IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bar/bedcje/2009223.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Fossil resource depletion and climate change emissions: the role of physical constrictions

Author

Listed:
  • Stephane Salaet
  • Jordi Roca

    (Universitat de Barcelona)

Abstract

In terms of global warming, early peak forecasts in oil and natural gas seem reasonably good news because most emissions arise from fossil fuel burning. However, this can be misleading if coal resources are as enormous as some estimations report because a switch between low carbon content fossil fuels (oil and natural gas) and high carbon content (coal) can be envisaged. Following this hypothesis we develop peak oil and natural gas scenarios where coal supplies what is needed for levelling off fossil fuel energy as soon as oil and natural gas reach their joint peak. We estimate the implications in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and we compare them with the most pessimistic IPCC scenario. Our conclusion is, despite this IPCC scenario probably being unrealistic, the limitation of fossil fuel resources is not quite sufficient to avoid very dangerous emission future evolutions. CO2 concentrations well above 450 ppm at the end of the century are derived and, in addition, no sign of stabilization is observed.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephane Salaet & Jordi Roca, 2009. "Fossil resource depletion and climate change emissions: the role of physical constrictions," Working Papers in Economics 223, Universitat de Barcelona. Espai de Recerca en Economia.
    • Handle: RePEc:bar:bedcje:2009223
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.ere.ub.es/dtreball/E09223.rdf/at_download/file
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • Q3 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Nonrenewable Resources and Conservation
    • C6 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling
    • Q4 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bar:bedcje:2009223. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Espai de Recerca en Economia (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/feubaes.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.