Wind Power

One of the sources of renewable energy is wind power. The energy contained within wind has been utilized by humans for thousands of years starting with transport where wind power was used to fill sails and make the ships sail and continuing with agriculture- in wind mills. Today, wind power once again, is becoming reality. Wind spins wind turbines and produces electricity, which is an alternative source to energy, which we mainly obtain from fossil fuels. Whilst wind power is not the main source of renewable energy today, the demand for it sure is growing. Figure 1 below shows where our energy came from in 2009.

 Figure 1.

Source: Renewable Energy Policy,2011. Renewable energy share of global final energy consumption and the different methods of obtaining renewable energies and their share.

Although wind power currently does not represent a significant amount of the world energy, Renewable Energy Policy Report produced in 2011 reported that the market for it is rapidly expanding and in 2011 for the first time ever recorded, the majority of new wind power capacity was added in developing countries and emerging countries such as China (Renewable Energy Policy, 2011). Prior to that, wind power is mainly used in European countries such as Denmark, UK and Spain, as well as in the USA. Wind farms are now seen both onshore and offshore and investments are made into more wind power plants. Figure 2 below shows the rise of demand and energy generated by wind power.

Figure 2.

Source: Renewable Energy Policy,2011. Wind power, existing world capacity, 1996-2010.

The video below explains how electricity is produced from wind turbines.

However whilst there certainly are advantages to obtaining energy using this method, there are also some disadvantages. Below I provide a list of advantages and disadvantages of wind power.

Advantages:

• ·      Wind turbines only use 1-10% of the wind areas which allows for farming on the surrounding land (Fthenakis, 2009)- much less land is required compared to say, biofuels production.
• ·      The turbines don’t require anything except wind power to keep them going thus no emissions are produced and they are very environmentally friendly. J
• ·      The energy used for the construction of a turbine is re generated by one turbine within 6 months.
• ·      The lifecycle of a wind turbine is 25 years thus it can produce a lot of energy in those 25 year where each turbine can support up to 1219 homes per year.
• ·      Wind turbines provide the cheapest renewable energy.
• ·      Wind turbines also do not need any special conditions and can be used everywhere in the world thus they are abundant.
• ·      Finally each wind turbine produces the same amount of energy as 16,000 solar panels hence they produce plenty of energy.
• ·      Wind farms are cheap to operate.

Disadvantages

• ·      Wind turbines rely on wind to generate power and wind does not always blow. Although wind turbines spin 70-80% of the time, this still means that they are potentially unpredictable and one cannot rely on power purely from wind turbines alone unless power is stored (Holttinen, 2006). However the current storage methods available are very expensive.
• ·      Although wind farms are cheap to operate, they are also very expensive to build so governments don’t always want to invest in them, especially when there are cheaper and easier fossil fuel alternative still available.
• ·      The location of wind farms is often derelict open spaces that are far away from city centers, where energy is required therefore long transmission lines are required to get electricity to its final destination. These are expensive and provide visual pollution.
• ·      The wind turbines themselves provide visual and noise pollution thus not all members of the public support them. For example there were major protests against the wind turbines that were installed in three mountainous passes in California- the Altamount Pass, east of San Francisco; the Tehachapi Pass, northeast of LA; and the San-Gor-gonio Pass near Palm Springs as people believed the wind turbines ruined the scenery of mountainous landscapes (Gipe, 1993).

Considering all the advantages and disadvantages of wind power, I think it is safe to say that it is all just a matter of time until wind power becomes more widely used. The main disadvantages are costs and ramblings of the public who are unwilling to accept new things in their familiar landscapes thus these disadvantages are only significant whilst the oil prices remain low making building of wind farms expensive and the public having no troubles affording their energy.

