The production and consumption of energy is crucial to the world economy. Whether it is to produce commodities, provide transportation, or ensure the normal operation of equipment, almost all economic activities require energy consumption. Energy has become the most important means of production in the industrial age and modern society. World energy is usually divided into primary energy and secondary energy. Primary energy refers to the energy resources that exist in the original form in nature and are not processed and converted, also known as natural energy. Primary energy is further divided into renewable energy (water energy, wind energy and biomass energy) and non-renewable energy (coal, oil, natural gas, oil shale, etc.). Among them, coal, oil and natural gas are the core of primary energy and the basis of global energy. Secondary energy refers to energy products converted from secondary energy processing, such as electricity, gas, steam and various petroleum products.
Oil is the main source of power for conventional automobiles and a necessity for industrial production activities. According to BP's "World Energy Statistics 2015", as of the end of 2014, the world's proven oil reserves were 1,700.1 billion barrels, which can be exploited for 52.5 years at the 2014 extraction rate. We know that the proven oil reserves do not constitute the total reserves of oil in the earth. In areas with suitable climate and exploitation conditions, oil is mainly obtained near the surface of the earth's crust. However, in other regions such as Siberia and North America near the North Pole, although the oil reserves under the earth's crust are huge, due to harsh climate conditions and ecological and environmental protection issues, it is difficult to extract them, which also brings certain difficulties to the estimation of the total amount of oil on the earth. The R/P value is usually used to indicate the number of years of oil recovery, where R represents the reserve and P represents the production. The R/P value has been rising steadily since the 1950s, but with the rapid growth of oil consumption, in the period after the 1960s, the R/P value fell to 30 years, which means that the oil supply of oil-producing countries will not be sustainable, and even oil will be depleted. Therefore, it directly led to the sudden tightening of oil policies in the Middle East and triggered the second oil crisis.
After the oil crisis, with the advancement of extraction technology and the continuous increase of proven oil reserves, the number of years of oil exploitation has been in a stable state, and the R/P value has gradually stabilized at more than 40 years. However, the amount of oil reserves to be discovered in the future is calculated on the basis of speculation, and the newly discovered oil fields are generally under poor conditions for exploitation, and the total global oil consumption will continue to grow. Global oil consumption was 500 million tons in 1950, 3 billion tons in 1980, and 4.03 billion tons in 2010. According to statistics, oil accounts for about 34% of the world's total primary energy consumption, natural gas accounts for 24%, and coal accounts for 30%. Although oil remains the most important energy fuel, its share has begun to decline continuously. Overall, the demand for petroleum resources worldwide will maintain an average annual growth rate of about 1%, while the consumption of petroleum resources in developing countries represented by China is increasing rapidly year by year. It is worth noting that with the massive consumption of petroleum resources, the concentration of pollutants in the atmosphere and the amount of carbon dioxide emissions have also increased significantly. Due to the large population and rapid economic growth in developing countries, the growth rate of oil consumption in these countries is much higher than that in developed countries and regions. The rapidly growing oil demand has put forward higher requirements for the oil supply guarantee capacity of developing countries, and the pressure brought by energy security issues is also increasing. serious challenge.
What is certain is that despite the dual pressures of population and economic problems, developing countries are trying to solve the contradiction between energy consumption and environmental pollution. Developed countries have huge capital investment in oil production and oil resources, but developing countries and regions have only huge market and consumption capacity, which directly leads to a serious imbalance in the oil resource market between developed and developing countries. In addition, the situation of major fossil energy sources such as natural gas is very similar to that of oil.