how people evaluate the entirety of their life and not simply their feelings at the time of the survey. The OECD study asks people to rate their own life satisfaction on a scale of 0 to 10. The ranking covers the organization’s 34 member countries plus Brazil and Russia.
The Happy Planet Index ranked Costa Rica as the happiest country in 2012. The particularly high score relates to high life expectancy and overall wellbeing. Vietnam and Colombia follow in second and third place. Of the top ten countries, nine are from Latin America and the Caribbean. Countries from Africa and the Middle East dominate the bottom of the ranking instead. Botswana is last after Bahrain, Mali, the Central African Republic, Qatar and Chad. Developed nations such as the United States and the European Union member countries tend to score high on life expectancy, medium-to-high in wellbeing, but rather low on their ecological footprint, which puts them in the ranking’s second-tier.
2.5.2 The Finite/Infinite Conundrum
The next assumption of peak oil theory is that the oil reserve is finite. The theory first assumes the ultimate recoverable reserve, then expresses cumulative oil production as a function of the ultimate recoverable reserve. Cavallo (2004) defines the Hubbert curve used to predict the U.S. peak as the derivative of:
(2.7)
Where Q(t) is the cumulative oil production and Qmax is the maximum producible reserve and a and b are constants. The year of maximum annual production (peak) then back is calculated as:
(2.8)
The fixation of Qmax is in the core of the Hubbert curve. Theoretically, the recoverable reserve increases for two reasons: 1) the boundary of resource; 2) the technology. As discussed in earlier sections, the boundary of resource is continuously moving. The recent surge in unconventional oil and gas reserve makes an excellent point to this regard. In fact, the following section makes the argument that this boundary is fictitious and for a sustainable recovery scheme, this boundary should not exist. The second reason for the reserve to grow is the technology that becomes applicable to a broader resource base. The earlier section on EOR makes the argument that EOR schemes alone can continue to increase the reserve and has done so in the past.
There is a general misconception that Hubbert was concerned with “easy” oil, “easy” metals, and so forth that could be recovered without greatly advanced mining efforts and how to time the necessity of such resource acquisition advancements or substitutions by knowing an “easy” resource’s probable peak. The difficulty of Hubbert curve is not its assumption that easy oil recovery is constant, it is rather the notion that a resource that turns into reserve with time is finite. As shown in previous sections, accessing greater resource bases is not a matter of ‘more difficult’ technology, it is rather a matter of producing with sustainable techniques.
2.5.3 Renewable vs Non-Renewable: No Boundary-As-Such
Chhetri and Islam (2008) elaborated the notion that the ‘finite resource’ is not scientific. With sustainable recovery tools, resources are infinite and are part of the continuous cycle. Figure 2.15 shows that as the natural processing time increases, the energy content of the natural fuels increases from wood to natural gas. The average energy value of wood is 18 MJ/kg (Hall, and Overend, 1987) and energy content of coal, oil and natural gas are 39.3MJ/kg, 53.6MJ/kg and 51.6MJ.kg, respectively (Website 4). Moreover, this shows that the renewable and non-renewable energy sources have no boundary. It is true that solar, geothermal, hydro and wind sources are being renewed at every second based on the global natural cycle. The fossil fuel sources are solar energy stored by the trees in the form of carbon and due to the temperature and pressure, they emerge as coal, oil or natural gas after millions of years. Biomass is renewed from a few days to a few hundred years (as a tree can live up to several hundred years). These processes continue forever. There is not a single point where fossil fuel has started or stopped its formation. So, why these fuels are called non-renewable? The current technology development mode is based on a short-term approach as our solution of the problems start with the basic assumption that ‘∆t tends to =0’. Only technologies that fulfill the criterion of time approaching infinity are sustainable (Khan and Islam, 2007). The only problem with fossil fuel technology is that they are rendered toxic after they are refined using high heat, toxic chemicals and catalysts.
Figure 2.15 Energy content of different fuels (MJ/kg) (from Spight and Islam, 2016).
From the above discussion, it is clear that fossil fuels can contribute to a significant amount of energy by 2050. It is widely considered that fossil fuels will be used up soon. However, there are still huge reserves of fossil fuel. The current estimation on the total reserves is based on the exploration to-date. If one assumes a priori that reserves are declining with time (Figure 2.16a), one fails to see the role of exploration and drilling activities. As the number of drillings or exploration activities increases, more recoverable reserves can be found (Figure 2.16c). In fact, Figure 2.16 is equally valid if the abscissa is replaced by ‘time’ and ordinate is replaced by ‘exploratory drillings’ (Figure 2.16b). For every energy source, more exploration will lead to a larger fuel reserve. This relationship makes the reserve of any fuel type truly infinity, and alone can be used as a basis for developing technologies that exploit local energy sources.
Figure 2.16 Fossil fuel reserves and exploration activities.
The US oil and natural gas reserves reported by the EIA consistently show that the reserves over the years have increased (Table 2.6 gives a sampler). These additional reserves were estimated after the analysis of geological and engineering data. Hence, based on currently observed patterns, as the number of exploration increases, the reserves will also increase.
Figure 2.17 shows that the discovery of natural gas reserves increases as exploration activities or drillings are increased. Biogas in naturally formed in swamps, paddy fields and other places due to the natural degradation of other organic materials. As shown in previous sections, there are huge gas reservoirs including deep gas, tight gas, Devonian shale gas and gas hydrates, which are not yet exploited. The current exploration level is limited to shallow gas, which is a small fraction of the total natural gas reserve. Hence, by increasing the number of exploration activities, more and more reserves can be found which indicates the availability of unlimited amount of fossil fuels. As the natural processes continue, formation of natural gas also continues for ever. This is applicable to other fossil fuel resources such as coal, light and heavy oil, bitumen and tar sands.
Table 2.6 US crude oil and natural gas reserve (Million barrels) (From Islam, 2014).
| Year | Reserve | % Increment | |
| Crude Oil Reserve |
