Fuel resources, conservation fossil

The US steel industry is very large and consumes large quantities of energy. It uses 35% of this energy in the form of electricity, fuel oil, or natural gas the balance is coal. Therefore, the supply of the noncoal energy by an MHR can conserve scarce fossil fuel resources. 

The global reserve/production ratio for the natural gas was sixty-two years in 1999 (compared to forty-one years for crude oil, and 230 years for coal). So far about 180 Gtoe of natural gas have been extracted and found in proven reserves additional natural gas resources are conservatively estimated to total another 200-300 see British Petroleum (74) Odell, P. 1999. Fossil Fuel Resources in the 21st Century. Vienna IAEA. 

Extractive reserves are not the panacea for forest conservation of all of Amazonia the appropriate conditions for such reserves exist at maximum for 25 percent of Brazilian Amazonia (Meneses 1994). Nevertheless, such an area would exceed that of France. At present, extractive reserves administered by IBAMA, the Brazilian Institute for Environment and Natural Renewable Resources, and extractive settlements administered by INCRA, the National Institute for Agrarian Reform, cover about three million hectares, representing about one percent of the closed canopy forest in Brazilian Amazonia (see Table 8.1). From a carbon perspective, these reserves and setdements store about 6 x 10 Mg (tons) C (400 Mg/ha x 0.5 Mg C/Mg biomass X 3 X 10 ha). This is equivalent to about 10 percent of the global annual flux of carbon to the atmosphere from fossil fuel sources. 

Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). In addressing the regulatory status of fossil fuel combustion wastes, EPA divided the wastes into two categories ... 

The plastics indnstry mnst actively develop and promote strategies to extract the maximum possible useful service life from all plastics. Increasing the service life conserves raw materials as well as energy. A waste material shonld be viewed as an asset (a possible raw material) rather than a disposal problem, with the focns on search for processes and markets that can make a useful product out of it. Recycling shonld be practiced whenever the resource recovery can be achieved at substantial overall savings in fossil fuel energy with minimum pollution. 

In the United States, liquid petroleum gases (LPG), natural gas liquids (NGL), and natural gas are used to produce plastics. In 2010, the US plastic production accounted for only about 2.1% of the total petroleum and 1.7% of the natural gas consumed. The electricity used was estimated at a further 1% of the consumption. Then estimating conservatively, only about 5.4% of petroleum resources were devoted to manufacturing plastics (US Energy Information Administration, 2013). The operational or process energy may add another approximately 3 % to this, bringing the total fossil fuel investment in plastics to about 8.6%. 

Responsible use of non-renewable resources is one of the three emphasis areas in the sustainable growth (Chapter 2). Any technologies that help conserve fossil fuel reserves help achieve that goal. Using renewable bioresources to make plastics, especially types of plastics used in high volume, is therefore a sustainable move by the industry (Philp et al., 2013 Reddy et al., 2013). Biomass raw materials can yield the same basic chemical intermediates that are derived from fossil fuel raw materials, making bio-based synthesis of conventional and novel plastics a possibility. The option is particularly attractive where the embodied energy as well as the carbon emissions associated with manufacture of the bio-derived variety is at or below that of conventional plastic material. 

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