Resource depletion

The USA's dependence on imported sources of strategic minerals has grown substantially since the second world war, while its ability to protect the sealanes critical to foreign supplies has deteriorated. Domestic production has been severely hampered by a lack of access to mining on public lands, and by excessive environmental regulations. No major purchases have been made for the strategic stockpile in 20 years. Concern has been growing in Western Europe and in Japan about secure supplies of strategic minerals. Being even more dependent on foreign sources of supply than the USA, some of these countries have recently initiated their own strategic stockpilling programmes. The USSR, long an important exporter of metals, appears to have changed its mineral trade policy, and has sharply reduced exports while entering the market as an importer of a number of key metals. These developments foreshadow growing competition for world supplies of strategic minerals.

Published in: Resources Policy, Volume 7, Issue 1, March 1981, Pages 4-13
Available from: ScienceDirect

The factors which influence the size and value of mineral reserves are discussed and an example is given of a more rigorous system for measuring supplies of non-renewable resources.

The extent to which reserves and resources of minerals can be used as leading indicators of future mineral production is examined and examples of the dangers of over-reliance on this factor are described.

Key aspects, such as confidence limits, differences in the economic exploitability, the dynamic nature of reserves, and their variability in grade, are examined in some detail using the South African coal industry as an example.

Published in: Resources Policy, Volume 1, Issue 6, December 1975, Pages 343-356
Available from: ScienceDirect

Peak oil research and the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) have contributed a great deal to improve people's recognition of peak oil. Although peak oil is becoming a part of public recognition, it is still hard to say whether peak oil discussion will develop into a theory such as “peakoilism”. On one hand, there are still some difficult problems in peak oil research. On the other hand, the peakoilers have the potential for scientific research and have their allies: the climate change researchers and the new energy advocates. Oil is a limited, non-renewable resource, and an oil peak is inevitable. Peak oil theory is a kind of development theory rather than a crisis theory, which promotes reasonable utilization of the limited oil resources, promotes conservation, and encourages the development of renewable energy.

Published in: Energy Policy, Volume 37, Issue 6, June 2009, Pages 2136-2138
Available from: ScienceDirect

This paper examines aspects of the case against global oil peaking, and in particular sets out to answer a viewpoint that the world can have abundant supplies of oil “for years to come”. Arguments supporting the latter view include: past forecasts of oil shortage have proved incorrect, so current predictions should also be discounted; many modellers depend on Hubbert's analysis but this contained fundamental flaws; new oil supply will result from reserves growth and from the wider deployment of advanced extraction technology; and that the world contains large resources of unconventional oil that can come on-stream if the production of conventional oil declines. These arguments are examined in turn and shown to be incorrect, or to need setting into a broader context. The paper concludes therefore that such arguments cannot be used to rule out calculations that the resource-limited peak in the world's production of conventional oil will occur in the near term. Moreover, peaking of conventional oil is likely to impact the world's total availability of oil where the latter includes non-conventional oil and oil substitutes.

Published in: Energy, Volume 33, Issue 8, August 2008, Pages 1179-1184
Available from: ScienceDirect