What is the difference between a natural resource and an economic reserve?

natural resource is any natural material that is either useful or valuable, this can include: natural gas, crude oil, metal ores and water (i.e. ground water). 

reserve is the amount of a resource that can be economically extracted using the existing technology. For a reserve to be economic, the company (BP, Shell ect.) must make more money selling the resource than they do spending money extracting it, in other words they must make a profit.

The amount of reserves can change due to many factors...

In the context of hydrocarbon exploration (crude oil and natural gas), reserves can go up due to:

 - Further exploration discovering more reserves 

 - An improvement or advance in exploration technology, leading to more of the current reserves becoming economic (for example, deep water reserves or unconventional sources)

 - A rise in the price of oil or gas can make (previously uneconomic) small oil or gas fields economic to extract from

Hydrocarbon reserves can go down due to:

 - Calculations of reserves being incorrect (companies may overestimate their reserves deliberately to boost share prices!)

 - As reserves are extracted from the Earth, the amount of resource left becomes depleted; the less resource there is, the harder it becomes to extract and therefore more money is needed to extract it, making the reserve less economic to recover. 

Answered by Erin S. Geology tutor

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