Resource availability

As was noted earlier, at any moment in time there is a finite stock of natural resources on the planet, the re-source base. Each rere-source has in turn its own rere-source

base, the total quantity of a substance or property on the planet, for example, the total amount of oil in exis-tence today. However, that total resource base is not the amount available for human exploitation. Figure 5.3

Potentially recoverable

Figure 5.3 Resource availability.

Source: J. Rees, Natural Resources: Allocation, Economics and Policy, 2nd edn, Routledge, 1985, p. 20

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Plate 5.2 As offshore technology advances, so more remote resources can be exploited.

(ImageState/Alamy)

illustrates the relationship between the resource base and the various sub-divisions of resource availability.

The term proven reserveis applied to those deposits that have already been discovered and are known to be economically extractable under current demand, price and technological conditions. Thus, the extent of the proven reserves of a particular resource is highly dynamic and dependent upon a host of partly inter-linked factors. These include the availability of the technology and skills to exploit the resource, the level of demand, the cost of production and processing, the price it can command in the marketplace, the availabil-ity and price of substitutes, and the environmental and social costs of developing the resource. These factors determine whether or not a particular resource will be exploited in a particular place and the global level of supply of that resource. The extent to which each of these factors influences resource development also varies across space and time. Today we have the tech-nological ability to recover resources in geological and environmental conditions that were previously uneco-nomic. For example, the exploitation of North Sea oil and gas in a physically challenging environment has been made possible by advances in offshore drilling and production technologies.

The category of conditional reserve refers to deposits that have already been discovered but that are not economic to work at present-day price levels with the currently available extraction and production tech-nologies. The boundary between proven and condi-tional reserves is dynamic and bi-direccondi-tional (that is,

resources that change from conditional to proven reserves can, if conditions change, revert to conditional status). The two remaining categories of resource are not readily available to society. Hypothetical resourcesare those that we may expect to find in the future. They are in areas that have only been partially surveyed and developed. They may be in regions, such as Antarctica, where the international community has placed a moratorium on resource development, for the time being at least. Speculative resources are those that might be found in unexplored areas which are thought to have favourable geological conditions.

Finally, there remains a large part of the earth about which we have no information on its potential resource base. The strength of this classification is that it stresses the highly dynamic nature of the concept of resource reserve. The danger is that it leads to the view that soci-ety will never run out of resources because there are always more to discover and technological progress will continue to make new resources available for exploita-tion. Even if the latter were the case, and clearly it is not, the planet now faces the additional problem that consuming resources, such as hydrocarbon fuels, is actually threatening the global ecosystem. Thus, there is a need to rethink the whole notion of resource avail-ability to take into account the ecological cost of our current ‘fossil fuels society’.

Given the highly dynamic nature of resources, it is very difficult to estimate at any moment in time the level of resource availability. It is even more difficult to specu-late about future levels of production and consumption

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and, thus, the possibility of resource scarcity. This is not just because extrapolation on the basis of current trends is often misleading, but also because there are a whole variety of factors that can promote resource scarcity.

Table 5.1 identifies a variety of different types of sca-rcity. The resource crisis of the 1970s was motivated by geopolitics, but by increasing the price of energy, it brought about other forms of scarcity. For example, the increased price of oil had a major negative impact upon those countries in the ‘developing world’ that had em-barked upon industrialization and had become increas-ingly dependent upon imported oil. However, it also shocked the ‘developed world’ into the realization that energy resources were finite, energy conservation was worthwhile and that alternative sources of energy were required. The ‘developed world’, and particularly the United States, came to realize the strategic importance of securing access to energy supplies. Critics of the war in Iraq say that one of the primary motivations for top-pling the regime of Saddam Hussein was the desire on the part of the United States and her allies to secure control of Iraq’s substantial oil reserves. The rejuvena-tion of Iraq’s oil industry and subsequent exports are a key component of the country’s path to recovery, but that is still some way off and it is too soon to tell what

impact increased Iraqi oil exports will have on the world price of oil. Today, despite continued geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and growing resource na-tionalism elsewhere, we still have a relative abundance of oil, but the rapid growth of energy demand in the emerging world, especially China and India, is causing concern that we are entering a period of sustained high energy prices. At the same time, as noted above, society is increasingly concerned about the ecological conse-quences of such increased energy consumption. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group Three (2007: 3) suggests that between 1970 and 2004 the largest growth of greenhouse gases came from the energy supply sector, with an increase of 145 per cent.

The combination of increasing demand as a result of economic development in the ‘global south’ and the challenge of climate change has led some commentators to talk about a ‘New Energy Paradigm’ that combines traditional concerns about security of supply at reason-able prices, with the need to devise energy policies that address climate change (Helm 2007). The remainder of this chapter focuses on contemporary trends in the geography of energy production and consumption and the relationship between energy consumption and economic development.

Table 5.1 The dimensions of resource scarcity Type of scarcity Concern

Physical scarcity • Exhaustion of minerals and energy.

• Human populations exceed the food production capacity of the land.

• Depletion of renewable resources such as fish, soils or timber.

• Growing demand for water for human use threatens aquatic ecosystems and the ability of river systems to replenish themselves.

Geopolitical scarcity • Use of minerals exports as a political weapon (e.g. sales embargoes).

• Shift in the location of low-cost minerals sources to ‘hostile’ or unstable blocs of nations (e.g. growing resource nationalism)

Economic scarcity • Demand at current price levels exceeds the quantity supplied (therefore shortages).

• Needs exceed the ability of individuals or countries to pay for resource supplies.

• Rich economies can always outbid the poor for essential resources, creating unequal patterns of resource use.

• Economic exhaustion of specific minerals or renewable resources causes economic and social disruption in producer regions or in nations dependent on them.

Renewable and environmental resource scarcity

• Distribution of essential biogeographical cycles (e.g. the carbon dioxide cycle and the greenhouse effect) threatening sustainability of life on earth.

• Pollution loads exceeding the ‘absorptive’ capacity, causing economic health and amenity problems.

• Loss of plant and animal species (biodiversity) and landscape values, with wide, but poorly understood, long-term consequences.

Source: Adapted from J. Rees, Resources and environment: scarcity and sustainability, in Bennett and Estall (eds) 1991 Global Change and Challenge: Geography in the 1990s, Routledge, p. 6

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Plate 5.3 The energy crisis in 1973 brought queues at the petrol pumps in many western countries and a three-day week in the UK.

(Evening Standard/Stringer/Getty Images)