NNRs facing rapid depletion

March 12, 2014 | By Barbara Vergetis Lundin

High quality non-renewable natural resources (NNR) like minerals, metals, and fossil fuels are vital to maintaining and expanding high-consumption industrial societies, but such resources are being rapidly depleted, according to ecologist and resource economist Chris Clugston of Negative Population Growth (NPG), who has researched global and U.S. sources, cost, and availability of NNRs since 2006.

Clugston has found that falling quality and rising costs of the world's remaining NNRs were a major factor in the great recession of 2008 and the anemic economic recovery since then. He projects economic growth will continue shrinking because of high costs and declining availability of resources, and warns that there may be occasional temporary surges in prosperity, the scarcity and costs of key NNRs will keep growth down.

The industrial world's extraction of NNRs has collided with the law of diminishing returns, Clugston contends, with more than 70 percent of the 89 NNRs researched experiencing scarcity in 2008 -- with higher costs or diminished quality, depressing industrial demand and dampening growth.

Remaining NNR deposits require increasingly difficult and costly extraction methods that raise the cost floor -- extractions in tar sands and shale formations, the deep sea bed, areas that are rugged and remote such as the Arctic, and areas that are urbanized, reserved or environmentally fragile, he said.

Clugston addresses population pressure as a factor in the resource scarcity dilemma only tangentially, noting the skyrocketing demand for NNRs stemming from the rapid growth of the world's industrialized nations from a total of one billion to more than five billion between 1950 and 2000. Spreading industrialization and continued high fertility in the third world are further increasing the demand for resources.

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http://www.fierceenergy.com/story/nnrs-facing-rapid-depletion/2014-03-12