fueling the planet - the past, present, and future of energy guidebook.pdf

7/28/2019 Fueling The Planet - The Past, Present, And Future Of Energy Guidebook.pdf

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Professor Michael B. McElroyHARVARD UNIVERSITY

FUELINGTHE PLANET:

THE PAST, PRESENT, ANDFUTURE OF ENERGY

COURSE GUIDE


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Recorded Books is a trademark of

Recorded Books, LLC. All rights reserved.

Fueling the Planet:The Past, Present, and Future of Energy

Professor Michael B. McElroyHarvard University


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Fueling the Planet:The Past, Present, and Future of Energy

Professor Michael B. McElroy

Executive Editor

Donna F. Carnahan

RECORDING

ProducerDavid Markowitz

DirectorIan McCulloch

COURSE GUIDE

EditorJames Gallagher

DesignEdward White

Lecture content 2009 by Michael B. McElroy

Course guide 2009 by Recorded Books, LLC

72009 by Recorded Books, LLC

Cover image: Detail from Pines at Sunrise Charlie Sawyer

#UT136 ISBN: 978-1-4361-8910-1

All beliefs and opinions expressed in this audio/video program and accompanying course guideare those of the author and not of Recorded Books, LLC, or its employees.


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Course Syllabus

Fueling the Planet:

The Past, Present, and Future of Energy

About Your Professor ....................................................................................................4

Introduction ......................................................................................................................5

Lecture 1 A Short History of the Earth ......................................................................6

Lecture 2 What Is Energy? ......................................................................................10

Lecture 3 The Sun ..................................................................................................14

Lecture 4 Fossil Fuels: Coal and Oil (Part I) ..........................................................19

Lecture 5 Oil (Part II) and Natural Gas....................................................................25

Lecture 6 Water and Wind Power............................................................................30

Lecture 7 The Nature and History of Nuclear Power ..............................................35

Lecture 8 Steam and the Industrial Revolution........................................................41

Lecture 9 Electricity..................................................................................................47

Lecture 10 The Internal Combustion Engine ............................................................53

Lecture 11 How We Use Energy Today ....................................................................61

Lecture 12 The Climate Challenge ............................................................................67

Lecture 13 Options for a Low-Carbon Energy Economy:Corn, Sugar Cane, and Other Biofuels ..................................................73

Lecture 14 Visions for a Sustainable Energy Future ................................................78

Glossary ........................................................................................................................84

Course Materials............................................................................................................86

Energy Recycling Facts ................................................................................................87

Notes..............................................................................................................................88


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Michael McElroy received his Ph.D. from Queens University in Belfast,Northern Ireland. In 1970, he was named Abbott Lawrence Rotch Professorof Atmospheric Sciences at Harvard University, and in 1975 he was appoint-ed director of the Center for Earth and Planetary Physics. McElroy served aschairman of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences from 1986 to2000. He was appointed director of the newly constituted Harvard UniversityCenter for the Environment in 2001 and now leads an interdisciplinary studyon the implications of Chinas rapid industrial development for the local,regional, and global environment. In 1997, he was named the Gilbert ButlerProfessor of Environmental Studies. He is a Fellow of the American Academyof Arts and Sciences.

McElroys research interests range from studies on the origin and evolutionof the planets to a more recent emphasis on the effects of human activity onthe global environment of the Earth. He is the author of more than two hun-dred technical papers contributing to our understanding of human-inducedchanges in stratospheric ozone and to the potential for serious disruptions to

global and regional air quality and climate due to anthropogenically relatedemissions of greenhouse gases. Professor McElroy is also the author of sev-eral books, including Energizing China: Reconciling Environmental Protectionand Economic Growth (Harvard University Center for the Environment, 1998)and The Atmospheric Environment: Effects of Human Activity (PrincetonUniversity Press, 2002). Professor McElroy also recorded one of the firstModern Scholar audio lecture courses, Global Warming, Global Threat(Recorded Books, 2003).

You will get the most from this course if you have Professor McElroys

Energy: Perspectives, Problems, and Prospects (Oxford University Press,USA, 2009), which is used as his primary resource.

PhotographcourtesyofMichaelB.

McElroy

About Your Professor

Michael B. McElroy


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Introduction

These lectures rely on a book Ive been working on for a number of years, abook titled Energy: Perspectives, Problems, and Prospects (December 2009,Oxford University Press). The theme of the book and my particular odyssey

here is to try to get a real sense of the history of the world and how it got towhere it is, and with that to examine the problems that have arisen along theway. Its a theme of the interplay between human activity, energy consump-tion, environmental change, and the compromises that have had to be madealong the way.

One of my main objectives in writing the book was to provide a treatmentthat would not be too technical but would still provide a real sense of how wecan get our hands around this very complicated problemat a time whenvery serious decisions about energy have to be made by the United States

and other countries around the world.

Pines at SunrisePhotography by Charlie Sawyer, Tallahassee, Florida.

CharlieSawyer


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In the Beginning

The Earth is approximately 4.6 billion years old. It formed,together with the planets and the sun, from a spinning mass ofgas and dust that composed the original solar nebula. This

matter accumulated to form the proto-Earth, and the planet

started to heat up. As this heating proceeded, the distinct zonesof the Earth formed: the core, the dense central part; the mantle, the hotregion on the outside; the crust; and the ocean and atmosphere.

As heat came out of the Earth it caused the crustal plates to move around.This drift of the continents rearranged the Earth over time, and with itrearranged the climate as well.

Life began early in the history of the Earth. The oldest rocks found on thesurface today have clear signs of the presence of life. So life is an ancientphenomenon, perhaps 3.8 billion years old, or even older. The early forms oflife, prokaryotes, were relatively simple organisms such as bacteria and blue-green algae. These prokaryotes are still here today, and most likely this lifebegan in the ocean rather than on the continents.

Perhaps 1.5 billion years ago, life became a little more complex. Prokaryotesjoined together; they essentially fused to provide the opportunity for morecomplex genetic material and organisms (eukaryotes). The eukaryotes werestill very simple, but they could do more complicated things.

Some of these organisms developed the capability of surviving in the pres-

ence of pure oxygen. The early organisms would have been poisoned byoxygen, so after developing the capability to survive in its presence, they hada big advantage. They could use sunlight for energy by photosynthesis anddispose of the oxygen waste in the atmosphere.

Therefore, approximately 1.5 billion years ago, the atmosphere began tomove closer to its present condition.

The profusion of life continued, though not in a steady fashion. It tended tomove in bursts. There was an explosion of new life-forms that occurred in theperiod known as the Cambrian, about 340 to 510 million years ago.

Sixty-five million years ago, a massive meteor hit the Earth, and it changedthe climate. It wiped out the dinosaurs and essentially changed the character-istics of some of the large forms of life spread around the Earth.

The demise of the dinosaurs proved beneficial for the world of mammals.Humans are a very late arrival on the scene. In fact, Homo sapiens sapienshave been on the planet for only 50,000 years or so, having descended fromearlier forms of humans.L

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The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Michael B. McElroys Energy:Perspectives, Problems, and Prospects, chapters 1 and 2.

Lecture 1:

A Short History of the Earth


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On the Move

During the last major ice age, humans began to move around the world.Human ancestors probably began life in central Africa, and as they moved intothe Middle East and farther north into Europe and Eurasia, some of thesehardy individuals were able to walk across the Bering Strait, the body of water

now separating America from Asia. In a short period of time those humansmoved all the way through the Americas down to the tip of South America.

