Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CCS is the one technology that could be termed green, but which does
not require us to move out of our “energy comfort zone” of fossil fuels.
Oil and mobility
Transport accounts for 23 percent of all emissions, and is the fastest
growing source of them. The transport sector is also uniquely hard to
decarbonize, because it is comprised of hundreds of millions of internal
combustion engines, and is nearly totally (95 percent) dependent on one
fuel source - oil. The one success story in weaning transport off hydrocar-
bons has been the electrification of trains, which can be run off central-
ized low-carbon power sources like nuclear reactors.
Transport and oil: current policies
Average annual %
growth 2006-30
Transport fuel
% of total in 2006
% of total in 2030
Oil
94.5
91.9
1.4
Biofuels
1.1
3.7
6.8
Other fuels
4.4
4.3
1.4
Source: International Energy Agency,
World Energy Outlook 2008
Of all fossil fuels, oil is the most convenient. And no one should com-
pletely bemoan its use. The commercial development of oil in the mid-
nineteenth century saved from extinction the sperm whale, which up to
that point had been hunted for the oily substance used for lighting in its
dome-like head. A small but very useful portion of total oil consump-
tion goes into plastics, synthetics, medicines and foods. However, we
are currently locked into using it for the majority of our transport, and
we need to reduce our dependency by using less of it (in more efficient
combustion engines) while at the same time developing alternatives (such
as electric cars).
There are some geological constraints to fossil fuels - more so for oil
and gas than for coal, which is spread fairly abundantly across the world.
There is a long-running controversy about peak oil (see p.51), by which is
meant the anticipated peak in oil reserves and production. Purely in terms
of supply and demand, it is unlikely that oil production will peak in the
next twenty years or so, if only because any seriously high price for oil will
accelerate production of the huge amounts of unconventional oil that lie
in Canada and Venezuela. (This, of course, assumes that the governments
