This paper considers the relationship between the extraction rates and remaining reserves of a nonrenewable resource. Under general conditions the derived extraction rule is firstly linear, and secondly exhibits a slope term common to all extractors regardless of pricing behaviour and costs whilst differences are captured by the intercept. Data from the world oil industry supports the hypothesi...

Population growth has created an expanding gap between the supply and demand of both energy and chemicals. Nonrenewable fossil sources, such as coal, natural gas, and petroleum, are the source of nearly 86% of the world’s energy and 96% of its organic chemicals. Diminishing reserves of these sources, rising atmospheric CO2 levels, and socioeconomic concerns require a reduction of our dependence...

In order to address the economic and environmental consequences of our global energy system, we consider the availability and consumption of energy resources. Problems arise from our dependence on combustible fuels, the environmental risks associated with their extraction, and the environmental damage caused by their emissions. Yet no primary energy source, be it renewable or nonrenewable, is f...

spend much of their time idle, and various schemes have been proposed to use this idle time productively. We have used this approach to improve overall performance in storage systems. The most common approach is to off-load activity from busy periods to less-busy ones in order to improve system responsiveness. In addition, speculative work can be performed in idle periods in the hope that it wi...

Some studies of renewable portfolio standards find that regulations increase generation costs; others find that reduced demand for nonrenewable energy sources lowers natural gas prices and that electricity prices follow. This paper presents reasoning for why these predictions can vary in the direction as well as in the magnitude of their effects. The driving factors are the relative elasticitie...

Optical polarization of 3He generates large nuclear spin magnetizations, allowing MR imaging of the gas spaces of human and animal lungs despite the low number density of spins in the gas. The atomic physics of optical pumping and spin exchange is explained; the hardware for polarizing, transporting, and imaging is detailed. Pulse sequences for optimum use of the nonrenewable magnetization requ...

Energy issues have become increasingly important for our world. It could be plausibly argued that energy will shortly be the single most important problem for industrialized countries, on the same footing as food, water and overpopulation, for the world as a whole. On a timescale of decades, our world may face an inevitable exhaustion of nonrenewable energy supplies. Even at the present time, e...

In a simple agent-based model of a small oligopoly nonrenewable natural resource model, the agents, communicating solely through the market price, sometimes exhibit collusion-like behavior, sometimes Cournot-like behavior. The collusion-like behavior is shown to arise when di erences between the agents are small. Conversely, the Cournot-like behavior is shown to result from di erences in produc...