• What are non-renewable resources?
• Examples of non-renewable resources
• Renewable resources
• Inexhaustible resources

We explain what non-renewable resources are and various examples. In addition, differences with inexhaustible and renewable resources.

Non-renewable resources like oil can be depleted.

What are non-renewable resources?

Non-renewable resources are those natural resources usable by the human being, which cannot be produced or regenerated at a rate that makes their rate of consumption. That is to say they run the risk to be scarce, either by disappearance or degradation. They exist in fixed quantities or they are created naturally at a tremendously slow rate.

Non-renewable natural resources are, unfortunately, some of the most coveted and most useful for industrial society, especially those that translate into obtaining Energy.

Thus, humanity is constantly in search of new reserves or alternative means of obtaining, if not replacements that, moreover, do not carry the ecological risk that these types of resources usually imply.

Examples of non-renewable resources

Minerals are also not renewed at the rate of their consumption.

Some examples of non-renewable resources are the following:

• The hydrocarbons. Formed from organic material prehistoric, subjected for billions of years to intense conditions of Pressure, temperature and absence of oxygen, hydrocarbons were formed inside the Earth crust and they can be mined today by humanity. They generally have a very high energy value and serve as an input to obtain a great diversity of different chemical materials. We talk about Petroleum, coal and natural gas, mainly.
• The terrestrial minerals. The Earth is made up of a fixed amount of chemical elements, being part of various types of minerals. Some are very abundant, others are less so, and some are quite rare. Either way, these minerals were formed during eons of geologic activity. Its extraction and transformation takes just a tiny fraction of that weatherTherefore, they can be considered as non-renewable resources: gold, silver, diamonds, uranium, etc.
• Groundwater. As long as they are confined aquifers and without recharging, groundwater reservoirs are limited. Encapsulated due to specific geological conditions, and therefore isolated from various sources of pollution, represent very pure water deposits, which have been given in a fixed number and could end.

Renewable resources

Consumption must be slower than regeneration of renewable resources.

Renewable resources are understood to be those that, although they run the risk of degrading or ending up, survive it because they are immersed in natural dynamics of replacement and renewal much faster or more massive than the dynamics of consumption by humanity.

That is to say, those resources that renew themselves naturally, and that if they are consumed at a rational rate, could in practice be inexhaustible.

An example of this resource is the hydroelectric power, dependent on the fall of large courses of Water, such as rivers or waterfalls, that move the turbines mechanically. These power plants are reliable and steady as long as the volume of river or waterfall water is constant and abundant.

Inexhaustible resources

The consumption of tidal energy does not deplete the resource of the seas.

The inexhaustible resources are those that are present in nature in margins of such abundance that it is practically impossible to exhaust them. That is why they are also called superabundant resources. Examples of this type of resource are hydrogen, earth, seas wave solar energy.