The story of civilization continued, and a couple of hundred years agohumans experienced what is usually referred to as the Industrial Revolution,which essentially pointed the way for the entire modern industrial energy-intensive economy.

Understanding the History

If the span of the Earths 4.5 billion years was put in the context of a single

year, the history would look something like this:

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January 1: Formation of Earth.

September 1: Appearance of life on Earth.

November 20: Profusion of organisms.

November 24: 9 p.m. Appearance of vascular plants.

November 25: Expansion of life from ocean to land.

December 6: Appearance of amphibians.December 12: Massive extinction.

December 18: Appearance of mammals.

December 25: 5 p.m. Extinction of dinosaurs.

December 31: 8 p.m. Appearance of Homo erectus.

December 31: 11:42 p.m. Appearance ofHomo sapiens.

December 31: 11:56:30 p.m. Human migration around globe.

December 31: 11:58:30 p.m. Development of agriculture anddomestication of animals.*

December 31: 11:59:58 p.m. Industrial Revolution.

*Agriculture began as best as can be told in the Middle East in the region generally referredto as the Fertile Crescent (the area currently occupied by Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and partof Iraq). There are good reasons to believe that the development of agriculture occurred inresponse to a change in climate. Before the climate moved to a less hospitable condition,this was undoubtedly a Garden of Edena region with abundant genotypes of a wide vari-ety of plants and animals such as sheep and goats. People didnt have to work very hardfor sustenance, but as the climate changed, it was advantageous to cultivate plants anddomesticate animals that otherwise might move off to better pastures.


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When the Earths history is put in the preceding context, its apparent thathumans are late arrivals on the scene, but are now important players in theglobal system. In many respects, humans control the Earth. Humans havechopped down trees, built large cities, learned how to fly, learned how tomove material and information globally, effectively, instantaneously, and have

also learned how to change the atmosphere on a global scaleand conse-quently have developed the capacity to change the climate.

A portion of the Hong Kong skyline.

JasonMurray/shutterstock.com


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1. What are prokaryotes?

2. What events in the history of the Earth contributed the most to the planetscurrent energy-intensive economy?

McElroy, Michael B. Energy: Perspectives, Problems, and Prospects. NewYork: Oxford University Press, USA, 2009.

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.

Questions

Suggested Reading

Other Books of Interest

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

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What exactly is meant by energy and power?

For the purposes of these lectures, a useful definition for ener-gy is that it is the capacity to do work. Work is accomplished byexerting a force to move something over some distance.

Imagine throwing a ball in the air. It will rise to a level, then fall

back to the ground. As the ball rises it has to work against theforce of gravity. One has to provide energy to get the ball moving. So youveprovided the ball with kinetic energy, which is determined by mass andspeed. As the ball rises and slows down, its kinetic energy is transformed intopotential energy, and all the kinetic energy is converted to potential energy atthe top of the trajectory of the ball.

Then as the ball falls it accelerates and regains kinetic energy. Ignoring suchmatters as air resistance, it has recovered all its kinetic energy and speedwhen it returns to the ground.

Now suppose water is stored at high altitude in a dam. Imagine unplugging thedam and allowing the water to run. The water possesses potential energy. Asyou release it, it will pick up speed as it runs downhill and its potential energy isconverted to kinetic energy. If you could capture that energy, you could use thespeed of the water to turn the wheels of a water mill, for instance.

Electricity is another form of energy, produced by converting from one formof energy to another. Thus, electricity is a derivative.

Suppose you plug a lamp into an electrical outlet and the light comes on. The

energy is supplied in the form of electricity. In the lamp, the electrical energy isconverted to light. So if the bulb is rated at 100 watts, a watt is a measure ofpower, the rate at which energy isdelivered to that bulb per unit oftime. The watt is named afterJames Watt, the father of theIndustrial Revolution.

Suppose you leave the lamp onfor an hour. The lamp will haveconsumed a given amount ofelectricity, so the total amountconsumed depends on the time.Usually, consumption of electrici-ty is measured in kilowatt hours,a power supply of 1,000 wattsconsumed for one hour.

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Michael B. McElroys Energy:Perspectives, Problems, and Prospects, chapter 3.

Lecture 2:

What Is Energy?

LECTURETWO

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Denise Campione/shutterstock.com

A desk lamp using a traditional,incandescent bulb and a newer,energy-saving fluorescent bulb.


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A very small fraction of the electricity consumed by the lamp is actually con-verted to light. Most of the energy is converted to heat. So heat is anotherform of energy. And light is still another form of energy.

Part of the modern economy is moving to increase the efficiency of every-thing we do, and one example of this is the increasing use of fluorescent light

bulbs, which are more efficient than incandescent bulbs.

Chemical Energy

A log is harvested from a forest. The log contains energy.A match could be used to light the log and produce fire andheat. But how did that energy get in the wood? The sunlightwas captured by a green plant that grew into the tree that pro-duced the log, so the energy was thus stored in the log in chemical form.

Again, this is an example of the conversion of energy from one form to another.

How efficiently do green plants capture sunlight? The answer: not very. Forthe amount of sunlight that shines down on a forest, less than 1 percent ofthe energy in the light is absorbed by the plants in the forest. In an agricultur-al system designed for great efficiency, it might be 2 or 3 percent, at most.The plant has to have a supply of nutrient and water to run photosynthesis,which requires energy. So part of the energy absorbed from the sun is usedto feed the plant and keep it functioning.

Nuclear Energy

Six forms of energy have been discussed to this point:kinetic, potential, light, electricity, heat, and chemical. Theseventh form of energy under discussion is nuclear energy.

An atom is composed of a nucleus and electrons, with theelectrons revolving around the nucleus. The chemical energy previouslytalked about is mostly the energy involved in the rearrangement of atoms toform molecules, larger composite structures, changing from one form toanother, either requiring energy to do so or releasing energy in the process.Thats the fundamental nature of chemical energy.

Nuclear energy is involved in the properties of the nucleus. The nucleus con-sists of electrically neutral particles (neutrons) and positively charged elements(protons). These are tightly bound together by strong nuclear forces.

If you were able to rearrange the nucleus, in principle you could release vastamounts of energy, or alternatively you might have to use a large amount ofenergy to rearrange the nucleus of a very stable atom.

So the nature of nuclear energy is rearranging energy implicitly bound upin the nucleus of atoms. This can be done by fission, the process wherein

you break the nucleus of the atom apart, releasing its components andreforming them into other atoms, and thus releasing vast amounts ofenergy in the process.

Albert Einstein formulated the famous equation E=MC2, making the pointthat energy and mass are intimately related. So if you can reduce the massof some system, the reduction in mass must be manifest by an increase inenergy. In other words, nuclear energy is basically a matter of changing themass of elements and in the process releasing energy.

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LECTURETWO

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Of course, nuclear power was initially developed during World War II tomake a devastating weapon, but it can also be used to create electricity.

Units of Energy

The British thermal unit (BTU) is a measure of energy, the energy that

would be required to change the temperature of one pound of water by onedegree Fahrenheit.

Another common unit of energy is the calorie, the energy required to raisethe temperature of a gram of water by one degree Centigrade. Both theseunits depend on humans experience with water, and scientists dont like theirunits to depend on common substances. So physicists have developed amore rigorous way to talk about units of energy.

The basic unit of length is the meter. The basic unit of time is the second,and the basic unit of mass is the kilogram. With these three measures a unit

of energy can be defined. The physical unit of energy that comes out of thisanalysis is the joule.

