Forgot your password? Term environmental impact of energy This website has limited functionality with javascript off. Please make sure javascript is enabled in your browser. Energy and environmental problems are closely related, since it is nearly impossible to produce, transport, or consume energy without significant environmental impact.
The environmental problems directly related to energy production and consumption include air pollution, climate change, water pollution, thermal pollution, and solid waste disposal.
The emission of air pollutants from fossil fuel combustion is the major cause of urban air pollution. Burning fossil fuels is also the main contributor to the emission of grenhouse gases. Diverse water pollution problems are associated with energy usage. One problem is oil spills. In all petroleum-handling operations, there is a finite probability of spilling oil either on the earth or in a body of water.
Coal mining can also pollute water. Changes in groundwater flow produced by mining operations often bring otherwise unpolluted waters into contact with certain mineral materials which are leached from the soil and produce an acid mine drainage. Solid waste is also a by-product of some forms of energy usage. Coal mining requires the removal of large quantities of earth as well as coal. Permalinks Permalink to this version ba95c2faf8cedb Permalink to latest version ba95c2faf8cedb.
What the chart shows is that low- and middle-income countries increased their emissions at very similar rates. By default the chart shows the change of income and emission for the 14 countries that are home to more than million people, but you can add other countries to the chart.
What has been true in the past two decades will be true in the future. For the poorer three-quarters of the world income growth means catching up with the good living conditions of the richer world, but unless there are cheap alternatives to fossil fuels it also means catching up with the high emissions of the richer world. The task for our generation is therefore twofold: since the majority of the world still lives in poor conditions, we have to continue to make progress in our fight against energy poverty.
Key to making progress on both of these fronts is the source of energy and its price. Those living in energy poverty cannot afford sufficient energy and those that left the worst poverty behind rely on fossil fuels to meet their energy needs. Once we look at it this way it becomes clear that the twin energy problems are really the two sides of one big problem. We lack large-scale energy alternatives to fossil fuels that are cheap, safe, and sustainable. This last version of the scatter plot shows what it would mean to have such energy sources at scale.
It would allow the world to leave the unsustainable current alternatives behind and make the transition to the bottom right corner of the chart: the area marked with the green rectangle where emissions are net-zero and everyone has left energy poverty behind.
Without these technologies we are trapped in a world where we have only bad alternatives: Low-income countries that fail to meet the needs of the current generation; high-income countries that compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs; and middle-income countries that fail on both counts.
Since we have not developed all the technologies that are required to make this transition possible large scale innovation is required for the world to make this transition. This is the case for most sectors that cause carbon emissions , in particular in the transport shipping, aviation, road transport and heating sectors, but also cement production and agriculture. One sector where we have developed several alternatives to fossil fuels is electricity. Nuclear power and renewables emit far less carbon and are much safer than fossil fuels.
But it is possible to do better. Some countries have scaled up nuclear power and renewables and are doing much better than the global average. The consequence of countries doing better in this respect should be that they are closer to the sustainable energy world of the future.
The scatter plot above shows that this is the case. Every country is still very far away from providing clean, safe, and affordable energy at a massive scale and unless we make rapid progress in developing these technologies we will remain stuck in the two unsustainable alternatives of today: energy poverty or greenhouse gas emissions. Summary The world lacks safe, low-carbon, and cheap large-scale energy alternatives to fossil fuels.
Click to open interactive version. The first energy problem: those that have low carbon emissions lack access to energy. The first global energy problem relates to the left-hand side of the scatter-plot above. The lack of access to these technologies causes some of the worst global problems of our time. At the present time, we cannot abandon any existing energy sources. They must receive the necessary modifications to eliminate or reduce their environmental impact, and new sources must be added, especially renewable ones.
Below, I will describe the state of available technologies and the most promising developments in each of them, always on a time scale of the next few decades. On a longer scale, nuclear fusion will be part of a catalog of more sustainable energy sources, but it will not be ready in the time period under consideration here and will thus be unable to help in resolving the crisis.
That is why I will not address nuclear fusion here, although a powerful and interesting program is being developed on an international scale. The goal is to harness the reactions of nuclear fusion as an energy source, but foreseeable progress places it outside the time span we have chosen for the present analysis of energy problems. Energy is a fundamental ingredient in human life.
Human beings ingest around 2, kilocalories of energy per day as food. But in industrialized countries, the average daily amount of supplementary exosomatic energy consumed in combined human activities industrial, domestic, transportation, and others is equivalent to , kilocalories per person. That is fifty times more, and in the case of the United States, the figure is one hundred times more see, for example, British Petroleum In fact, there is a strong correlation between individual energy consumption and prosperity among different societies.
Two interesting phenomena are observable here. In the poorest countries, the correlation is very strong, with energy consumption leading to clear improvements in the HDI. But in more developed countries, the very large differences in energy consumption do not significantly affect levels of wellbeing. This indicates that, for the latter countries, energy saving is a possible and desirable policy. In the most prosperous countries, saving is actually the cleanest and most abundant energy source.
