Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Energy, Emissions, and Action
u
.
Setting the Stage
This chapter moves our discussion to how to reduce the
effect of the energy we use on our environment. The
amount of energy we use is so large that it is hard to get
a feel for its size. I start with comparing the total primary
energy supply (TPES) to natural phenomena that we
could possibly use to supply the world
s energy needs.
The TPES from all sources amounted to a yearly average
power of
'
] (a terawatt is one
billion kilowatts), a number that is too big to mean much
to most people. It is the energy used to light all the
world
terawatts in
[
s cars, trucks, buses,
trains, airplanes, and ships; produce all the steel, cement,
aluminum, and other metals; run our farms; produce all
our computers; and everything else that we make or use.
It also keeps going up and was
'
s light bulbs; run all the world
'
.
In my time as a working physicist I did experiments
involving subnuclear processes and processes that were
related to the scale of our cosmos; from a billionth of a
billionth of a meter to
.
terawatts in
billion light years. Those
numbers mean something to me mathematically, but are
not easy to visualize. So it is with the TPES. It is hard to
understand what
trillion barrels of oil per year really is
(it would cover the entire United States with oil one foot
deep), or what many billion tons of coal is (six billion tons
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