Resources (AQA A Level Geography)

• Resource security refers to the ability of a country to safeguard a reliable and sustainable flow of resources to maintain the living standards of the population
• A resource is something to which human society attaches value, due to its usefulness
• Resources can be classified according to common characteristics:
• Natural or human
• Renewable or non-renewable 
• Recyclable or non-recyclable
• Biotic or abiotic
• Stock resources are finite and non-renewable 
• E.g. coal, oil, gas, gold, copper, uranium
• Flow resources are renewed within short timescales either through physical systems or biotic reproduction
• E.g. solar, wind, forests, fish stocks
• Critical flow resources, such as forests and fish stocks, require careful management to ensure continuous availability
• Further classification of stock resources can be made
• Resources are an estimate of the quantity of all deposits of a valued mineral or energy source, including those that are discovered, undiscovered or not viable
• Reserves are those parts of the ‘resources’ that can be economically, technically and legally extracted
• A McKelvey box illustrates an international scale for evaluating stock resources 

McKelvey box evaluating stock resources

Explanation of McKelvey Classification of Stock Resources

	Proven or measured reserves	Probable or indicated reserves	Possible or inferred reserves	Possible or hypothetical and conditional reserves
Definition	Quantity and quality of resources estimated with a high level of confidence. Viewed as being economically viable	Quantity and quality of resources estimated with a level of confidence sufficient to allow further evaluation of their economic viability	Quantity and quality of resources estimated based on limited evidence. There may be issues regarding depth, continuity and access	Largely undiscovered and confidence in existence is low. Based on geological knowledge of similar situations where resources have already been discovered
Quantity and quality of resource	Size is known accurately	Size partly measured and measurements used to estimate the extent	Identified but estimated and not measured	They are thought to exist but haven’t been sampled
Degree of mineral sampling confidence	90% or greater	50% or greater	10% or greater	Insignificant

Natural resource development over time

• Over time resources go through several stages of development, from being located to being exhausted

The lifecycle of a stock resource

Concept of the resource frontier

• A resource frontier refers to an area on the periphery of a country or territory which is being opened for resource extraction for the first time
• Resource frontiers are often:
• Natural environments with little or no human development
• Remote with limited infrastructure
• Harsh environments may pose technological challenges to extracting natural resources
• The Arctic is an example of a resource frontier:
• Climate change has opened up new shipping routes to the far north
• The region has estimated or inferred stock of more than 400 billion barrels of oil
• Potentially the largest stock of oil outside the Middle East
• Other resources in the region include fisheries, forestry, mining and tourism
• But several challenges remain before any of the resources can be exploited and developed
• These make the Arctic a frontier environment:
• The region is environmentally sensitive to damage
• Fragile ecosystems
• Short growing season
• Oil spills would be very difficult to clean up due to ice cover
• A lack of infrastructure - meaning transport, accident management and search and rescue is expensive
• Frequent storms and extreme cold - make working conditions difficult
• Icing during winter - puts infrastructure at risk of damage
• Warming temperatures - could increase the number of icebergs through the calving of glaciers, making shipping lanes perilous
• GPS communication systems - work less well north of 70° latitude

Concept of resource peak

• A resource peak refers to the phase of maximum production of a resource before depletion exceeds discoveries
• The idea developed from the concept of ‘peak oil’ suggested by Shell geophysicist M. K. Hubbard in 1956
• It has since been applied to other stock energy resources and minerals
• There are a number of challenges when evaluating the concept of resource peaks:
• Perspectives on when certain resources ‘peak’ vary as new technologies are developed or new reserves found
• Prices of resources such as oil can be volatile and so the economic viability  of extraction will vary over time
• It can also be difficult to predict future levels of demand

• Some argue that global ‘peak oil’ has already been reached as the rate of new discoveries of oil reserves is falling
• Others suggest that we are some way away from this
• New technologies are being used to extract more oil from current reserves and for discovering new sources of oil, for example:
• Enhanced oil recovery of residual oil from depleted existing oilfields
• Deepwater drilling of oil further offshore
• Discovery of ‘unconventional’ oil sources, such as tar sands and shale oils

Factors that affect when a resource peaks