Biofuel

Fuels produced from plants are considered to be biofuels. Biofuels are mainly ethanol and sometimes butanol, which whilst being a better fuel, is actually much harder to obtain from plants than ethanol. Both ethanol and butanol are alcohols produced from crops by fermentation of sugars that are present within the crops. Plants such as wheat, corn, sugar beets, sugar cane, molasses and any other sugar or starch containing plants can be used for biofuels, even potatoes. During ethanol production an enzyme is used to break down the starches in the crops into sugars, then fermentation of sugars occurs followed by distillation and drying. In 2010, global biofuel production was at 105 billion liters and provided almost 3% of fuels required for road transport. Most of the ethanol is produced in Brazil although USA also does not lag far behind.

Ethanol itself is lower energy fuel than petroleum per unit volume however it does prove to be more efficient and hence more environmentally friendly in this sense. Ethanol can actually be used in petrol engines instead of petrol if it is mixed with petrol where up to 15% of the fuel can be ethanol. Although larger fuel volumes by approximately 30% are required when ethanol becomes involved, the price of biofuel currently remains lower than that of pure petroleum.

However not everything is so pretty and shiny with biofuels. As with many new technologies, lack of research suggest that it remains uncertain whether it takes more energy to produce biofuels than is recovered. The distillation process requires a very high energy input for heat as well as energy being required for farm equipment, cultivation, planting, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, which are all made from oil, when growing the crops for biofuels. Irrigation systems, harvesting, transport, fermentation and drying all also require further energy inputs (Russo, 2008).

The other dark side of biofuels that is known as an ongoing debate called food energy and environment trilemma (Butterbach-Bahl, 2013). This debate is about crops grown on fields and farms for biofuels threatning food supplies. It has not been properly investigated whether there is sufficient land available to produce the crops needed in sufficient amounts for common biofuel use by the general public.

Some other difficulties may arise in the cultivation of biofuels such as the process of plant growth being highly seasonal in many regions of the world and climate dependent hence not all countries would be able to implement it. Also disease and insects may destroy crops and sometimes these things get out of hand potentially leaving the human population starving for oil and without energy supply if there was no other energy back up available.

Ethanol has also shown to be corrosive for today’s oil infrastructure such as piping networks and ships thus it would require infrastructure adjustments and replacements and thus investment if it was to become a global energy source (Savage, 2011).  It also produces less energy than petroleum as shown by figure 1 below but research is currently under way to try and find an easy, cheap and environmentally friendly way to either synthesize butanol and other larger hydrocarbons from ethanol or to ferment these large hydrocarbons directly from the crops themselves.

Figure 1.

Source: Savege, 2011.Energies available from biofuels compared to traditional fuels.

Finally, vegetable oil has also been recognized as a source of fuel when burned. This is because it contains fatty oils. The fatty oils are also produced by palm trees and soya, so research into these plants is also currently being done as well as algae which are also believed to be a good potential source of biofuel. Some studies such as the one by Savage, 2010 actually argue that the only viable and efficient biofuel that can be produced will be from algae as it can be affordable in large enough volumes for biofuel to become the new global energy source.

Some studies suggest that biofuels could provide up to a quarter of global transport fuel by 2050 but this is highly debatable and would require a lot of research, investment and new technologies to be invented for the myth to become reality. There is currently a lack of evidence to show that biofuels are associated with lower GHGs emissions than fossil fuels when the full life cycle of their production and combustion are considered. However the governments of more than 35 countries have already established policies promoting the use of biofuels which is especially evident in Brazil, USA and countries within the EU (Butterbach-Bahl, 2013). So in conclusion, whilst biofuels sure do seem a cleaner option of energy production than non-conventional oil, we can only hope that enough research is done into the area before it becomes our new reality and yet again we dup ourselves into something that we can no longer get out of such as the irreversible anthropogenic global warming that we have created by the combustion of fossil fuels.

