Abstract
Now that the stage has been set, let us look in more details at our problem. To which extent are fossil fuels limited, and how do we know their usage has an influence on the climate? Such are the questions answered from now on.
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Notes
- 1.
Freely downloadable at www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/kwes.pdf.
- 2.
If you plot the production curve of Fig. 3.1 setting a logarithmic scale on the vertical axis, this initial growth phase appears as a straight line, evidencing the exponential growth.
- 3.
You can check \(\int _{-\infty }^\infty P(t)dt=aP_m\).
- 4.
See www.indexmundi.com or BP Statistical Review of World Energy June 2012.
- 5.
Le Monde, January 8, 2013. http://petrole.blog.lemonde.fr/2013/01/08/exxon-shell-bp-total-les-rois-du-petrole-sont-ils-nus-2/
- 6.
Financial Times, September 21, 2011.
- 7.
See the Wikipedia article on “Petroleum.” This is a lower bound; the exact number depends on the kind of oil considered.
- 8.
Number for the year 2010, see [1].
- 9.
On a normal scale, ticks are regularly spaced, as in “1 ton, 2 tons, 3 tons...”. On Fig. 3.4, numbers are multiplied by 10 between one tick and the next. As a result, the vertical axis now reads “1 Mt, 10 Mt, 100 Mt...”. Such is a logarithmic scale.
- 10.
When you cut a tree and burn it, the carbon it contained is released into the atmosphere.
- 11.
Having a lot of coal and little oil, Germany used the Fischer-Tropsch process extensively during World War II. Altogether, it provided half of Germany’s total oil production during the war ([13, p. 344]).
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Bret, A. (2014). Fossil Fuels. In: The Energy-Climate Continuum. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07920-2_3
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