Abstract
World energy pundits have long proclaimed that the fossil fuels in the Earth’s crust are limited and will be exhausted some day. This argument is similar to the accepted pronouncements of cosmologists that “the entropy of the Universe is increasing towards a maximum” or that “the sun will one day burn itself out.” The world energy crisis of 1973 was precipitated when OPEC curtailed oil production and fixed their own price for oil for the first time, and within a year the price of oil went from about $1.20/bbl to about $10/bbl. This was aggravated by the increase in oil imports to the USA, which ceased to be self-sufficient in oil in the late 1960s. The present world price for oil is about $30/bbl (after reaching a maximum of about $40/bbl and dropping to less than $ 15/bbl) and it is expected to eventually increase again. The price of oil will depend on demand as well as the financial needs of the oil producers. The successful development of alternate energy sources, e.g., fusion, could bring the price down to $5/bbl. Since energy is an integral part of every function and product from food (which requires fertilizer) to plastics which are petroleum based, to steel or other metals which require energy for extraction, beneficiation, reduction and fabrication, worldwide inflation can be directly attributed to the rising price of oil.
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Hydropower, Nuclear, Renewable, Solar, Wind,
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Gesser, H.D. (2002). Energy: An Overview. In: Applied Chemistry. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0531-0_1
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