Fossil Fuel Depletionby Razaan Abakar | 20-07-2017 12:29 |
|---|
 A fossil fuel is a fuel formed by natural processes, such as anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms, containing energy originating in ancient photosynthesis. The age of the organisms and their resulting fossil fuels is typically millions of years, and sometimes exceeds 650 million years. Fossil fuels contain high percentages of carbon and include petroleum, coal, and natural gas. The world has been consuming fossil fuels at an accelerating rate since the beginning of the industrial age, and there is growing evidence that the production of all fossil fuels may peak within the lifetime of the children being born today. Globally - every year we currently consume the equivalent of over 11 billion tons of oil in fossil fuels. Crude oil reserves are vanishing at the rate of 4 billion tons 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. 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. Renewables offer us another way, a way to avoid this (fossil fuelled) 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. |
