When is fossil fuel going to run out

The global demand has not reached the peak yet. Year by year, global energy consumption is getting higher, therefore the use of fossil fuels is getting higher too. Learn more about environmental impacts.

Natural gas is the most eco-friendly fossil fuel. We consider it as a bridge between non-renewable and renewable sources of energy. The problem is that fossil fuels formed millions of years ago, so waiting for new fossil fuels to form is not an option with our rising demand. Our reserves will be empty soon.

Formed millions of years ago, yet only used for around years, fossil fuel reserves are emptying very quickly. The projected fossil fuel exhaustion rate depends upon a few factors:. Even the most conservative industry insiders believe we could run out of available oil within the next 50 years. Might there be other places around the world where we could find oil? There are, but when you compare current consumption against 1 extraction levels, 2 the cost of that extraction, and 3 current technology, we hit a wall.

Admittedly, the global pandemic has changed the consumption game. The price of a barrel of oil even went into the negative in April , thanks to a glut in supply caused by competition between OPEC, Russia, and the U.

That being said, consumer consumption will most likely return to pre-COVID numbers when the time comes, so the industry must be ready. Meanwhile, actual global oil production and consumption continues to rise. The difficulty in attempting to construct these curves is that our discovery of reserves and technological potential to extract these reserves economically evolves with time.

If we look at trends in proven fuel reserves, we see that our reported oil reserves have not decreased but increased by more than 50 percent, and natural gas by more than 55 percent, since Again, these figures are only useful as a static measure; they will continue to vary with time as our capacity to economically source and extract fossil fuels changes, and our levels of consumption rise or fall.

However, whilst depleting reserves could become a pressing issue years from now, there is another important limit to fossil fuel production: climate change. The amount of fossil fuels we consume is just not sustainable. Global population increases means the need for fossil fuels increases. The fact that the resources are limited is not the main problem. The downsides to extracting fossil fuels from the earth are:. Fossil fuel consumption is still increasing and new reserves are significantly smaller than past deposits.

Another big factor is that to keep average global temperature increases below 1. But unfortunately this has not led to a decrease in use. So how long will the main types of fossil fuels last? It is estimated that discovered oil reserves will run out by It is more likely that cost of extraction will become too high and fortunately more renewable, cheaper sources will be employed.