Fossil fuels diminishing reserves

Owing to diminishing fossil fuel reserves, alternative energy sources need to be renewable, sustainable, efficient, cost-effective, convenient and safe.1 In recent decades, microbial production of ethanol has been considered as an alternative fuel for the future because fossil fuels are depleting. Several microorganisms, including Clostridium sp. and yeast, the well-known ethanol producers Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Zymomonas mobilis, are suitable candidates to produce ethanol.2,3... 

Biofuels are claimed to offer many different benefits at the national level. These include (i) reduced dependence on the diminishing reserves of petroleum (ii) greater energy security (iii) a smaller bill for oil imports (iv) less pollutants released to the atmosphere (v) the introduction of major industries to produce bio-ethanol and bio-diesel and (vi) a new market for farmers. On the debit side, one has to consider the additional fossil fuel that will be expended (and carbon dioxide released) in the provision of extensive and sustainable supplies of these sources of energy. There is also the competition for land to produce food and the possible impoverishment of the soil. Overall, it is probable that in the short term biofuels will assume an increasing, but still modest, role in transportation. 

In the United States, whidi has the most attractive oil shale reserves, interest in oil shale development has waxed and waned. This is partly because the richest oil shale reserves, the Green River Formation in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, are on lands owned mostly by the US government and therefore are not available for commercial development. Tracts of oil shale lands in the Green River Formation were leased for commercial development in 1974 and the decade between 1974 and 1984 represented the greatest activity ever in oil shale research in the USA. Since then, interest has diminished and hardly any oU shale research is presently being conducted. Understandably, the plentiful supply and low cost of petroleum has suppressed the commercialization of oil shale and other fossil fuel conversion processes (tar sand processing and coal liquefaction). 

It is expected that by the middle of this century the world s remaining fossil fuel reserves will become much more precious given the growing global awareness of the impact of CO2 on the environmental health of the planet and the declining availability of easily recoverable reserves. For this reason it is probable that the FCC will transform itself steadily into a feed preparation unit for existing and yet to be discovered chemical processes. The preeminence of today s FCC unit as an engine for the production of motor fuels will likely diminish as the decades pass. 

Shafiee S, Topal E (2009) When will fossil fuel reserves be diminished Energy PoUcy 37 181-189... 

It is Hkely that in the long-term, these products will mean plastics will remain affordable, even as fossil fuel reserves diminish. 

Biodiesel has emerged as an environmentally friendly and renewable alternative fuel to petroleum-based fuels. Reserves of conventional petroleum-based fuels, which are only located in certain parts of the world, are rapidly diminishing. Because of ever-increasing prices of fossil diesel and environmental concern due to emission of toxic compounds on its combustion, many countries across the world are encouraging the use of biodiesel as a transport fuel. 

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