The Fundamental Law of Energy Use

The usefulness of energy resources for the advantage of man is governed by the fundamental law of energy use:

“Except the ratio of advantage to cost, measured in units of energy, is bigger than 1:1, the potential resource will not succeed to become a real resource”.
This law states energy resources, and gives the standard that all the potential energy resources and energy technologies should meet. For illustration: Fossil fuels, food, fissile fuels, and so on are economic sources of energy only when they can be acquired at an energy or work cost which does not surpass the energy or work advantage available from them. Therefore, estimates of crude oil in the ground, computation of the earth’s net energy content, solar insulation intercepted by the earth, and so forth contain little meaning in terms of energy resources.

The instant that more energy is needed to find, process, extract, transport and employ a barrel of oil than can be acquired from it, there will be no more potential reserves of petroleum; the quantity of crude oil staying in the ground, no matter how large, will be of no importance to mankind. The cook point out that technological feasibility neither equivalents nor forecasts economic feasibility. The prevailing optimism that something will become economically possible when sufficient money is spent on R and D is neither supported by history, nor by sense of physical economy.

It is also helpful to differentiate among economic exhaustion and physical exhaustion. For illustration, for every barrel of oil generated, more than two are left underground, even a steep increase in price of crude oil cannot pay for enhanced recovery efforts.

Moreover, energy resources also have ecological confines. For illustration: With current technology, use of high-sulphur coal might be curtailed since costs of using it without degrading the environment are so high. Therefore, the remaining deposits of high-sulphur coal no more are resources.

There is an acknowledged hierarchy of designations for reserves in the gas and oil industry that is quite identical to that used in metal mining. Proved reserves are those which can be computed from information acquired from drill-holes space close sufficient in the field that there can be slight doubt of the continuity among the holes, and therefore of the quantity and recoverability of the oil or gas. Likely reserves are depending on extrapolation from drill holes into or via one or more generating horizons in separate fields; the computations symbolize probable extensions of recognized productive accumulations of oil and gas. Likely reserves symbolize an estimate of the probability of finding undiscovered traps in a geologic basin where there is already some production from one or more formations of wide level. Speculative reserves are those that might be found in geologic basins or in terrain where no oil or gas has still been found though where the geologic make-up of the earth’s crust is identical to that of areas which have yield oil or gas or both. The above categories reduce exponentially in consistency from probable to speculative, and approximations for two categories must never be added altogether.

Tar sands are sandstones in which the pore spaces are entirely or partly filled by congealed petroleum. In any kind, though have a solid bituminous material termed as kerogen that, whenever heated to a high temperature, results a replacement crude oil. Kerogen emerges to consist totally of plant stays, unlike crude oil, which emerges to have been made from animal remains.