Energy in the 21st Century: Part 2- Fossil Fuels

The energy derived from fossil fuels has been the most significant factor in the rise of our industrial technology-based civilization in the last three centuries. Fossil fuels include coal in all its many forms, oil, and natural gas. When experts are asked to estimate the energy we derive from fossil fuels today, the answer varies from 75% to 90% of the total energy generated by our species. The 18th and 19th centuries were dominated by coal. When our industrial society moved from the steam engine to the internal combustion engine, oil moved to dominance becoming the principal energy source of the 20th century. Throughout the 20th century control of oil resources drove national agendas. World War II was a war over oil as much as it was one fought over competing racial ideologies. The post-war period of Cold War and the Israel-Arab confrontation also featured oil as a political weapon driving up the cost of energy, and contributing to worldwide hyperinflation and currency volatility. In the first decade of the 21st century we have witnessed oil prices rise and fall dramatically, as much a function of the changing view that the worldwide supply is either stable or in decline, as well as a strategy driven by stock market futures speculators.

Coal

There is a lot of misinformation about fossil fuels circulating if not in the popular press in the minds of people these days. Are we running out of fossil fuels as a resource? The truth is we are not even close to exhausting fossil fuel sources that we can extract from the planet. There’s lots of coal around, whether lignite, bituminous or anthracite.  According to the World Coal Institute, at the current rate of consumption and assumed future demand, our coal reserves will last us well into the 22nd century.

Oil

What about oil? More than any other energy source, the amount of recoverable oil is directly correlated to the price per barrel of oil. When one talks to industry experts today, recoverable oil numbers at $85 US per barrel are much higher than when that number drops to $70 or less. That’s because we are beginning to see an end to the easy-to-find oil sources. In 2009 the biggest oil field discoveries were in what a few years ago would have been deemed inaccessible – deep seabeds. These include finds in the Gulf of Mexico, in the South Atlantic off Brazil and Angola, and in the Indian Ocean off Australia’s west coast and the east coast of Mozambique.

Unconventional oil sources like the bitumen deposits in Western Canada and Venezuela, and the oil shales in the Western United States represent both proven and yet to be counted barrels of oil.

New technology is being used to exploit old oil reservoirs. Traditional extraction techniques often leave up to 80% of the oil in the ground. Through enhanced recovery techniques operators can increase extraction from these exhausted sources by as much as 60%. Techniques include pumping sequestered carbon dioxide into existing oil reservoirs, injecting steam, horizontal drilling to find previously inaccessible pockets of oil, or introducing natural or genetically engineered microbes to feed on the oil generating gas as a byproduct and concentrating oil into recoverable pools.

With proven oil reserves today amounting to over 1.34 trillion barrels, an increase of 200 billion from 2007 statistics, we can conclude that we are not running out of oil, not by a long shot.

Natural Gas

This source of energy is often found in association with oil although many natural gas finds are autonomous. The chief component in natural gas is methane.  Other natural gases include ethane, ethylene and propane. Like its counterpart, oil, easily found natural gas has been displaced by exploration and discovery in areas previously considered climatically or physically challenging. For example, one of the major natural gas finds lies in the Mackenzie River delta in the Northwest Territories in Canada. Extraction and transhipment challenges remain the biggest impediment to exploiting this find. Similarly, Siberia, another area where natural gas has been found, provides similar challenges. One solution to transhipment challenges is the creation of liquefied natural gas production and  storage facilities. From these locations the gas can be transhipped by rail, trucks  or ocean going ships.

Proven natural gas reserves in 2009 exceeded 6.25 quadrillion cubic feet. That number has not significantly changed from previous estimates so current exploration is continuing to find new sources to keep up with worldwide demand. Consumption rates today are in excess of 100 trillion cubic feet per year and projections forecast worldwide demand to reach 150 trillion cubic feet by 2030. Even at this rate of consumption and without new finds we will not run out of natural gas in the 21st or even 22nd century.

So What is the Problem?

Fossil fuels continue to be inexpensive when compared with other energy sources. It costs more for a liter bottle of spring water than it does for a liter of gasoline in Canada and the United States. So what is the disincentive to use gasoline and oil as a source of relatively cheap energy?

Fossil fuels are a finite resource. We don’t just burn them. We also use them to create products. Why burn something of such value if we can find other energy sources to use that are comparatively infinite?

Fossil fuels by their nature when burned produce byproducts that have created environmental challenges that have become compelling issues for all of us on this planet. Coal is inherently a dirty fuel and “clean coal” technologies are unproven.

The burning of oil contributes to greenhouse gases whether it’s coming out of geothermal plants or the tailpipes of automobiles and trucks.

Oil extraction and transhipment is a source of potential pollution, particularly when that oil is being extracted from deep seabeds and being shipped along ecologically fragile coastlines.

Natural gas is the least polluting of the fossil fuels but the one that offer great challenges during transhipment. Liquefied natural gas is a highly volatile commodity.

Energy in the 21st Century: Part 1- Our History and the Current Global Dilemma

What sets humanity apart from other species? Is it just our opposable thumb, or our brain size, or our mastery of tools? A number of animals exhibit masterful dexterity without an opposable thumb. An elephant’s trunk is one very good example. There are a number of animals with brains that are larger than ours such as elephants and many whales and dolphins. These animals exhibit a wide range of intelligence. But even then there are many smaller animals, particularly birds like corvids – the crows, blackbirds – and parrots with much smaller brains, who exhibit extreme intelligence. There are many animals who create and use tools, from ants who masticate leaves turning them into sponges to create humidity control rooms in their colonies, to birds and chimpanzees who alter materials at hand to make them useful for many purposes. So in all of these attributes we are not unique.

We are, however, the only species on the planet that has taken natural occurring phenomenon and materials and turned them into energy generators that has led to the reshaping of human society. When times were simpler before the invention and perfection of steam engines, internal combustion engines and all that has followed, humanity relied on natural energy sources – wind, water, muscle and fire. At first we burned wood to create energy from fire. Wood fires helped us to forge tools from soft metals like copper and tin. Then we learned to create charcoal from wood to increase the energy and heat from our fires so that we could create tools from harder metals like iron. We did all of this well before the European voyages of discovery to North America. We did all this well before the rise of the Roman Empire. We didn’t change how we derived energy in human society for a very long time.

The discovery that we could burn rocks in the form of coal to create energy goes back thousands of years but the need to provide higher energy yields for the new steam engine precipitated its widespread use  from the 18th through the 20th century. Coal became humanity’s biggest energy producer, heating boilers in factories, ships and locomotives, providing a fuel for heating homes, and becoming a source for generating the energy to drive turbines that generated electricity.

The 19th century saw the inception and development of another Earth-based energy source, oil and natural gas. In the 20th century our pursuit of new weapons unlocked the power of the atom leading to the development of the nuclear energy industry.

We mastered geology in our pursuit of energy resources, first finding the easily accessible oil and coal that was close to the surface. By the end of the 20th century the pursuit of energy sources altered the relationship between nation states. The Second World War was in many respects an attempt by a few nations to grasp these resources in pursuit of national and ideological goals. The post-war world became a “cold war” race between two nations who pursued energy self-reliance as national goals. But by the end of the 1960s it more and more became abundantly clear that energy self-reliance was no longer attainable as economies continued to grow and energy requirements along with them.

The Middle East became a major energy source for many nations. The geopolitics of the region meant that energy pursuit could no longer be separated from religious, nationalist and ideological issues. Oil companies were compelled to pursue exploration in places where oil was harder to extract. Exploration rigs started dotting sea coasts, and then moved farther away from shore into deeper and deeper waters. Bitumen extraction from sand deposits in Canada, similar phenomenon in Venezuela and oil shales in the US became strategic resources. Today new fields are being discovered in deep water of Brazil, Australia, the Guinea Coast,  South Asia and Western Australia.

Are we as a species tapped out on oil? Not even close. But the cost of our use of oil has had enormous impact on the planet and in the 21st century our energy paradigm is changing as we move away from burning extracted resources to create energy, to renewable energy from the sun, wind and water, and the burning of biomass.

In this next chapter of our 21st Century Tech voyage of discovery we will address what our future energy usage will look like. Please join me for the ride.