Our Energy Future

Resources, Alternatives and the Environment

Christian Ngo, Joseph Natowitz

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119213390
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Energía

Presents an overview on the different aspects of the energy value chain and discusses the issues that future energy is facing

This book covers energy and the energy policy choices which face society. The book presents easy-to-grasp information and analysis, and includes statistical data for energy production, consumption and simple formulas. Among the aspects considered are: science, technology, economics and the impact on health and the environment. In this new edition two new chapters have been added: The first new chapter deals with unconventional fossil fuels, a resource which has become very important from the economical point of view, especially in the United States. The second new chapter presents the applications of nanotechnology in the energy domain.

• Provides a global vision of available and potential energy sources
• Discusses advantages and drawbacks to help prepare current and future generations to use energy differently
• Includes new chapters covering unconventional fossil fuels and nanotechnology as new energy

Our Energy Future: Resources, Alternatives and the Environment, Second Edition, is written for professionals, students, teachers, decision-makers and politicians involved in the energy domain and interested in environmental issues.

CHAPTER 1
We Need Energy

Energy is a thermodynamic quantity equivalent to the capacity of a physical system to produce work or heat. It is essential to life. If we live better than our primitive ancestors, it is because we use more energy to do work, to produce heat, and to move people and goods. Energy can exist in various forms (chemical, mechanical, electrical, light, etc.). It is in the process of transforming energy from one form to another that we are able to harness part of it for our own use.

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BASIC NATURE OF ENERGY

Energy is related to a fundamental symmetry of nature: the invariance of the physical laws under translation in time. In simple words this means that any experiment reproduced at a later time under the same conditions should give the same results. This symmetry law leads to the conservation of the physical quantity, which is energy. There are also other symmetries that lead to important conservation laws. Space invariance with respect to translation or rotation leads, respectively, to conservation laws for momentum and angular momentum. This means that if we translate or rotate an experimental arrangement, we will get the same experimental results. Conservation of energy, momentum, and angular momentum is of basic importance and governs the processes occurring in the universe.

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1.1. GENERALITIES

1.1.1. Primary and Secondary Energy

All of the energy sources that we use, except geothermal and nuclear energies, are derived initially from solar energy (Figure 1.1). The fossil fuels that we use today—coal, oil, and natural gas—are derived from organisms (primarily ocean planktons) that grew over several hundreds of millions of years, storing the solar energy that reached the earth’s surface. Renewable energies—hydro, biomass, and wind—are also directly or indirectly derived from the energy of our sun. Solar and geothermal energy, although technically not renewable are often classified as such because they are effectively inexhaustible on any practical time scale.

Figure 1.1. Origin of different sources of energy used by humans.

Nuclear energy is derived from uranium nuclei contained in the earth. This element was formed in heavy stars and was scattered in space when those stars died. Uranium nuclei were present in the dust from which the solar system was formed about 4.5 billion years ago. The earth formed by accretion of such dust and some thermal energy due to this process still remains. However, most of the thermal energy contained in the earth comes from the decay of radioactive nuclei present in the earth and initially produced in stars.

It is useful to distinguish between primary and secondary energy sources. Primary energy sources correspond to those that exist prior to any human-induced modification. This includes fuels extracted from the ground (coal, crude oil, or natural gas) or energy captured from or stored in natural sources (solar radiation, wind, biomass, etc.). Secondary energy sources are obtained from the transformation of primary sources. Gasoline or diesel fuel from crude oil and charcoal from wood are examples of secondary sources.

We can also distinguish between nonrenewable and renewable energies. Nonrenewable energies are in finite quantities on the earth. Like uranium, which comes from the dust of stars, they could have been present at the earth’s formation (about 4.5 billion years ago) or, like fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, crude oil, oil shale, etc.), they could have been synthesized several hundred million years ago. In contrast to the nonrenewable energies, renewable energies will be available as long as the earth and the sun exist, which is estimated to be about 5 billion years.

1.1.2. Energy Units

The joule is the standard energy unit in the international system. Defined as 1 kg·m²/s², it is a very small quantity of energy compared to the amounts we use in daily life. For that reason, we will frequently use another unit widely used in the energy domain: the kilowatt-hour and its multiples:

Prefixes defining multiples of any physical quantity are shown in Table 1.1.

TABLE 1.1. Multiple Prefixes

Prefix	Multiplicative Factor	Symbol	Prefix	Multiplicative Factor	Symbol
Deca	10^1	da	Deci	10^−1	d
Hecto	10^2	h	Centi	10^−2	c
Kilo...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
• PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
• CHAPTER 1: We Need Energy
• CHAPTER 2: Oil and Natural Gas
• CHAPTER 3: Unconventional Oil and Gas Resources
• CHAPTER 4: Coal
• CHAPTER 5: Fossil Fuels and Greenhouse Effect
• CHAPTER 6: Energy from Water
• CHAPTER 7: Biomass
• CHAPTER 8: Solar Energy
• CHAPTER 9: Geothermal Energy
• CHAPTER 10: Wind Energy
• CHAPTER 11: Nuclear Energy
• CHAPTER 12: Electricity
• CHAPTER 13: Weak Point of Energy Supply Chain
• CHAPTER 14: Transportation
• CHAPTER 15: Housing
• CHAPTER 16: Smart Energy Consumption
• CHAPTER 17: Hydrogen
• CHAPTER 18: Nanotechnology and Energy
• CHAPTER 19: Conclusion
• EXERCISES
• SOLUTIONS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT