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.

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.