Over the last decade, the world’s rapidly diminishing oil reserves has been an increasingly hot topic. Crude oil is a scarce, finite resource and it is currently the most efficient source of energy when combusted. In the current global situation where industrialisation is growing quickly and consumers are becoming more affluent, many processes require fuel. For example, industrialisation consumes huge amounts of fuel for production. Increasing affluence means that more people can afford cars today, therefore more fuel is now being consumed. As a whole, global consumption has been rising exponentially the last few years. As such, there is a fast growing need to find newer and efficient energy sources as a substitute for oil.
The need for sustainability also serves as a driver of energy change, to find other sources of energy to replace oil. For example, Brazil has made use of sugarcane to get ethanol to be used as fuel. Alcohol is also being used as fuel to power some cars these days.
People are also becoming more concerned about the effects global warming has on the earth. The combustion of oil releases products. Whether the combustion process is complete or incomplete, the products released (complete combustion: carbon dioxide; incomplete combustion: carbon dioxide and carbon soot) contribute to global warming. Therefore, people are looking for alternative energy sources which are more “clean” and less harmful to the environment.
One interesting thing I learnt in class this week was the different potential sources of energy – from above and below the ground. Most of these energy sources are sun-derived, such as coal and lignite. In fact, all the energy sources – sun, wind, water, biomass, waves, coal, lignite, oil, gas, geothermal and uranium – are sun-derived with the exception of uranium which is also known as nuclear energy. This was interesting because before this week, only solar energy was sun-derived to me.
Solar energy has been around for many years. However, humans have not fully utilised energy from the sun. We have not discovered a way to collect all the solar power from the sun. it is said that the amount of energy received by the earth from the sun in 1hour is more than humans use in 1year. If we are able to make solar energy cheaper and improve technology such that we do not “waste” any solar energy, it would serve as a very good substitute for crude oil. In fact, Germany has embarked into this fairly new industry by being the world’s biggest investor of solar energy despite the country experiencing much less sunlight time than other countries. Desertec has come up with a concept to cover deserts with solar panels to try capturing as much solar energy as possible. Producing solar power is viewed as a huge potential market and the world needs to start making use of the “free” energy we are getting from the sun. The biggest advantage of energy from the sun as opposed to oil is that everyone gets more or less the same amount of energy from the sun, it just depends how much we can capture. But supply of oil is dependent on oil-producing countries and they can choose to control prices and mark up the price. Therefore, in the long run, solar power, or even other sources like wind energy, would be cheaper as the investment is a sunk cost at the start when the equipment is set up, but not a variable cost like oil.
Personal rating: 8/10
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