New trends in physics teaching, v.4; The ... - unesdoc - Unesco

The energy crisis
by Hubbert. Note again that the effect of this very large hypothetical increase in the resource is
very small. Figure 2 shows a dramatic model from Mario Iona [ 71 which can be used to represent
the history of 7 per cent annual growth of world consumption of petroleum and to show the
consequences of continuing the 7 per cent annual growth in the future.
D 0
C
0
.-
U 0.1
1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980
Figure 1. History of World Crude Oil production (redrawn from Hubbert [6a]). The approximate straightline on this semilogarithmic
graph shows that world oil production has grown steadily at a rate of a little over 7 per cent per year for nearly a
century.
This amount of oil must be
discovered if we wash oil
Consumption to continue to
grow at 7 per cent per
year for the decade
2000 - 2010
Figure 2. The 7 per cent solution (?) for world petroleum (Iona [7]). This representation presents a graphical answer to the
question ‘How long could world petroleum consumption continue to grow at 7 per cent per year as shown in figure l?’ The
area of each rectangle represents the quantity of petroleum consumed in the labelled decade. This makes it clear, as was seen in
the example of the chess-board (table l), that if the doubling time is one decade, the consumption in any decade is equal to the
total of all previous consumption. The area of the rectangle ABDC represents the known world petroleum resource.
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