There are a variety of different units for the energy people consume in theirdaily lives. Electricity is generally measured in terms of kilowatt hours. If youbuy natural gas, your gas will be billed in units called therms, fundamentally ameasure of BTUs. One hundred thousand BTUs equals one therm. So if youwanted to compare gas prices with electricity prices, or therms to kilowatthours, you could convert both to BTUs and then compare.

A quad, or quadrillion BTUs, is the unit used to describe the energy con-sumed by a nation. The number the United States consumes per year isapproximately 100 quad.

One other unit is the gallon, a measure of volume associated with the unitswe purchase for automobiles. A gallon of gasoline contains a certain amountof chemical energy, and that energy is something we can convert and com-pare. A gallon of gas contains about 115,000 BTUs of energy.

The basic unit of power that physicists use and which is used in peopleseveryday lives is the watt, a joule per second.

Another unit, familiar from knowledge of automobiles, is the horsepower,introduced by James Watt, who sold his steam engines based on how manyhorses one could replace. A horsepower is a unit that corresponds to thework that could be done by a healthy horse working for eight hours a day.

One joule (J) in everyday life is approximately equal to

The energy required to lift a small apple one meter straight up. The energy released when that same apple falls one meter to

the ground.

The energy released as heat by a person at rest, every hundredth of a second.

The energy required to heat one gram of dry, cool air by 1 degree Celsius.

The kinetic energy of an adult human moving at a speed of about one handspanevery second.

Clipart.com


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1. What is the relation between potential and kinetic energy?

2. What are the basics of nuclear energy?


McElroy, Michael B. The Atmospheric Environment: Effects of HumanActivity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Questions

Suggested Reading



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The United States, with 5 percent of the worlds population,consumes roughly 24 percent of the worlds total commercialenergy. On a per capita basis, the United States uses signifi-cantly more energy than the rest of the world. Per capita, the

United States consumes roughly 330 million BTUs per person

per year, compared to 64 million BTUs per person per year forthe rest of the world.

If all that energy were supplied in the form of heating oil (which of course itisnt) at $2 per gallon, the annual bill for a typical family of four in the UnitedStates would amount to approximately $18,500. So energy is an importantpart of the U.S. economy.

The average healthy human puts out energy at a rate of about 100 watts. Ahighly trained athlete could put out as much as a couple hundred watts.

The energy we consume directly in the form of food is only a small fractionof the total energywe consume (about5 percent). To placeour food demand forenergy in context,and given the factthat Americans eata lot of meat, abouthalf an acre of farm-

land (cultivated landplus pasture) wouldbe needed to satisfythe nutritional needsof a typical person.

The Sun

Most of the energy from the sun comes in the form of visible light. Objectstend to release light, and the wavelength of light thats emitted depends on the

temperature of the object. The higher the temperature, the more energy isemitted, and the shorter the wavelength of light emitted from the object.

The light that comes from the sun is emitted from a region of the solar atmos-phere where the temperature is about 5,600 degrees Centigrade. So the placefrom which the energy is coming is extremely hothot enough so that muchof the energy is coming in the so-called visible part of the spectrum.


Lecture 3:

The Sun

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The sun, as it accumulatedfrom the original nebula, grewextremely hot in its center (mil-lions of degrees) and reached avery high pressure. Under such

circumstances, the nuclei ofhydrogen atoms are squeezedclosely together to form deuteri-um. In the process, there is achange in mass and a vastamount of energy is produced.

The basic energy source for thesun is nuclear due to a processcalled fusion, which is when

nuclei are joined together tomake heavier nuclei (but lessmassive than the combination ofthe nuclei originally involved in the reaction), so that there is a net releaseof energy.

The holy grail for many in the physics community is to reproduce the solarprocess on the Earth. The capability to develop a star in the lab, to havefusion, would provide an inexhaustible supply of energy, and there would beno waste issues because the waste would be naturally occurring substances.

The challenge in creating the conditions that exist in the core of the sun isthat the material would have to be contained at millions of degrees and atvery high pressure. Labs around the world are trying to do this using magnet-ic containment. But it is such a challenge that it is difficult to imagine fusionas a significant source of energy for the next several decades, at least.

Absorbing the Suns Energy

The sun is essentially transferring energy from a high-temperature core tothe outside of the sun, where the light can escape into space. Space is

essentially empty, and the Earth orbits at a significant distance from the sun,so the light coming from the sun is diffusing over a larger area.

How much sunlight actually gets to the Earth? As it happens, quite a bit.

If there was a target of one metric square pointed at the sun, outside theEarths atmosphere, the total amount of energy hitting the target would amountto 1,370 watts per square meter, about 1.4 kilowatts per meter squared.

The Earth reflects a significant fraction (about 30 percent) of the suns ener-gy back to space. The other 70 percent is absorbed by the Earth. The

amount thats absorbed is about 240 watts per meter squared.Think of 100 units of solar energy coming into the Earth. Thirty units are

reflected back to space, with six of those units reflected back from the atmos-phere, 20 reflected back by clouds, and about four by bright surface features.(The darker the surface, the less reflective it is and the more it absorbs.)

Solar storms and a large flare as seen by theHubble Space Telescope in 2006.

NASA


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Of the 70 units that are not reflected back into space, some is absorbed bythe atmosphere (16 percent), some by clouds (4 percent), and most at thesurface (50 percent).

Evaporation

The surface of the Earth is relatively cold compared to the temperature ofthe sun. Some of the suns energy is used to heat the atmosphere, but thevast majority is used to evaporate water.

If the temperature of water is raised high enough, it burns off and the liquidis turned into vapor. It takes a large amount of energy to transform a givenamount of liquid to gas. This represents a major consumption of the energyconsumed at the Earths surface. Much of this energy is employed to evapo-rate water from the ocean. The evaporation of water from the ocean cools thesurface of the ocean. (People also cool by evaporating water from the sur-

face of their bodies.)The capacity to evaporate depends on the properties of the atmosphere. If

the atmosphere is already moist, then it is hard to evaporate. If the humidityis high, for instance, then perspiration doesnt cool a person off very much. Ina dry desert area, on the other hand, even if the temperature is high, one canevaporate and cool his or her body at an acceptable level (and of course aperson has to consume more water to do this).

People use energy to heat water and transform water from its liquid form toits vapor form, producing a stored form of potential energy that can be used

for many purposes.

The water evaporated from the surface of the Earth eventually goes backinto a liquid or solid form as it cools. So as the air rises and cools the vaportransforms back to a liquid: the precipitation that falls on the Earth. The totalamount of precipitation that occurs over the Earth must be almost exactlyequal to the total amount of evaporation that occurs from the worlds oceans,which in turn must be almost exactly equal to the energy of the sunabsorbed at the oceans surface and that is used essentially to vaporizethe liquid in the ocean.

So there is a direct connection between the solar energy that is used toevaporate water and the precipitation humans need to provide the fresh waterthat runs the Earth. In terms of capturing the energy of that precipitation, ifthe precipitation falls on a high region, and it melts in summer, and the waterruns downhill into a river, the potential energy of the water stored at the top ofthe hill is then potentially available as kinetic energy to do work.

The energy absorbed directly by the atmosphere or thats transferred indi-rectly to the atmosphere by evaporation (followed by condensation and pre-

cipitation) is ultimately driving the circulation of the atmosphere: the wind, themode by which air moves heat from one latitude or region to another. Theenergy thats absorbed by the ocean is used to cause the ocean to move,and the combination of the ocean and the atmosphere in motion determinethe global climate. Were it not for the fact that heat can be moved through theatmosphere from the tropics toward higher latitudes, and by the ocean, thetropics would be much hotter and the higher latitudes would be much colder.


