Depletion of Fossil Fuel Reserves and Projections of CO_2 Concentration in the Earth Atmosphere

The paper has been suggested by two observations: 1) the atmospheric CO_2 growth rate is smaller than that ascribed to the emission of fossil fuels combustion, 2) the fossil fuel reserves are finite. The first observation has lead the way to a simple kinetic mode, based on the balance of 1) land/ocean CO_2 absorption and 2) CO_2 anthropogenic emission limited solely by depletion of the present day fossil-fuel reserves, in a business-as-usual scenario. The second observation has suggested to extrapolate past CO_2 emissions by fossil fuel combustion in the future years up to 2200 CE, by constraining emissions to the physical limits of reserves availability. The Meixner curve (hyperbolic secant distribution) has been used to model the pathway of resource exploitation for the three main classes of fossil fuels, crude oil, natural gas and coal. The kinetic model, driven by the extrapolated emissions, has been employed to project the CO_2 atmospheric concentration due to fossil fuel combustion close to the zero-reserve epoch. The result is just the output of simple models tuned on well-known experimental data. Error analysis of literature data provides the method robustness and the relevant uncertainty band. Contribution of other greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide has been neglected, since their emissions cannot be projected with the paper methodology (they do not derive from fossil reserves). Notwithstanding this limitation, paper results clearly demonstrate that some of the IPCC projections of the CO_2 concentration are largely overestimated if compared to the physical limits of fossil fuel exploitation.