- The energy resources in the recent years had become an important element of the world socio-economic development. However, in as much as resource does not refer to a thing or a substance, but to a function that a thing or substance may perform, or an operation in which it may take part, the large-scale exploitation of the planet's resourcebase may well go down in history as a defining characteristic of the 20th century.Today the scale of resource consumption threatens the entire global ecosystem. Throughout the last century access to and control over natural resources was a source of conflict. Equally, patterns of resource consumption remaina major markerbetween the so-called 'de…