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Current Annual Mean Global Temperatures

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Energy In, Energy Out

In a sunny climate region, there might be as much as 300 watts per metersquared of solar energy available at the surface. If 20 percent of that couldbe captured and converted to electricity (roughly the efficiency with which aphotovoltaic cell can create electricity), this would mean a potential to har-

ness 60 watts per meter-squared of solar energy. (One could do some con-versions based on the material in the previous lecture to determine howmany such cells families would need to power their homes.)

Approximately 100 quads of energy are consumed nationally in the UnitedStates. If 1 percent of the available sunlight could be converted to energy(very unlikely), roughly two acres per person would be required to satisfyenergy needs.

How does the 400 quads consumed globally compare to the total amount ofsunlight coming into the Earth? Globally, people only use about one part in10,000 of the sunlight coming into the Earth, so people are not a dominantconsumer of solar energy. That solar energy is used to run the climate sys-tem, for forests, for food, and to evaporate water from the ocean.

In a steady condition, most energy goes back into space as degraded heatin the form of infrared light, so the Earth radiates infrared light at roughly thesame rate it absorbs visible light. The climate problem of concern is that byadding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the Earth is sending less ener-gy back to space than it is getting from the sun. So the Earth is gaining ener-

gy from the sun, and the planet is heating up. The heat is being stored in theocean and is being manifest by a warmer surface on the Earth.

Data Source: NOAA


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1. What is the relationship between temperature and light wavelength?

2. What happens to the sunlight that reaches Earth?


McElroy, Michael B. The Atmospheric Environment: Effects of HumanActivity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Questions

Suggested Reading



LECTURETHREE

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In terms of commercially available energy on a global basis,coal amounts to roughly one-quarter of the energy consumedby the world.

One of the problems with coal is that it is carbon rich. Theenergy from burning coal is released by changing the chemi-

cal state of carbon from so-called reduced carbon to carbondioxide, and thereby releasing energy in the process. In burning coal tosupply energy needs, large amounts of carbon dioxide are produced andvented into the atmospherethe fundamental problem to deal with in termsof the climate issue.

The world currently consumes more than five billion tons of coal per year. Inrecent years, coal amounted to close to 40 percent of the total global sourceof carbon dioxide being vented into the atmosphere. The increase in coal usein recent years has been spectacular, particularly in developing countries

such as China. In 2004, the United States was clearly the largest emitter ofcarbon dioxide. In 2009, China has moved to number one, for the most partbecause China is the worlds largest consumer of coal. China is now consum-ing close to half of the coal used on a global basis.

The History of Coal

Most of the coal present in the Earth today was formed during theCarboniferous period about 300 million years ago. The climate of the Earthduring this period was not very different from what it is at present. It was


Lecture 4:

Fossil Fuels:

Coal and Oil (Part I)

19

DavidRoos/shutterstock.com

Particulate matter hangs in the air over Shanghai at dusk.


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defined by alternating ice ages and warm periods. The Earth was in a deepice age until roughly 20,000 years ago and entered a relatively warm phaseabout 10,000 years ago. Over the past few million years of Earth history, iceages have lasted a couple of hundred thousand years with brief warm peri-ods in between.

The general view is that the Carboniferous period had a type of climatecondition that created an opportunity for some of the plants that eventuallyformed coal to grow. The plants that became the source of coal grew for themost part during this period on the coastal margins of tropical and subtropicalland areas. (Remember that the continents have moved around and werearranged differently 300 million years ago.)

The significant reserves of coal in North America and China indicate thatChina and North America were significantly displaced toward the equatorialregion 300 million years ago. The countries today that have rich resources of

coal were generally in the tropics 300 million years ago.

The landscape of 300 million years ago featured peculiar trees growing togreat heights, maybe 200 feet above the ground (in coastal swampy regions)with trunks up to 6 feet in diameter at the base. As these trees died and fellinto the swamp ground, they were eventually covered with sediment andmud. A fraction of the carbon in those trees was preserved and, under greatpressure, formed what is known as coal.

Some coal is relatively pure in terms of carbon; some is relatively polluted in

terms of a variety of compounds that cause problems when released in theenvironment. For example, various types of coal contain greater or lesser con-centrations of sulfur. When coal is burned without taking measures to treat it,both carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide are released. Sulfur dioxide forms acidrain when it falls to the surface and is responsible for small particles in the airthat are unhealthy when breathed. So sulfur from coal is a serious pollutant.

The coal burned in the United States today is regulated by laws that limit theamount of sulfur that can be released into the environment. A utility burningcoal to make electricity can either use a coal with a low sulfur content or

install equipment that will capture the sulfur from the smokestackand thereis in fact a vigorous market in trading permissions to release sulfur.

From Wood to Coal

Coal was used more than a thousand years ago in China and was usedeven earlier for other purposes in other parts of the world. The primary use ofcoal over much of history was to replace vanishing and deteriorating suppliesof wood, the primary fuel for most of history.

Wood was used to heat, to cook, and to create charcoal, which was required

to smelt ores to make copper and iron. For most of human history, the prima-ry use of wood was to make charcoal to produce a pure form of carbon thatwhen combusted could produce high temperatures.

But producing charcoal consumed vast quantities of wood, and in manyregions of the world, civilizations exhausted their supplies of wood, and indoing so societies either collapsed or had to use military means to steal woodfrom their neighbors.


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Industrializing

When it came to developing the colonies in North America, one of the majoradvantages that England had was access to wood that was abundantly avail-able on the east coast of North America. (There was a law that required thattrees of a certain height were the property of the Crown. Having access to tall

wood was a critical military resource for making the masts of the sailing shipsthat dominated travel at that time.)

Even so, the developed world was depleting its sources of wood, and coalbecame the alternative. Using coal as a replacement for charcoal providedthe incentive for the Industrial Revolution.

To facilitate this transition, there had to be a process for purifying coal, andthis was done first in England by Abraham Darby, who found a way to pro-duce acceptable charcoal that could be used to smelt ore using coal ratherthan wood.

But again, coal is a serious source of pollution. There are means that can beemployed to reduce the contaminants by purifying coal before it is burned.Coal, for example, could be treated to convert the carbon to a gas that couldbe burned, so that the burning process would be relatively clean. Still, it cantbe ignored that energy comes out of the coal in the form of carbon dioxide asa product.

Not all coal is the same. The lowest energy content of coal comes fromlignite. Subbituminous is better, and bituminous

even better. The best of all is anthracite,which is close to pure carbon and whichhas a very high energy content.

The Clean Air Act began to regulate airpollution in the 1970s and such regulationalso came in Europe as well. In the UnitedStates, the conventional approach was touse non-smoking forms of coal, so-calledsmokeless fuel, which basically put the onus

on using anthracite.

Coal has evolved and continues to be a majorsource of energy, but fundamentally, there is stillthe problem of carbon dioxide.

Oil

The origin of oil is not the same as the origin of coal. For the most part, oil isa product of photosynthesis occurring in a marine environment, the ocean.There, little organisms, phytoplankton, provide the primary way that solar

energy is captured by photosynthesis and ultimately stored in forms that leadto the eventual production of oil.

In order to produce prototypical oil, the photosynthesis occurring in theocean has to produce residues in an environment in which these residuescan be stored and not consumed.

There are special places in the ocean where the biological productivity is sohigh that oxygen can not be made available fast enough to consume the

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dead bodies. These are localized environments and they represent the bestplaces to form the prototypes of what eventually becomes oil.

Imagine the dead bodies accumulating under the sediment in these particu-larly favorable regions and being heated by the heat coming out of the Earth.Eventually, these dead bodies start cooking to form chemicals that eventually

become the ingredients of crude oil.

Oil in the World Today

The environments around the world where the residues of this activity arefound are highly localized, and the major sources of oil today are controlledby a relatively few countries. The total oil production in the world in 2007 wasdominated by Saudi Arabia, which produced the most oil of any country.

Oil is measured and traded in units of barrels. A barrel of oil is 42 gallons.Saudi Arabia produced 11 million barrels per day in 2007. The number two

producer was Russia, with 9.5 million barrels per day, followed by the UnitedStates with 8.2 million barrels per day and Iran with 4.2 million barrels per day.

In terms of consumers, it is a much different picture. The consumers aredominated by countries like the United States, which is no longer able toproduce sufficient oil to satisfy its energy needs. The United States is thelargest importer of oil in the world, followed by Japan, China, Germany, andSouth Korea.

This presents a dangerous situation in which relatively low-population coun-

tries (Saudi Arabia, for instance) and relatively unstable parts of the worldcontrol the basic supplies of oil for the global market. On several occasionsthese countries have been able to withdraw that oil from the market andcause a rapid rise in costs.

Scarcity?

Geophysicist M. King Hubbert famously predicted that the United Stateswould hit peak oil production in the 1970s and that the rest of the world would

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follow a couple decades later. This prediction has probably come true for theUnited States.

But this downward slide refers to conventional oiloil that can be producedrelatively cheaply by the current system. However, there are abundantsources of unconventional oil, and it seems unlikely that the world will run out

of oil in the next couple of decades. It will be a question of cost and of envi-ronmental impact.

There are vast quantities of potential oil stored in oil shale and in so-calledtar sands (notably in Alberta, Canada). With tar sands, the tar would have toeither be mined and heated to extract it, or hot steam would have to be usedto extract the tar. Then one would have to re-create the lighter hydrocarbonsneeded for gasoline or jet fuel. The process would be expensive and a majorenvironmental challenge, but the oil is potentially there.

The United States is also abundantly rich in oil shale, but once again, a lotmore energy must be used to get at it, more carbon dioxide would be pro-duced, and the expense would go up.

China has abundant sources of coal. China is not, however, rich in oil. Chinais now becoming a major importer of oil, as is the United States. So there isessentially an international competition for a scarce supply of oil. If supplyand demand are temporarily out of balance, oil prices internationally can riserapidly or decline.

What is oil?

Oil is essentially a complicated mix of hydrocarbons (some light, someheavy) and crude oil can be treated to produce the compounds people need.When the oil age began, people were looking for kerosene to burn to producelight. At the time, it replaced whale oil (a good thing, because whales werebeing grossly overharvested).

With kerosene, the distillation process involved throwing away a lot of lighthydrocarbons that are today used for gasoline. So a modern refinery isessentially re-creating and restructuring the chemical composition of a com-

plex mix of hydrocarbons present in crude oil to create the compounds peo-ple wantgasoline, plastic, kerosene, tar . . . in other words, the whole vari-ety of hydrocarbons the modern industrial economy depends on.

Scotlands GrangemouthRefinery is one of only ninesuch facilities in the UnitedKingdom. It has a refiningcapacity of approximately10 million tons of crude oilper year.

EwanChesser/shutterstock.com


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1. What provided the incentive for the Industrial Revolution?

2. How does oil form?


Freese, Barbara. Coal: A Human History. Cambridge, MA: PerseusPublishers, 2003.

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Edwin Drake (foreground,right) and Uncle BillySmith (foreground, left)with workers at the first oildrilling rig near Titusville,Pennsylvania, in 1859.

The story of oil use is an ancient one. There is historical evi-dence for seeps of oil out of the ground in regions rich in oiltoday (Iraq, Mesopotamia) as early as 5000 BCE. Peopleused those oil seeps as a source of asphalt, and pitch was

used in the mortar of the Towers of Babylon, for example. Even

Genesis records Gods instructions to Noah for building the ark:Make rooms in the ark and cover it inside and out with pitch.

Oil wells in China were drilled as deep as 240 meters as early as the fourthcentury CE, using drill bits attached to bamboo poles. Oil produced in thosewells was used to evaporate brines to produce salt. The Chinese also devel-oped the ability to move oil over significant distances using pipelines theyconstructed with bamboo.

The Greeks found they could use oil as a powerful weapon of war, so-calledGreek fire, and they used this effectively, for example, to fend off the Vikings.

Modern Oil

The history of modern oil might be dated to whathappened in Titusville, Pennsylvania, on August 28,1859. At that time, a fellow called Uncle BillySmith, working for Edwin Drake, struck oil at adepth of 69 feet. Tostore this oil and getit to market, the oil

was stored inwhiskey barrels.Each barrel con-tained roughly 42gallons of oil, andmodern trading todayreflects this.

Smith and Drakegot rich off their find,and the market theyhad was a market


Lecture 5:

Fossil Fuels:

Oil (Part II) and Natural Gas

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for kerosene. Entrepreneurs were poised and ready to take advantage of this.One of the entrepreneurs was John D. Rockefeller, who would become thefounder and principal shareholder of Standard Oil.

Rockefeller was born in 1839 in the Midwest and established a businessselling turkeys at age seven. He was quick to realize that the discovery in

Pennsylvania provided a tremendous opportunity to use the oil to replacewhale oil as a source of lighting. And he saw he could make even moremoney if he controlled both the source and delivery to the retail customer.

In May of 1911, Standard Oil was accused of being in violation of antitrustlegislation, and Standard Oil was broken up into multiple companies. But itstill operated in a coordinated way.

The market for kerosene was basically depleted when Edison brought elec-tricity to bear to provide cleaner, more efficient lighting. But at about the sametime, people (Henry Ford in particular) began to develop the automobile, andwith it a demand for lighter hydrocarbons.

One of the companies that was formed as a result of the antitrust action wasStandard Oil of Indiana, and a man there developed the initial technology tocrack the oil to make the gasoline-type compounds. There is some irony inthat Standard Oil of New Jersey then had to pay Standard Oil of Indiana roy-alty checks to make use of this technology.

As oil became a commodity in great demand, new discoveries were made,including one in Texas in 1901 that was so large that the price of oil got to

the point (3 cents a barrel) that it was cheaper than water. One can see thatthe history of oil is one of booms and busts.

The internationalization of oil also occurred in the early part of this century.Oil was discovered in Baku on the Caspian Sea in 1871, in Dutch East Indiesin 1885, in Borneo in 1897, in Persia in 1908, in Mexico in 1910, inVenezuela in 1922, in Bahrain in 1932, in Kuwait in 1938, and, the biggestfind of all, in Saudi Arabia in 1938.

A forest of derricks covers the Burkburnett, Texas, oilfield in 1918.

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Oil and War

Winston Churchill was the First Lord of the Admiralty during the outbreak ofhostilities in World War I. Earlier, he had decided to change the Royal Navyfrom a fleet that relied on coal as a fuel to one that ran primarily on oil.Stoking burners with coal to keep ships running meant that most sailors were

stokers and only a few were available to fight. With oil-fed boilers, most of thesailors could be fighting sailors.

England, however, did not have a big supply of oil, so the issue becamemaintaining this supply for the Royal Navy. The United States provided themain supply of oil during World War I for the United Kingdom.

