Fossil Fuels -- Party Over?
After writing an entry on Hydrogen Fuel, I suddenly felt very interested in learning what would be the next stock of the decade. Oil and Coal have definitely been the major, indispensible energy source, but the world is pushing towards the age of clean and renewable energy at a much faster pace than we have expected, so if we can foresee the trend, we might be able to get on the next train of big money.
While looking into the Discovery News, I was surprised to see a slideshow titled "7 Signs the Fossil Party is Over". Economics? My taste! And so I read on and find something really interesting.
First of all, the Hubbert Peak Theory caught my sight. The picture you see above was a graph showing the original 1956 prediction of world petroleum production rates. If everything follows that Hubbert's Curve like all those examples found in the webpage below, as the supply of the oil, natural gas, coal, metals copper and water reach(ed) their peaks and began to fall, and the global economy began to recover very very slowly, the prices of these resources will have to go up. Of course, there are other questions we cannot answer too, like
- how fast will the global economy recover?
- will the demand for these resources really increase with the recovery?
- will the demand increase greater than the supply?
- will there suddenly be a lot of major discoveries of the resources?
- as the fossil fuels began to lose demand to the renewable energy, will the fossil fuel be phased out faster than the increase in demand?
- Prices of the resources are also affected by the people's ability to pay, will the prices increase so great that people are not able to pay for the products and thus the companies don't actually benefit from the price gains?
I guess only time can tell, but we can make reasonable guess with enough data and statistics in order to increase our chances of thinking at the right side.
Keep reading and learning!
Resources:
http://dsc.discovery.com/earth/wide-angle/fossil-fuels.html
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/05/11/peak-coal-energy.html
http://dsc.discovery.com/earth/slideshows/peak-oil.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory
