Exhaustibility of Non-renewable Resources: a Real Threat for the 21st Century?

The master’s thesis focuses on the issue of exhaustibility of non-renewable natural resources and its goal is to analyze the reserves of selected non-renewable natural resources and their development in the years 2000–2022 and then evaluate whether the threat of their depletion in the 21st century is real or not and subsequently determine what economic problems may be related to such a situation. In the theoretical part, different views on rarity are presented, which are the Malthusian and Ricardian principle of rarity. Furthermore, the theoretical part focuses on providing the main contributions to the given issue, which include, for example, Limits to Growth or contributions from important economists such as Hayek and Simon. Among other things, the work in this part will focus on the basic characteristics of natural resources and their division. The practical part analyzes the territorial breakdown of natural resource reserves, namely oil, coal, natural gas, gold, silver and iron ore. The development of the reserves of these commodities in their absolute value is depicted for the period from 2000 to 2022, and then this development is compared with the current level of consumption, which led to an estimate of how many years the reserves of the given resource will last at the current reserves and at the current level of consumption. The practical part also deals with the development of prices, or rather the blending of the development of the rarity of a given resource into its price. One conclusion of the work is that the price of individual resources is not affected by the rarity of the resource, that is, it is not affected by the size of its reserves. The second conclusion is that if only the current level of consumption and current reserves are taken into account, the threat of depletion in this century is current for all sources analyzed except for coal. However, if the average annual growth of reserves, consumption and production is also taken into account, for which there are considerable reasons, then there is no threat of depletion of reserves in the 21st century for even one non-renewable natural resource.