Germany didnt have much oil either. It had lots of coal and used coal as itsprimary source of fuel. When the Germans decided to invade France, theybrought their troops and supplies along the railroad. The French marshaledtheir troops and took over the taxicabs of Paris to bring their troops to wher-ever the Germans were. So it was an advantage for the French to haveaccess to oil and a disadvantage for the Germans to be reliant on coal. Theoil the Germans had was used for their submarines.

The bottom line is that oil played a major role in the Allies victory in WorldWar I. In World War II, oil was also a major factor, because the Germansrealized early on that they needed a supply of oil to maintain their war effortand took steps in this direction, including developing the technology to con-vert coal to oil (a process later used by the South Africans during the

Apartheid embargo to turn their sources of coal into their major source of oil).Natural Gas

In some respects, natural gas is the best of the fossil fuels. As its name sug-gests, it is a gas, largely methane (CH4), with some other lighter hydrocar-bons. It can be piped from one place to another relatively inexpensively, andit can be burned producing a relatively clean flame. It produces carbon diox-ide, but since methane contains a fair amount of hydrogen, a significant partof the energy comes from turning those hydrogen atoms into water. Somethane produces less carbon dioxide per unit of energy than oil, which inturn produces less than coal.

Natural gas is similar in its source to oilthink of a marine environment, richbiological activity, with lots of dead bodies falling down and being cooked andsubjected to high pressures.

Most of the natural gas that exists is trapped in natural deposits, and oncethese are tapped into, large amounts can be brought to the surface. Naturalgas has been used for a long time, first in China in 500 BCE. It was first usedcommercially in Fredonia, New York, as a source of lighting in 1821. In the

present, it has become a major source of clean energy for the United States.The largest producer of natural gas is the Russian Federation, followed by

the United States, Canada, Iran, Norway, Algeria, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia,Turkmenistan, and Malaysia.

The United States is essentially self-sufficient in terms of natural gas,although in practice, since Canada has abundant sources of natural gas, theUnited States imports significant amounts from Canada.


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The United States has established a pipeline system that brings natural gasfrom source regions to various storage environments, and from there to con-sumers. This represents an incredible infrastructure, for the most part belowground. There are over 300,000 miles of pipeline carrying natural gas in theUnited States, with 1,400 compressor stations to maintain a steady flow of

gas, 394 underground gas facilities, fifty-five locations where gas can beimported or exported by pipeline, and five facilities for the import of liquefiednatural gas.

Moving natural gas in gas form is relatively easy. If the gas is pressurizedand cooled, the methane can be turned into a liquid, so more energy can bestored in a given volume. In this way natural gas can be transported by spe-cialized ships (this also requires a system for bringing the liquefied naturalgas back to its gas form for distribution).

Liquid natural gas will provide a way for countries poor in natural resources

to satisfy their energy demands. China, for example, is increasingly relying onliquid natural gas.

Europe made the transition to natural gas more recently than the UnitedStates. The abundant sources of oil and natural gas in the North Sea allowedthe British government in the Margaret Thatcher era to get out of the coalbusiness and to switch its energy economy to oil and natural gasa goodthing for the environment in terms of air quality.

The problem is that the North Sea source of oil and natural gas is running

out, and so Europe is increasingly forced to depend on sources outside of itsborders. The major suppliers are increasingly Eastern Europe and potentiallythe Middle East and North Africa.

It is important to point out that Europe is becoming more and more relianton an energy source, critical to its economy, that can be withdrawn at thewill of an outsiderRussia, in particular, if it chooses to do so for military orstrategic purposes.

A natural gas pipeline disappears into the taiga forest in central Siberia on its way west.

VasilyYernekov


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1. What does it mean to crack oil?

2. How did oil figure in the two world wars?


Yergin, Daniel. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. NewYork: Free Press, 1991.

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For most of human history, people have relied on personalmuscle power and on animals to do work. It is only over thelast few thousand years of human history that people havedeveloped the capacity to tap into the energy of running water,

and it is even more recently that people have been able to use

the energy in the wind.Energy from Water and Wind

The earliest use of water power was no doubt tapping river flow to turn awheel to grind grain. This was probably most effectively used first in Italy dur-ing Roman times. As Rome began to decline, manual labor became scarce,and for the first time there was an incentive to produce labor-saving devices.Harnessing the energy in streams and rivers was therefore beneficial in thelater days of the Roman Empire.

The Doomsday Book records that by 1086 A.D. in England, south of theriver Trent, there were as many as 5,624 water mills performing a variety oftasks, including sawing wood, hammering metals, and crushing ore.

The Persians were apparently the first to appreciate the use of wind as asource of mechanical power in the seventh century A.D. China also usedwind power to pump water, and of course wind was used for sailing ships.

Wind was used widely in Holland, where at one time there were as many aseight thousand wind mills, largely employed to pump water to keep Hollanddry. In the early United States, Midwestern farmers harnessed wind as a pri-

mary way to draw water up to the surface.

Seizing Opportunity

In New England, the Merrimack River drains an area of about five thou-sand square miles. It flows from New Hampshire into Massachusetts beforemoving to the ocean. It captures rainfall from the region, and the averagerainfall there is significant.

The river drops by about two feet per mile. This is not a lot in terms ofcapturing energy, but the river does most of its dropping in a series of falls.There are six regions in which there are falls of significance, and three ofthese falls, which became the key development areas for the textile indus-try, are in the cities of Manchester (New Hampshire) and Lowell andLawrence (Massachusetts).

The falls at Lowell proved a significant obstacle in bringing the resourcesof New Hampshire and the upper reaches of the Merrimack River to the cityof Boston.


Lecture 6:

Water and Wind Power

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Entrepreneurs built a canal thatcircumvented the falls at the cityof Lowell. With a series of locksalong this canal, boats could goaround the falls without having

to unload cargo to another boaton the other side of the falls.

One of the first corporations inthe New World was created toconstruct and manage thecanalthe Proprietors of Locksand Canals on the MerrimackRiver (PLC). They built a damacross the river upstream of the

falls and diverted the wateraround the falls. They built tex-tile mills that could be energizedby drawing water out of the canal to run the mills and produce textiles.

The mills could only be operated during the day because of lack of lighting.Not wanting to waste the energy of the water, the river was turned off atnight. These entrepreneurs also figured out a simple way to charge the millsfor their energy. They invented the unit of mill powerone unit of mill powercorresponded to supplying 25 cubic feet of water per second at a drop of 30

feet, equivalent to a maximum power output of 84 horsepower.

Hydroelectric Power

While water power in some sense had its industrial heyday in New Englandand elsewhere a few hundred years ago, the importance of water power hasnot disappeared. The primary use of water power today is probably the pro-duction of electricity from dammed rivers, and hydroelectricity is now a majorsource of derivative electrical energy.

The largest producers of hydroelectric power in the world, in 2003, were

Canada first, followed by Brazil, China, the United States, Russia, Norway,Japan, India, Venezuela, France, Sweden, Paraguay, and Spain.

The way hydroelectricity works is that a dam is built and water is storedbehind the dam. When the water is released at the base of the dam itcomes out at high pressure and can turn a turbine and generate electricity.So the higher the dam and the more water stored, the more electricity thatcan be produced.

For the most part, dams are concentrated in areas with significant rainfall and

significant topography, high mountains in particularthink of the Rockies, theAndes, and the Tibetan Plateau. This accounts for the important role playedby Canada, Brazil, China, and the United States.

On a state-by-state basis in the United States, states with the highestamounts of hydroelectricity are Washington state, California, Oregon, NewYork, Idaho, Montana, Tennessee, Alabama, Arizona, and Maine.

