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Oil Gluts and Inexhaustible Energy Systems
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10048 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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4 / 1986 |
1,386 Words |
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Alvin M. Weinberg
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As prices dip and global oil consumption drops annually, energy seems no longer to be as imperative an issue. Conservation and the development of new energy sources are the main factors involved in turning the former "crisis" around. As pleasant as the current glut may be to some, all good things must end, including the present low oil prices. The following article examines the viability of "inexhaustible" energy systems as a long-term alternative to dependence on fossil fuels.
With the spot price of oil falling below $15 per barrel and the world's consumption of oil some five million barrels per day lower than it was seven years ago, and the U.S. importation of petroleum this year almost five million barrels per day lower than it was in 1977, it is no wonder the public no longer regards energy as an important problem. President Carter's announcement of only seven years ago that energy was our most pressing issue seems terribly off the mark in today's light.
Three developments are responsible for this extraordinary turnaround in energy. First, conservation has been a great success. As the price of oil went above $30 per barrel, new sources of oil were exploited; moreover, our society became more energy efficient. Thus per dollar of GNP, the United States expended 26,500 Btu of primary energy in 1974, when the first oil crisis struck; in 1984, we spent only 21,000 Btu of primary energy per dollar of GNP, all measured in constant 1982 dollars.
Not all of this improvement in the energy efficiency of our economy is attributable simply to more efficient cars or home appliances or house insulation. Another important factor, and one that is not sufficiently recognized, is the extraordinary shift toward electricity. In 1968, 18 percent of U.S. primary energy was converted into electricity; in 1985 this fraction had risen to 35 percent. Why should this lead to higher energy efficiency of the economy? After all, when fuel is converted into electricity in a power plant, more than 65 percent of the energy in the fuel is thrown away as waste heat. True enough: but at the point of end use, even for heating, electricity is exquisitely controllable and highly efficient. What is lost at the power station is in many extremely important instances more than regained at the point of end use. Today, for example, fully 20 percent of our steel is manufactured in electrically driven mini-mills. The direct energy used in such mills is but 30 percent of that used in standard open-hearth steel manufacturing. In addition, because mini-mills can be built close to their customers, mini-mill steel implies less energy used for transport of both the raw materials (scrap) and finished products from the mini-mill. Thus, as C. Burwell of the Institute for Energy Analysis has stressed, electricity per se is an important agent of energy conservation.
The third factor is the shift to energy sources other than petroleum. Wood now accounts for some 3.5 percent of our primary energy; geothermal energy, about 0.1 percent; and solar heating of houses and of water, about .01 percent. Except for wood, these are small compared to the expansion of nuclear power. In 1974, 48 nuclear reactors accounted for 6.1 percent of our electricity; today this number of reactors has doubled and they provide 16 percent of our electricity. In the world, some 390 reactors with a capacity of about 285,000 megawatts now account for 6 percent of the world's primary energy and 20 percent of the world's electricity. Had the electricity from all these nuclear reactors been
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