If it did, it would be an absolute catastrophe for the least-developed countries, which lack everything, including energy. Therefore, while energy saving must be a central aspect of active polices in first-world countries, from a global perspective, we must deal with the problem of a growing demand for energy.
The primary energy sources are identified and it seems unlikely that any will be added in the foreseeable future. From the dawn of humanity to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century, the only available sources of primary energy were wood and other forms of natural biomass, beasts of burden, and wind for maritime or river traffic. With the development of the first steam engines, coal entered use as an energy source and it continues to be an important source of consumed primary energy today.
Later, with the widespread use of automobiles with internal combustion engines calling for liquid fuels, petroleum and its by-products became the preeminent source of energy. Finally, over the last half century, natural gas has become an important component in the generation of electricity and the production of heat for industrial and domestic uses. They were formed in earlier geological epochs by natural processes in which organic materials—mainly plants and marine organisms—were subjected to high pressure and temperatures.
That is why they are known as fossil fuels. Their contribution to the sum of primary energy consumed worldwide at the end of British Petroleum was As we will see below, there are many reasons why this cannot be sustained, even into the near future.
The rest comes from nuclear energy, which provides 5. Energy drawn from wind and the Sun in various ways is a marginal factor from a global perspective, but it is beginning to have a greater presence in some countries, especially Spain. So that is the global perspective; there are no more available sources of primary energy. The enormous predominance of fossil fuels as a primary energy source has some important consequences:.
First, they are unequally distributed. Two thirds of the known reserves of petroleum, probably the most difficult fuel to replace, are under five or six countries in the Middle East, which implies a degree of dependence that is not especially compatible with a stable supply. Natural gas is also very concentrated in that area, and in the countries of the former USSR, while coal is more evenly distributed in all parts of the planet.
Second, these are non-renewable raw materials. They were formed over the course of dozens or even hundreds of millions of years and are thus irreplaceable. Moreover, they are limited resources. In particular, the use of petroleum as an energy source on which the lifestyle of industrialized nations is based, could be just a brief fluctuation in the history of humanity, limited to a period of about two centuries.
Third, these raw materials are scarce. There is some debate about the amount of available petroleum, but most geologists and petroleum experts agree that, at the current rate of consumption—no less than 85 million barrels of petroleum a day, which means burning a thousand barrels of petroleum per second—we only have enough for a few decades.
It can be argued that the amount of petroleum extracted depends on the price and that, if it rises, there will be no practical limit to production. But this argument overlooks the fact that it takes more and more energy in prospecting, pumping, treatment, and logistics to extract petroleum from deposits that are increasingly deep or depleted. When the energy needed to extract a barrel of crude oil comes close to the energy that same barrel could produce, no matter what its price, then it will have disappeared as a primary energy source, although it may continue to be useful, especially in the petrochemical industry, where it is used to synthesize a multitude of compounds that are fundamental to almost all branches of industry and agriculture.
At the current rate of consumption, proven petroleum reserves will last about 40 more years, while those of natural gas will last around 60 years.
Coal reserves will last approximately a century and a half British Petroleum There will be new discoveries, of course, and there are also the so-called non-conventional petroleums drawn from hydrocarbons dispersed in sand, bituminous schists, or heavy tars, but we must always remember the growing energy cost, and thus, their decreasing net yield and higher price.
At any rate, there will not be a sudden end to supplies, passing from the current levels of use to nothing. There will probably be a progressive rise in price and, at some point, a progressive decrease in consumption and production as well.
Finally, we know that burning fossil fuels generates enormous amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide CO2. This gas is one of those that produces the greenhouse effect and thus contributes to global warming.
Given how fast this phenomenon is taking place in geological terms , it could produce serious climatic disturbances that are potentially harmful for our civilization not for life, as has frequently been alleged, nor for human life, but certainly for our complex and demanding social organization.
In sum, our social activity is based on fossil fuel use that, due to environmental concerns and limited supplies, must be limited in the future. Nevertheless, coal will continue to be a massive energy source for decades to come, but its use will only be tolerable if the contamination it produces can be palliated. In consequence, the second energy challenge the first is reducing consumption in developed countries is to diminish the primacy of fossil fuels in energy production.
Transportation depends almost entirely on liquid fuels derived from petroleum. Coal and natural gas are now important for electric production but they could conceivably be replaced by renewable or nuclear energy in the long term. However, it is not easy to imagine alternatives to the use of petroleum by-products for transportation.
All of these involve very far-reaching changes. The first possible alternative is the use of biofuels—bioethanol and biodiesel—to at least partially replace conventional fuels. But we have recently seen the collateral problems that can arise, especially in the area of food production, even when biofuel production is only just beginning. Of course, the influence of bioethanol production—the most controversial case—on food prices is limited and price rises coincide with other, deeper causes, some of which are momentary and others, structural.
The only grain that is widely used to make ethanol is corn, while wheat and barley are employed in marginal amounts with regard to total production. Rice is not used at all. And yet, prices have risen for all these grains, especially rice. Moreover, about half the current production of bioethanol comes from Brazilian sugarcane, and the price of sugar has not risen at all. In any case, making ethanol from grains is the worst possible solution, not only because of its impact on food production, but mostly because of its poor energy yield.