The Boott Cotton Mills along the Merrimack River and

Hamilton Canal in Lowell, Massachusetts. The mills arenow a museum and loft apartments.

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In the state of Washington, hydroelectricity provides a cheap source of elec-tricity from the water stored behind dams. Not surprisingly, some of thecheapest sources of electricity in the United States occur in Washington.

Many of the large dams in the United States were built some time ago, andthe mood about dams is changing, particularly in the United States. Take the

Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, built in 1966. Its 710 feet high,with a crest width of 1,560 feet. The thickness at the top is 25 feet andexpands to 300 feet at the base. It took 4.9 million cubic yards of concrete tobuild, and it produced some 3.2 billion kilowatt hours over the course of theyear in 2005.

There has been significant opposition to this dam based on the impact thedam has on the ecology of the region, and there is a serious possibility thatthe people operating the dam are going to be forced to limit the energyexploited from the dam to supply water to the fragile ecological system down-

stream of the dam.

There are also plans for the elimination of four dams on the Snake River inWashingtonthe largest issue being the effect of the dams on the migrationof fish, in particular salmon. So there are ecological issues that threaten thefuture of hydroelectric power in the United States.

There is less opposition in countries like China, and arguably some ofthe largest future developments are going to be in South America, Brazilin particular.

Hydroelectric power will be an important contributor to global energydemand in the future, but in no sense will it compensate for demand norallow for the elimination of coal or fossil fuels.

A wide angle view of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River at Page, Arizona. Constructionbegan in 1956 and was completed in 1966. The dam created Lake Powell, which straddles the bor-der between Utah and Arizona and is the second largest man-made reservoir in the United States(behind Lake Mead). It stores 24,322,000 acre feet of water when full. The dam generates 3.2 bil-lion kilowatt hours of electricity annually.

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The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China has been extremelycontroversial. The cost of the dam has been estimated at $25 billion, and thedam displaced several million people living upstream of it. There are alsoconcerns about the changing ecology around the dam and sewage from thelarge city of Chung-Ching. Before, this sewage would have run down the fast-

moving river and onto the plain, but now it is stored behind the dam.So building dams is a potential contributor to the need for electricity, but one

that doesnt come free.

Wind

The primary application of wind today is to turn the blades of turbines to cre-ate electricity, and it is a growing industry around the world.

About 1 percent of the Earths absorbed energy is converted to kinetic ener-gy in the atmosphereand thus the motion of the air, or wind. Harnessing

that kinetic energy provides the potential to generate electricity. And sincewind is free, there is an opportunity to make a capital investment and capital-ize on that investment.

The old wind mills were not terribly efficient, but the technology has come anenormous distance. There was a movement to develop wind power after theoil shocks of the 1970s, but the initial success of wind power in the UnitedStates was circumvented by the fact that oil prices went down precipitously inthe 1980s. So people who had invested in wind farms found their investmentswere not generating electricity at a competitive price.

Wind power production essentially terminated as oil prices plunged in the1980s. It might have revived as people began to worry about climate change,but it wasnt a major issue during the two terms of President George W.Bush. Climate change was, however, taken seriously in Europe, andEuropeans invested significantly in forms of renewable energy.

Thus, to an extent, the global wind market, from the point of view of industrialdevelopment and investment, switched from theUnited States to Europe. But this is beginning to

reverse. In 2009, new investments in windpower in the United States moved the UnitedStates into the number-one position (surpassingGermany) in terms of capacity to generateelectricity for wind.

In terms of cost, wind is competitive in manyregions with conventional sources of electricity.If the price of coal goes up (because of pollu-tion taxes on the release of carbon dioxide, for

example), there is an opportunity for wind tobecome even more competitive. Wind, there-fore, represents a significant potential contribu-tor to the future of the energy economy.

PhilipLange/shutterstock.com

Wind turbines on the coast of Fuerteventura inthe Canary Islands.


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1. What are the benefits and problems associated with hydroelectric power?

2. What caused the push for wind power to decline in the 1980s and beyond?


Steinberg, Theodore. Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters ofNew England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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The nucleus of an atom in general consists of protons andneutrons, which have comparable mass. The proton is electri-cally charged in a positive direction, and the neutron is electri-cally neutral. The proton-neutron combination essentially

determines the mass of the atom.

Normally, particles of the same charge are going to be drivenapart. Very powerful attractive nuclear forces are required to keep protonstogether in the nucleus of an atom. Those nuclear forces are responsible forthe integrity of the nucleus of an atom. If the composition of the nucleus isrearranged, large amounts of energy have to be either supplied or consumed.

By Einsteins equation (E = MC2), eliminating mass produces energy, andincreasing mass consumes energy.

The material that plays the most important role in the modern nuclear indus-try is uranium, which occurs in different forms, in other words, in differentmasses of the nuclei atoms (this means a different number of neutrons in thedifferent isotopes of uranium).

The mass number of the elements is defined by the combination of the pro-tons plus neutrons in the nucleus. The forms of uranium in natural environ-ments of the Earth are in three primary isotope forms (with mass numbers of234, 235, and 238).

The key player in the nuclear business is uranium-235. The most abundantisotope is 238 (99.3 percent present in the world). Uranium-235 has an

abundance of .0055 percent in nature. To produce power, there needs tobe a high concentration of 235, so natural uranium (238) must be enrichedfor the process.

If a neutron is absorbed by uranium-235,it goes to 236, which is unstable andautomatically breaks up to form thenuclei of two other chemical ele-ments (for example, barium andkrypton). In the process, it can

release more neutrons than wereabsorbed in the first place. So there isa potential to run this sustainably, tokeep it going. When the 236 decompos-es it produces a massive amount ofenergy, because the combined mass ofthe new elements formed is less than 236.


Lecture 7:

The Nature and History of Nuclear Power

Uranium ore

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Some of the elements produced by the initial decomposition of 236 arethemselves unstable, so they can also decay and produce a whole suite ofdifferent elements, many of which are unstable. The problem of nuclearwaste is the problem of what happens to these radioactive elements, whichcan produce radiation very harmful to humans. Once the nuclear process is

initiated, there are a series of consequences to face.The History

Enrico Fermi, working in Italy, demonstrated in 1934 that if neutrons werefired at uranium, it would result in a whole range of radioactive elementsand he received the Nobel Prize for this work in 1938.

In 1938, a group of German scientists (including Otto Hahn, Fritz Strass-mann, Lise Meitner, and Otto Frisch) provided the first conclusive proof offission of uranium and for the vast quantities of energy that were released in

the process.

Weapons

It quickly became clear to scientists in the United States that fission of urani-um could provide an important new source of energyand that it could beresponsible for the development of a devastating weapon.

Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 2, 1939,and indicated that a nuclear chain reaction could release vast amounts ofpower and generate large quantities of new radium-like elementswhich

could lead to the development of bombs.The letter eventually led to the establishment of the Manhattan Project,

which at one time involved 130,000 people working with a budget of close to$2 billion. The Manhattan Project led to the development and explosion of thefirst nuclear bombs, and eventually the bombs that were exploded in Japan atHiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

The Manhattan Project had its first major success on December 2, 1942,when it demonstrated the first sustained nuclear chain reaction. The experi-ment that demonstrated this occurred at the University of Chicago and wasdirected by Enrico Fermi, who had emigrated to the United States.

The first nuclear bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, in a test in NewMexico at what is now the White Sands Missile Range. The release wasequivalent to about 20 kilotons of TNT. The material used was plutonium (thesame fuel as for the bomb at Nagasaki). The bomb that destroyed Hiroshimaused uranium-235.

