Conventional Resources Of Bihor County And The Implications Of Their Use

The importance of achieving a sustainable development was greatly discussed during the last decades, especially due to the negative implications of pollution on the surrounding environment. During such conferences each country was requested to cut down the pollution level. Of course, ideal would be that this diminishing of green house effect gases to be obtained by gradually replacing the present resources we use with those less damaging to the entire planet, replacement which, as we know, cannot be done as a whole, at least not now. In this paper we have focused our attention on the county of Bihor from Romania, county that has both conventional resources, which, as it may be seen here, are heavily exploited, and also important unconventional ones. The paper has two parts: the first part presents in a nutshell the natural background of Bihor County as well as the existent conventional resources and the situation generated by the exploitation of such resources in order to assure the thermal comfort of the inhabitants. In the second part we describe a scenario about the emissions of CO2 in Bihor County, under the conditions of assuring the peoples’ thermal comfort only by burning fossil fuels. The scenario starts from existent data about the average quantity of thermal energy used by one inhabitant of Bihor County corroborated with the manner of obtaining the thermal energy in this part of the country. What it is intended to highlight in this work are the strong ecological implications (and, implicitly the deriving economic and social ones) of using conventional resources in this area, considering that Bihor County sits on a large geothermal water basin.