THE ANTHROPOCENE - Plastics and Environmental Sustainability - page 9

United States leads the world in energy use; 4.6% of the world population
in United States consume approximately 19% of the energy, while 7% in the
European Union consume 15%. While most of this (~78%) is from fossil
fuels approximately 9% of the energy is from renewable sources. But in the
medium term, the United States is forecasted to have ample energy and will
in fact be an exporter of energy, thanks to the exploitation of natural gas
reserves.
Increased reliance on conventional fossil fuel reserves appears to be the
most likely medium-term strategy to address the energy deficit, assuming
no dramatic technology breakthrough (such as low-temperature fusion or
splitting water with solar energy) is made. But it is becoming increasingly
apparent that any form of future energy needs to be far less polluting and
carbon intensive relative to fossil fuel burning. If not, there is a real
possibility that humankind will “run out of livable environment” long before
they run out of energy sources! About 26% of the global greenhouse gas
(GHG) emissions (mostly CO 2 ) is already from energy production.
1.1.1 Fossil Fuel Energy
Fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas, were created millions of years
ago by natural geothermal processing of primitive biomass that flourished
at the time. Thus, fossil fuel reserves are in essence a huge savings account
ofsequesteredsolarenergy.Sincetheindustrialrevolution,wehavesteadily
depleted this resource to support human activity, relying on it heavily for
heating and generating power. About 88% of the global energy used today
is still derived from fossil fuels, 10 and that translates primarily into burning
87 million barrels of oil a day (bbl/d) in 2010 (estimated to rise to nearly 90
bbl/d in 2012). 11
1.1.1.1 Oil
Since Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well at the Allegheny River (PA)
in 1859, we have in the United States ravenously consumed the resource
also importing half of our oil needs. Global reserves of oil presently stand
only at about 1.3 trillion barrels, over half of it in the Middle East and
Venezuela. The US oil reserves that stand only at 25 billion barrels (2010)
are continuing to be very aggressively extracted at the rate of 5.5 million
(bbl/d) and can therefore only last for less than a decade. Hubbert (1956) 12
proposed a bell-shaped Gaussian curve (see Fig. 1.5 ) to model US oil