Crude Oil and Natural Gas: Key to a Sustainable Energy Future

This entry aims to elucidate the energy mix of the future and the likely role of sustainable development of crude oil and natural gas resources therein, as renewable energy is becoming attractive in bridging the demand–supply gap (see Karatayev and Clarke 2016). Sustainable energy future is the focus of major stakeholders around the world but this appears a complex agenda to accomplish, although it is not an insurmountable problem. The need to act now is further bolstered by the recent climate-induced disasters such as drought, flooding, hurricanes, and severe storms (Drago and Lujala 2012; Anifowose and Odubela 2015) as well as rising temperatures, including the associated humanitarian crises caused by increasingly fragile human health conditions like cardiac and respiratory illnesses (Ghazali et al. 2018). The precision of human-induced climate events, particularly extreme weather conditions, can be of great concern just as a recent study suggests that climate change increased the rainfall during the August 2017 Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas, USA, by approximately 20–40% (Ornes 2018). Despite all the resources in that part of the world, such events tend to leave devastating socioeconomic and psychological effects on its victims. Similar scenarios in less developed climes (i.e., sub-Saharan Africa) are responsible for ~80% of fatalities and ~70% of economic losses related to natural hazards (Sidibe et al. 2019), and these areas have been deemed highly vulnerable to climate change with projected increases in droughts and flood risks due to global warming (Sidibe et al. 2020).