
Globally - every year we currently consume the equivalent of over 11
billion tones of oil in fossil fuels. Crude oil reserves are vanishing at the
rate of 4 billion tones a year1 – if we carry on at this rate
without any increase for our growing population or aspirations, our known oil
deposits will be gone by 2052.
We’ll still have gas left,
and coal too. But if we increase gas production to fill the energy gap left by
oil, then those reserves will only give us an additional eight years, taking us
to 2060. But the rate at
which the world consumes fossil fuels is not standing still, it is increasing
as the world's population increases and as living standards rise in parts of
the world that until recently had consumed very little energy. Fossil
Fuels will therefore run out earlier.
It’s often claimed that we
have enough coal to last hundreds of years. But if we step up production to
fill the gap left through depleting our oil and gas reserves, the coal deposits
we know about will only give us enough energy to take us as far as 2088. And let’s not even think of the carbon
dioxide emissions from burning all that coal.
So does 2088 mark the point
that we run out of fossil fuels? The simple answer is no. Some new reserves
will be found which will help extend this deadline slightly, but these can’t
last forever. New reserves of fossil fuels are becoming harder to find, and
those that are being discovered are significantly smaller than the ones that
have been found in the past.
Take oil, for example,
we’re probably already on a downward slope. Sixteen of the world’s twenty
largest oil fields have already reached their peak level of production (the
point at which they are producing their largest annual oil yield), whilst the
golden age of oil field discovery was nearly 50 years ago.
Renewable offer us another
way, a way to avoid this (fossil fuel) energy time bomb, but we must we
start now. As the Saudi Oil Minister said in the 1970s, “The Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out
of oil.”
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