The Sky is Falling

So this is my last post in my Minecraft themed energy blog. I have really enjoyed writing this blog and I hope you have enjoyed reading it and have found it informative. I am saying farewell to all my dear readers for now although I might write more posts in my blog in the future especially regarding the current economics crude oil prices situation. I will also update my blog if there are any major changes in the energy industry that occur in the foreseeable future. I have personally learned a lot about oil and energy and hope that you have all found my blog informative too. One of the reasons I picked this topic is because I am considering doing an MSc in geology or finance and energy thus now I feel like I have something to talk about at my interview if I do apply and actually know what I am talking about which is always a bonus. J I have also realized through writing this blog that I definitely find the topic interesting and am now seriously looking at MSc courses related to the energy industry.

A quick summary of my blog. In my blog I have covered The Anthropocene and climate change; global energy consumption; Malthusian theories of consumption; global distribution of oil as well as its formation and recovery methods; peak oil phenomenon and the debate of how much crude oil we have left; possible undiscovered oil reserves of the Arctic; non-conventional oil and the implication of its recovery; renewable energy; nuclear energy and disasters and a little bit about the current oil economics global affairs. Thus I have covered a whole scope of different areas including geography, economics, geology, photography and politics.

The slogan question at the top of my blog states: “Is it the apocalypse of the Black Gold era and what are the alternative- from dusk till dawn or are we all doomed?”. I think I have a little bit more knowledge to answer this question after the creation of my blog. Although I discovered that the crude oil situation on the planet is indeed a sorrow site, which is also quite scary, there are a lot of other potential sources of energy. Although all these areas such as yet undiscovered Arctic oil, non-conventional oil, renewable and nuclear energy all require a great amount of research still to be done, I think there is still time for the research to take place and humanity shall be ready for change, the day crude oil runs out. Unlike the peak oil documentary, it is clear that crude oil will not suddenly disappear so I think we don’t really have anything to worry about right now however more research is certainly needed. With those thoughts, I shall leave you all and I wish everyone an amazing 2015!

Thank you very much for reading,

The Creeper.

Renewable energy

Renewable energy comes from resources that can be renewed in a reasonable amount of time and not from fossil fuels, which will run out. Renewable energy includes wind power, solar power, hydropower, biomass, biofuel and geothermal energy. I have already written detailed blog posts about wind power and biofuel so this is just a fairly quick post to summarize the remaining alternative energies that exist for humanity to use instead of crude oil.

According to renewable global status report, 19% of the global energy consumption in 2014 already came from renewable energy and 22% of all our electricity was generated from energy produced by renewable energy sources (Sawin, 2014). Worldwide investments in renewable energy were $214 billion in 2013 with particular interest in renewable energy shown by USA and China (Sawin, 2014). The main advantage of renewable energy is that production of energy this way is much more environmentally friendly and causes less GHGs emissions in comparison to the conventional crude oil recovery methods. Furthermore renewable energy is not geographically constrained unlike oil, deposits of which are only found in particular countries on Earth. Thus each country can generate one type or another of renewable energy making it independent of the volatile oil prices, economically more stable and secure as well as providing energy securities regardless of geopolitics conflicts occurring elsewhere in the world and making the country “green”.

Below there is a video of how renewable energy is produced by all the methods that I have not discussed in details however I feel like a little summary of each method is nevertheless required in this post. Firstly solar power produces energy by converting the thermal energy emitted by the sun and well as the light energy into electricity. This is mainly done using solar panels. Hydropower uses the kinetic energy produced by flowing rivers and oceans on our planet to convert it to electricity. This is done using dams and it is possible because water is much more dense than air thus any flowing body of it produces kinetic energy that can be converted and other types of energy making it more useful for humans. Biomass is the biological material that one gets from currently living or recently living organisms on our planet via either combustion thus converting biomass to thermal energy or by converting it to different forms of biofuels by biochemical processes. Finally geothermal energy uses the fact that the Earth’s core is much warmer than the surface and regardless of the season or atmospheric temperatures, the temperature below the surface is always warm. This is partially due to the radioactive decay of the minerals found below the Earth’s surface that release a lot of heat during the decay. Thermal energy derived from the decay can also be converted into electricity and other useful energies for the society.

Renewable energy has seen increased popularity in our society especially as oil prices are rising and crude oil is running out. Many more investments and research have been done into different types of renewable energy. Even the developing countries and emerging economies are now starting to explore the field of alternative energies treating it as long-term investments into the future. Below there is an example of an advert from a brochure in South Africa promoting renewable energy.

Figure 1.

Source. South African brochure advert promoting renewable energy.

Marred Christmas- Poking the Russian Bear

“You are Fourth on my List of Loveable Evil Dictators- after Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler- you are the greatest..”

So today might be Christmas for some but it is very not Christmassy for others. Just like me, sat alone, snowed in, in my house in Leicestershire on Christmas Day with no humans to appear in the foreseeable future in my life, I am making a doll installation; the world is struggling with oil prices whilst Europe and USA celebrate Christmas. For major oil producing countries such as the Middle East and Russia, who do not even celebrate Christmas, this American “super low price oil” Christmas joke is really not funny. During December oil prices have dropped so much that the whole world has become shaken up. During my almost 4 years of driving experience, I do not remember the petrol station ever telling me a price lower than 130 p per liter of fuel and yet here I am, filling up my tank at only 113 p per liter. Some experts believe that this is all America’s fault as they try to cripple Russia and control their pipelines to the EU via Ukraine and Iranian and Syrian (The Middle East) pipelines to the EU via Syria in order to gain global control of the essential resource and become the global leader. The resource, oil, which America does not have enough of, to be the king of the world, has to be controlled in alternative ways. However all the negativity to one side, some see the oil price drop as a positive thing where this is America’s attempt to help Russia out and help them get rid of the Putin dictator. Help, of course I say with a tint of irony and sarcasm, as whilst it may seem that USA is helping Russia get rid of another evil dictator, it also seems that by doing this they hope to achieve a country that is weaker and no longer competes with America for world domination. Putin has already shown himself to be a master player in the chess game of energy politics so the hope that lower oil prices will crush Putin has to be met with a degree of uncertainty. The article describes today oil price affairs and tries to suggest the real reasons for them.