Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
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THE GREATEST ENERGY
TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
FOSSIL FUEL POWER: CHEAP, PLENTIFUL, RELIABLE,
SCALABLE—INDISPENSABLE
This is the challenge: finding a source of energy that is cheap, plentiful, reliable, and scalable. As we've
seen, it's a challenge that is incredibly difficult to overcome. Power from sunlight has the problems of di-
luteness and intermittency and so requires too many resources to concentrate and store in order to create an
independent, scalable power source. And plants are a form of storing solar energy, but they don't scale well
because of the resources needed to grow them and the amount of land available to grow them on.
Well, there is good news. There is a form of solar energy, a biofuel that has none of these problems be-
cause nature has already concentrated and stored the sunlight of plants that lived hundreds of millions of
years ago. Those dead plants are called fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are so called because they are (in most theories) high-energy concentrations of ancient dead
plants.Ourentirecivilization isbasedonburningthesedeadplants,whicharemadeupofhydrogenandcar-
bon atoms connected by powerful chemical bonds. When you burn gasoline in your car or coal in a power
plant or gas to heat your home, those bonds break apart, releasing enormous amounts of energy. They exist
in solid (coal), liquid (oil), and gas (natural gas) form.
If you've ever used charcoal instead of wood to grill food, you grasp the basic advantage of using ancient
dead plant fuel. The charcoal can generate more heat in less space because it has been “cooked”—primarily,
the water has been taken out of it, producing a higher concentration of energy (“burning” water doesn't re-
lease much energy).
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Well, fossil fuels are naturally, thoroughly “cooked” plant energy. Over millions of
years, as plants pile up and are covered by more and more layers of soil, the natural forces of the Earth heat
them up and concentrate them into far purer forms of energy than wood or charcoal. Thus they have the
advantage of being naturally concentrated and stored.
The other advantage they have is that they exist in astonishingly, astonishingly large quantities. For ex-
ample, the world has an estimated 3,050 years (at current usage rates) of “total remaining recoverable re-
serves” of coal.
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