What Energy Sources Should Be Pursued? | Introduction
It would be difficult to imagine the modern world without cars, electric appliances, hot showers, air-conditioned buildings, and other modern amenities. Yet manufacturing and running all the machines that make life so easy and comfortable requires vast amounts of limited resources.
At the present time 89 percent of all the energy consumed in the United States is derived from fossil fuels—oil, coal, and natural gas. About 10 percent is derived from nuclear power and 1 percent from renewable sources such as the sun, wind, and water.
Although they are finite resources, fossil fuels have provided many obvious benefits to modern society. A small amount of gasoline, for example, provides a tremendous amount of energy for an automobile to travel hundreds of miles at high speeds. This gas is easy to transport with pipelines, ships, and trucks and is convenient and simple for consumers to use.
Reliance on oil comes with a price, however. While the United States uses fully 25 percent of the world’s petroleum, it only has 5 percent of global petroleum reserves. Most of America’s oil must be imported from foreign countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Nigeria, and Venezuela at a cost to consumers of about $200,000 per minute. Besides creating a huge trade deficit, this situation requires Americans to rely on countries where brutal dictatorships, political instability, and outright hostility toward the United States can create serious oil shortages. As former CIA director James Woolsey notes, “Two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves are in the Persian Gulf and as time goes on, the world is going to rely more on the Gulf, rather than less. . . . [You] can’t bet on this part of the world making a smooth, easy path that will allow all of us to happily continue to drive our SUVs and use that part of the world as our filling station.” Although sales of SUVs continue to climb, most Americans seem to understand Woolsey’s point. A March 2003 Gallup poll reported that 65 percent of Americans believe the United States is likely to face a critical energy shortage during the next five years, up from 45 percent who expressed a similar fear in 1980.
Even if the gulf states remain content to keep America’s wheels turning, the world currently consumes 29 billion barrels of oil every year. In the next fifteen years, that number is expected to nearly double even as production remains about the same. While the world will not run out of oil, as the years pass people will demand much more petroleum than the available supplies. This excessive demand will cause the price of a barrel of oil to rise dramatically, with potentially disastrous consequences for the world’s economy. Major food shortages and war could result. According to energy industry expert Paul Roberts, writing in the Los Angeles Times:
As production falls off . . . prices won’t simply increase; they will fly. . . . [The] global economy is likely to slip into a recession so severe that the Great Depression [of the 1930s] will look like a dress rehearsal. Oil will cease to be a viable alternative— hardly an encouraging scenario in a world where oil currently provides 40% of all energy and nearly 90% of all transportation fuel. Political reaction would be desperate. . . . Worse, competition for remaining oil supplies would intensify, potentially leading to a new kind of political conflict; the energy war.
Even if supplies were to remain plentiful, oil poses other serious problems. Burning oil releases tons of pollution into the atmosphere every day. One of those pollutants, carbon dioxide (CO2), is a gas that contributes to global warming. Other dangers to the environment, such as oil spills, wastewater contamination, and air pollution from refineries, also accompany petroleum use and production.
Coal is another fossil fuel that has great benefits and many drawbacks. While the fuel generates about 70 percent of the electricity in the United States, coal is a significant contributor to air and water pollution, acid rain, and global warming. Despite this situation, the nation’s appetite for coal-powered electricity is expected to grow by 32 percent over the next twenty years. During this period, 27 percent of the aged, polluting coal-fired power plants now in operation will be worn out and scheduled for retirement.
Nuclear power plants do not contribute to air pollution, but they have other drawbacks. To produce energy, these power plants use uranium, a radioactive substance that is extremely poisonous. By storing this material, nuclear power plants have been shown to be vulnerable to terrorists. A small airplane flown into a building housing a nuclear reactor could contaminate an area the size of a large city for a period of thousands of years. In addition, the waste created by these reactors remains poisonous for tens of thousands of years. Scientists have yet to create a safe method for indefinite storage of spent nuclear fuel.
Despite the problems of oil, coal, and nuclear power, modern societies continue to benefit from the energy provided by these traditional sources. Looking to the future, however, many have called for a switch to renewable energy sources. As Glenn Hamer writes in Power Engineering, public support for these sources is growing for various reasons:
People like to breathe clean air, and they care about the condition of the planet. Asthma rates are soaring, and when consumers who visit supermarkets learn that their fish is now dangerous to eat as a result of the mercury produced from coal generation, they naturally are going to want alternatives. This is not to mention the torrent of stories on global climate change, a condition that even the Bush Administration’s EPA has acknowledged is at least partially caused by man.
Hamer is backed by a Gallup poll that shows 49 percent of Americans are concerned with protecting the environment. With that in mind, one of the major selling points for wind, solar, and hydrogen fuel cells are the environmental benefits of these new “green” energy sources. As former California Wind Energy coordinator Ty Cashman writes in Earth Island Journal:
The wind blows in every country. The sun shines everywhere. . . . Local communities can have their own energy resources as well as their own local farms for food production. They will be able to produce their own electricity from wind and solar panels, and their own hydrogen fuel for homes, workshops and vehicles from their own water and solar energy.
One of the most promising forms of renewable energy is solar power. Solar power utilizes the enormous amount of energy produced by the sun every day. Solar collectors work in a variety of ways to turn this energy into heat and electricity. Ac- cording to some studies, enough electrical power could be generated in a one-hundred-square-mile area of the desert southwest to supply the entire country with electricity. Demand for solar power energy is growing. The U.S. market for solar power increased approximately 60 percent in 2003, and global production has grown sixfold since 1997. More than a million Americans use solar water heaters, and more than two hundred thousand homes use photovoltaic systems.
Like all energy sources, however, there are drawbacks to solar power. For example, at current rates the investment needed to produce solar collectors makes the power more expensive than electricity generated by fossil fuels. In addition, there is no way to efficiently store large amounts of solar power for use at night and for prolonged cloudy periods.
Another source of renewable energy—the hydrogen fuel cell—is being developed to provide power for automobiles. These cells separate hydrogen molecules from oxygen in water in order to produce electricity. Backed by grants from the federal government, major auto companies such as DaimlerChrysler, Ford, and General Motors are spending billions of dollars to develop practical applications for fuel cells within the next decade. According to hydrogen researcher and author Seth Dunn, “The critical question is no longer whether we are headed toward hydrogen, but how we should get there, and how long it will take.”
Like other power sources, however, hydrogen has its critics. Although there are substantial commercial, political, and environmental benefits to developing fuel cells, the government is planning on using large amounts of a fossil fuel—natural gas— to create hydrogen. While hydrogen can be produced by solar power, at the present time there is no infrastructure to provide the vast amounts of hydrogen that would be necessary to keep America’s 90 million cars and trucks on the road.
The advantages and disadvantages of solar energy and hydrogen fuel cells are among the issues debated in At Issue: What Energy Sources Should Be Pursued? Throughout this anthology, energy industry experts, environmentalists, and others disagree as to the best path to follow, but most are convinced that the current energy system is not going to function in the next century the way it has in the past. All agree that renewable energy, more efficient oil production techniques, or technologies yet to be discovered must be developed in order to meet the energy needs of the future.