Non-Conventional Oil

As mentioned preciously, with conventional oil running out fast and prices for crude oil increasing, the society is quickly trying to find new methods of obtaining energy. One of such methods is extraction of the same crude oil raw product from non-conventional oil. The difference between conventional and non-conventional oil is that crude oil is much harder to recover from non-conventional oil requiring much higher costs both financially and environmentally so the question remains as to whether it is worth it. The other method of obtaining energy is renewable and nuclear energy, which I shall discuss further on in my blog with all implications and advantages. I have already written a blog post about one of the non-conventional oil recovery methods from shale oil in detail and this is a more a more general post about other non-convectional oil that is out there and is being actively researched. Non-conventional oil includes oil from oil shale, oil sands, GTLs (gas to liquids), tight oil and biofuels. I shall also look at biofuels in more detail in my next post but I decided to do a more general post about all other types of non-conventional oils first because biofuel is in between being classed as non-conventional oil and renewable energy. My blog after non-conventional oil is going to explore renewable energy so I thought putting a post about biofuel in between non-convectional oil discussion and other biofuels was a good idea.

Oil sands are extra heavy crude oil or crude bitumen that is trapped in unconsolidated sandstone. These are still hydrocarbons thus forms of crude oil yet they are extremely dense and viscous making exrraction difficult, expensive and generally not possible using conventional oil extraction techniques. Some deposits, which are shallow enough, such as those found in Anthabasca oil sands can be extracted using conventional oil extraction techniques however most must be recovered using strip mining or the oil made to flow into wells using complex in-situ technologies. The more complex methods require more energy and water for the recovery of oil sands thus increasing costs yet again both monetary and environmentally. Furthermore the deposits may be contaminated by heavy metals such as nickel and vanadium as well as sulfur which mean separation after extraction is required increasing the costs of recovery. The deposits are found worldwide although the two most important, biggest and easiest to recover deposits are Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada and the Orinoco heavy oil belt in Venezuela. Regardless of all its disadvantages, oil sands production is projected to increase very singnificnatly in the next 20 years although Canadians warn that the production rates are very slow and insignificant on the global crude oil production scales (Miller, 2013).

Tight oil is crude oil that is contained in petroleum formations of low permeability- often shale or tight sandstone. Tight oil is not the same as oil shale which is produced synthetically from oil shale. Tight oil requires hydraulic fracturing and often uses the same horizontal well technology as that which is used in shale gas production. One of the problems with tight oil is that its formations are heterogeneous and hence they vary widely over small distances thus it is very hard to predict the amount of oil that can be recovered from one well let alone a reservoir which potentially makes investments into these projects unattractive. Furthermore the production of tight oil requires at least 15-20% natural gas in the reservoir pore space to be able to drive the oil towards the borehole out the reservoir. It is located all over the world in such countries as Russia, USA, China, Australia, Argentina, Libya, Venezuela, Mexico, Pakistan, Canada and Indonesia thus could present a solution for each country’s own recovery of this product when conventional oil is exhausted. Some studies and news forums suggest that a $150 billion investment is going to be made into the tight oil industry in North America in 2015 (Mills, 2008).

GTLs and as well as CTLs (coal-to-liquid) are already being produced in small volumes as very expensive substitutes to conventional crude oil. They are expected to increase the contribution to the global energy font in the future. The four main conversion technologies used for the production of unconventional oil this way are Fischer-Tropsch process, Mobil Process, Belgius process and Karrick process. However natural gas requires high transportation costs thus many known yet remote fields are not yet being developed but the on-site conversion to liquid fuels are making energy recovered this way available under current economic conditions and large plants for coal to liquid conversions are currently being built in China. There are also some plants where gas-to-liquid conversion occurs found in such countries as Malaysia, South Africa and Qatar. Although the processes are highly inefficient in both scenarios and very large quantities of coal and gas are required to provide significant contributions to tatal liquid supply. Also environmental concerns remain a worry as the conversions generate high amounts of CO2, which is then released into the atmosphere. CO2 is a GHG and hence its emissions have significant impacts on global warming.

Thus overall it seems clear that so far no technology is available to make recovery of oil and energy from non-conventional oil nor economically profitable nor environmentally friendly. No significant research has been performed yet as it would require a lot of investment so it is unlikely that these methods will take of on global scales any time in the foreseeable future until humanity gets desperate to obtain more oil and thus non-conventional oil can not currently be considered as a viable alternative to the conventional oil and energy we obtain from it.