In fact, between fertilizers, seeds, harvesting, transportation, and treatment, the amount of energy contained in a liter of ethanol is barely more than that required to obtain it from cereals see, for example: Worldwatch ; CIEMAT Therefore, from an energy standpoint, it is unreasonable to use this type of raw material. Environmental concerns associated with the use of water and tillable land also seem to discourage it Zah On the other hand, the energy yield of sugar cane is much higher, and the yield of ethanol from what is called lignocellulosic biomass—present in woody or herbaceous plants and organic residues—is even higher.
This is called second-generation ethanol. All of these conclusions appear in the interesting graph in figure 2, which is taken from Zah It offers all the data about fossil fuel consumption in the growing, harvesting, pretreatment, and other processes needed to obtain biofuels from different plant materials, as well as the overall environmental impact, compared to the direct use of petroleum by-products.
The third challenge, then, is to perfect the already existing technology to produce second-generation biofuels on a level useful to industry. This is not far off, and some pilot plants are already experimenting with various processes for generating ethanol from the sort of biomass that has no effect on food, requires less energy cost, and has less environmental drawbacks see, for example: Ballesteros ; Signes It is easier, at least in principle, to replace fossil fuels used to generate electricity—resorting to renewable or nuclear sources—than to find substitutes for every petroleum product.
Thus, in the long run, I think we will turn to electric vehicles, first as hybrids and later purely electric. The problem here is how to store the electricity. The batteries used at present are inefficient and very contaminating, but intense research into new devices for storing electricity is currently under way and will allow the construction of electric vehicles with adequate performance.
In general, we should say that energy storage, be it electricity, heat, hydrogen, or any other form, currently occupies a central position in energy research, both because of its importance to the future of the transportation industry and in order to solve problems derived from the intermittence of renewable sources, as we will see below.
Therefore, below, I will concentrate on the production of electricity, which is shaping up to be the most flexible and adaptable energy, even for the future of the transportation industry. The electricity production scheme varies considerably from one country to another. It can be seen that, with the exception of France, that relies very heavily on nuclear power, and partially Spain, which has an appreciable use of renewable sources, the basic energy source continues to be coal.
And it will continue to be so for a long time, due to its abundance and its distribution on almost all continents. The case of China is particularly notable. According to the International Energy Association, in recent years, it has been opening a new coal-based electric plant every week. So, if we want to continue using coal as an energy source, we must develop procedures to eliminate or at least limit atmospheric CO2 emissions the other emissions are already controlled right in the power plants.
In particular, the capture of CO2 emitted during coal combustion can be carried out with oxicombustion techniques that modify the composition of the air entering the boilers so that the gas emitted is almost entirely CO2. That way, no separation is necessary. This can also be done by applying separation techniques to air-based combustion.
Both methods generate additional energy costs and will need new physical-chemical processes, which have been tested in laboratories but not on the needed industrial scale.
As to the CO2 that is obtained as a result—we must find underground or underwater deposits hermetic enough that CO2 injected into them will remain trapped there for centuries. In reality, deposits of this type exist naturally. For example, deposits that have held natural gas for geological periods of time can be used to store carbon dioxide once the natural gas has been exploited.
The same is true for exhausted petroleum deposits, sedimentary saline formations, and so on. In fact, most of the experiments with CO2 storage around the world are associated with oil fields whose production is falling. The carbon dioxide is injected under pressure in order to improve production, obtaining crude oil that would not come out using conventional extraction techniques.
Another interesting experiment is being carried out at Sleipner, a gas production camp on the Norwegian coast of the North Sea. In that field, methane, the principal ingredient of natural gas, comes out mixed with significant amounts of CO2. Once the two are separated in the extraction plant, the CO2 is injected back into the seabed at a depth of about a thousand meters, in a bed of porous boulders with water and salts.
They have been depositing CO2 there since , and data about how hermetic it is will be of great value when seeking new locations for massive use.
At any rate, we should mention that the processes of capturing and storing carbon dioxide will always signify additional costs, which must be added to the price of energy obtained from the clean use of carbon.
The conclusion is that humanity will not stop using such an abundant and widespread energy source as coal, but its use has grave environmental consequences that it is extremely important to counteract with techniques such as CCS. Perhaps the most important challenge for us in the next few decades will be significantly increasing the contribution of renewable energy compared to current levels, which are marginal on a planetary scale.
Hydroelectric power has the greatest presence and its resources have been used in the most complete way, but other renewable energies, such as wind and solar power, have advantages and disadvantages. Their advantages are the opposite of the disadvantages to fossil fuels mentioned above—they are sustainable, unlimited, and hardly contaminate at all, even when we consider their complete lifecycle and their territorial distribution.
Their disadvantages fall into two categories: high cost and intermittence. One of the reasons why renewable electricity is so expensive is its degree of dispersion, which is an intrinsic characteristic offset only by its unlimited and sustainable character.
However, it is reasonable to think that the expense of conventional energy will continue to increase as supplies diminish and environmental costs are figured in. In that case, its costs would converge with those of renewable energies at some point.
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