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.

Arctic Prospective Oil Resources

In a world desperately thirsty for oil, the Arctic and its resources seems a very appealing option. With increasing demand for oil and increasing prices, there has been higher interest shown regarding the Arctic on the global scale. In 2008 US Geological Survey estimated that the are north of the Arctic Circle has 90 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and 44 billion barrels of natural gas. This represents 13% of the expected undiscovered oil in the world (USGeological Survey, 2008).

The Arctic Circle appears to encompass 6% of the Earth’s surface, one third of which is found above sea level and another one third is in continental shelves beneath less than 500 m of water. The rest is deep ocean basins historically covered by ice (Gautier, 2009). Deep oceanic waters are known to have low oil potential at the moment but the continental shelves of the Arctic potentially have very high recoverable oil hidden within them. Until very recently the Arctic was seen as a very remote and technically difficult region to access with high costs of oil recovery. Whilst low-cost recovery oil was still widely available, little exploration was done in the Arctic. Some offshore wells have been drilled such as those in Mackenzie Delta, the Barents Sea, offshore Alaska and the Sverdrup Basin but even these were seen as economically unsustainable and hence were abandoned (Gautier, 2009).

However now there is an increasing interest in the Arctic due to various factors. Firstly after decades of substantial ice melting, the Northwest east passage can become a viable transportation route hence the Arctic becomes more accessible following the major decline in ice cover since 1987 (Harsem, 2011). Secondly in 2007 Russia planted a deep sea flag at the North Pole- Arctic region as an important evidence of leadership of the Kremlin. Third oil prices increases push for new discoveries to sustain high demand for oil. Finally in 2008 US geological study stated that about ¼ of the world’s undiscovered oil is probably located in the Arctic.

The exploration of the Arctic oil is still considered more technically challenging than any other environment. The USGS estimates that 84% of the oil and gas there is located offshore which means it is more difficult and expensive to recover than the oil and gas from onshore oil fields. Furthermore the US Geological Survey (USGS) did not consider economic factors such as the effects of permanent sea ice or oceanic water depth in its assessment of undiscovered oil and gas resources (USGeological Survey, 2008). Nevertheless all these difficulties don’t seem to scare the northern countries in the race to obtain these territories with the aim of exploration them for resources. The four Arctic countries- Russia, US, Canada and Norway are already looking to expand their activities in the Northern region whilst Iceland and Greenland are looking at becoming oil and gas producers. Figure 1 below shows the oil fields that are assessed by the USGS in their 2008 report about the Arctic oil. It is obvious that with oil being as highly valued resource as gold, new formations and the right of exploration could create major geopolitical conflicts between the countries involved. It is especially worrying as Russia and USA are involved- historical opponents and competitors against each other so perhaps we have a worry of another cold war approaching!? Russia has already landed some deep sea flags in the area to try and claim the northern territories.

Figure 1.

Source: USGS, 2008. Location of Arctic Basins assessed by the USGS.

Whilst little research is done to this day regarding the Arctic, its resources and whether they are economically sustainable to recover, evidence seems to suggest that the region certainly has a fair amount of unexplored resources buried under the surface. All of the northern countries that have potential access to the area are currently undertaking research into the area and its resources. Perhaps the Arctic oil is our solution to the problem of scarcity of oil and will push the peak oil point further away from what it could be otherwise hence oil is a worry for a very distant future. Also perhaps it could mean that non-conventional oil resources do not need to be explored just yet meaning high costs and likewise renewable energy is not the only solution.