Page 12 - Geothermal Energy Renewable Energy and The Environment

Series Editor’s Preface

By 2050, the demand for energy could double, or even triple, as the global population rises and
developing countries expand their economies. All life on earth depends on energy and the cycling
of carbon. Energy is essential for economic and social development but also poses an environmen-
tal challenge. We must explore all aspects of energy production and consumption including energy
efficiency, clean energy, global carbon cycle, carbon sources and sinks and biomass as well as their
relationship to climate and natural resource issues. Knowledge of energy has allowed humans to
flourish in numbers unimaginable to our ancestors. The world’s dependence on fossil fuels began
approximately two hundred years ago. Are we running out of oil? No, but we are certainly running
out of the affordable oil that has powered the world economy since the 1950s. We know how to
recover fossil fuels and harvest their energy for operating power plants, planes, trains, and auto-
mobiles that result in modifying the carbon cycle and additional greenhouse gas emissions. This
has resulted in the debate on availability of fossil energy resources, peak oil era and timing for the
anticipated end of the fossil fuel era, and price and environmental impact versus various renewable
resources and use, carbon footprint, emission and control including cap and trade and emergence
of “green power.”
Our current consumption has largely relied on oil for mobile applications and coal, natural gas,
and nuclear or water power for stationary applications. In order to address the energy issues in a
comprehensive manner, it is vital to consider the complexity of energy. Any energy resource—
including oil, coal, wind, biomass, and so on—is an element of a complex supply chain and must
be considered in the entirety as a system from production through consumption. All of the ele-
ments of the system are interrelated and interdependent. Oil, for example, requires consideration for
interlinking of all of the elements including exploration, drilling, production, water, transportation,
refining, refinery products and byproducts, waste, environmental impact, distribution, consumption/
application and finally emissions. Inefficiencies in any part of the system will impact the overall
system, and disruption in any one of these elements would cause major interruption in consumption.
As we have experienced in the past, interrupted exploration will result in disruption in production,
restricted refining and distribution, and consumption shortages; therefore, any proposed energy
solution requires careful evaluation and as such, may be one of the key barriers to implement the
proposed use of hydrogen as a mobile fuel.
Even though an admirable level of effort has gone into improving the efficiency of fuel sources
for delivery of energy, we are faced with severe challenges on many fronts. This includes: popu-
lation growth, emerging economies, new and expanded usage and limited natural resources. All
energy solutions include some level of risk, including technology snafus, changes in market demand,
economic drivers and others. This is particularly true when proposing energy solutions involving
implementation of untested alternative energy technologies.
There are concerns that emissions from fossil fuels will lead to climate change with possible
disastrous consequences. Over the past five decades, the world’s collective greenhouse gas emis-
sions have increased significantly even as efficiency has increased, resulting in extending energy
benefits to more of the population. Many propose that we improve the efficiency of energy use and
conserve resources to lessen green house gas emissions and avoid a climate catastrophe. Using fossil
fuels more efficiently has not reduced overall greenhouse gas emissions due to various reasons, and
it is unlikely that such initiatives will have a perceptible effect on atmospheric greenhouse gas con-
tent. While there is a debatable correlation between energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, there
are effective means to produce energy, even from fossil fuels, while controlling emissions. There are

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