The energy yielded in these early bombs was modest compared to the ener-gy released in weapons, developed later, which combined fission and fusion

with yields up to a thousand times greater than the bombs dropped atNagasaki and Hiroshima.

Still, the bombs devastated those cities and were responsible for 100,000deaths almost immediately, with an uncertain number of casualties later as aresult of exposure to radiation.

The enduring memory of that devastation has a significant influence in thedebate on whether nuclear power is safe as an electricity-generating system.


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Harnessing Nuclear Power for Electricity

Fission is the first step. On average, there are 2.5 neutrons produced per fis-sion event. In principle, this allows for a self-sustaining reaction in whichthese neutrons can trigger further fission events.

When every one of these reactions results in a single additional fission reac-

tion, the state of the system is said to be critical. This is the condition thatapplies in a stable, functioning, power-generating nuclear reactor. If the num-ber of fission events increases with time, the system is said to be supercriti-cal, and thats a situation that occurs when dealing with a nuclear weapon.

The average energy of the neutrons that are produced by fission of urani-um-235 is very high. If those neutrons encounter the most abundant uraniumisotope (238), they will produce plutonium-239, a very good bomb material.To prevent this from happening, the fast neutrons have to be slowed down.

And if they can be slowed enough they aremore likely to hit the uranium-235 and keepthe self-sustaining reaction going.

A nuclear power plant contains a number ofkey elements. One is the rods with which thefissile material is inserted, and then there is amoderator, which is designed to slow the neu-trons down so that they react with uranium-235rather than uranium-238.

The transition of nuclear power from militaryuse to civilian use was relatively slow afterWorld War II. The research that was occurringin the United States and elsewhere was con-ducted under a cloak of secrecy. PresidentHarry Truman established the Atomic EnergyCommission in the United States in August of1946 and gave it responsibility to oversee bothcivilian and military applications of nuclear

energy. The Department of Energy still hasresponsibilities on the weapons side and thecivilian side of nuclear energy as a residue ofthat early history.

The first reactorsso-called pressurized waterreactorswere constructed by the U.S. Navy inthe United States under the direction of AdmiralHyman Rickover in 1953 and were deployed toprovide the power structure for the new U.S.

nuclear submarine fleet. The first civilian reac-tor, at Shipping Point, Pennsylvania, becameoperational at the end of 1957. There was a fair-ly rapid growth in nuclear power in the United States between 1965 and1974. By the end of 1974, there were fifty-five reactors around the countrygenerating electricity at a rate of about 32 gigawatts output, accounting atthat time for about 6 percent of total U.S. electricity generation.

The picture above shows a singlenuclear power fuel bundle. A fuelbundle is made up of several indi-vidual fuel rods packaged into aunit. A commercial nuclear reactor

is powered by several of thesebundles arranged into a matrix.

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The Late 70s

An incident at a nuclear facility at Three Mile Island in 1979 generated atremendous amount of public concern. The incident caused no loss of life andthere was no radioactivity released to the outside. Contributing to the publicreaction was the fact that twelve days before the accident a movie had been

released called The China Syndrome. The movie depicted a disaster thatoccurred where a nuclear power plant had gone into an unstable mode. Sowhen the incident occurred at Three Mile Island, there was a tremendous pub-lic reaction, even if the reaction was not based on an understanding of theissue and even if there was a strong confusion between the use of nuclearenergy as a source of nuclear power and the use of it to create bombs.

In 1986, at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union, a reactor went unstable andreleased a massive amount of radioactivity. People died and radioactivedebris was spread over a significant region. This helped to create public

opposition to nuclear energy, and there hasnt been significant nuclear devel-opment in the United States or in much of the world since that time.

The top ten countries in terms of the capacity to produce electricity fromnuclear power (for 2005) are, first, the United States, followed by France,Japan, Germany, South Korea, Russia, Canada, Ukraine, the UnitedKingdom, and Sweden.

Nineteen to 20 percent of the electricity used in the United States comesfrom nuclear power. In France, 80 percent of the electricity comes fromnuclear power. The French made the decision (in light of the early oilshocks) that since France did not have abundant independent sources ofenergy the country needed to be energy independent. They made a largeinvestment in the nuclear industry and replaced most of its conventional fos-sil-generated electricity with nuclear power.

Not surprisingly, considering that nuclear energy is enjoying more favorablepublic opinion because of concerns about global climate change, the Frenchare major leaders in pushing the technology in building and managing nuclearfacilities in countries other than France.

The Future of Nuclear Power

Nuclear power is beginning to enjoy a renaissance of popularity in theUnited States, but there are significant obstacles. There is the need for acomplicated permitting process before a nuclear power plant can be built.The second problem is a nervousness among those who might invest innuclear power that the rules might change and they would lose their invest-ment. And there is good reason to believe this.

A nuclear power plant at Shoreham, Long Island, New York, was properly

licensed, built, and financed, but never produced a single watt of electricitybecause of public pressure that forced the nuclear power plant to be decom-missioned. A large amount of money was lost, paid for in part by the ratepayers of the Long Island utility and in part by local government.

At the moment, nuclear power probably is not economically competitive withcoal or wind or solar, but there are opportunities for safe nuclear power thathave to be part of the research process and potentially part of the solution fordeveloping a safe source of electricity for the future.


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Nuclear power results in a range of radioactive isotopes, some of which areactive for long periods of time and can cause serious damage if released intothe environment, or if humans are exposed to the effects of this radiation.

A need exists for a long-term storage facility to keep those elements out ofcontact with the environment. In the United States, there is a plan to store

these long-lived radioisotopes in a facility in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Butthe political reaction to it is negative, and major political representativesfrom Nevada are opposed. In 2009, prospects for Yucca Mountain are notvery positive.

Another option is to reprocess and reduce the amount of waste, which iswhat the French do. The problem with reprocessing is that there is the possi-bility of creating radionuclides that could be used to create bombs. PresidentJimmy Carter, who was knowledgeable about the nuclear industry, pushedfor the United States to get out of the reprocessing business.

There isnt a long-range plan for the development of nuclear power in theUnited States. Intermediate waste is currently stored at the facilities wherenuclear power plants are operating, and there is no plan for long-term storageor reprocessing.

There are new ideas about efficient new nuclear power technologies thatcould produce minimal waste and efficiently produce electricity, but it isntclear what the future of nuclear power will be in the United States. The publichas, however, become educated about the distinction between nuclear power

for civilian purposes and nuclear power for bombs.Political issues will be dictated in part by economic issues, and if nuclear

power continues to be expensive relative to alternatives, there will be hesita-tion in investing in nuclear power. The public objections to coal-fueled powerplants, however, have probably shifted public opinion in favor of nuclearpower plants.

Sites storing spent nuclearfuel, high-level radioactivewaste, and/or surplusplutonium destined forgeologic disposition.

Symbols do not reflectprecise locations. U.S. Dept. of Energy


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1. When is the state of a nuclear system said to be critical?

2. Why is nuclear power enjoying a renaissance?


Bodansky, David. Nuclear Energy: Principles, Practices, and Prospects. NewYork: Springer, 2004.

Questions

Suggested Reading



LECTURESEVEN

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Water exists in three phases: ice, liquid, and gas. Except at oneparticular combination of temperature and pressure, only twophases of water are stable at any particular time. At ambientroom temperature, there can be both liquid and gas (ice would

melt). As the temperature of liquid water increases, the amount

of water present in the gas phase increases. The amount ofwater vapor in equilibrium with the liquid is a function of tempera-turean important property of water.

Imagine water is heated to 100 degrees centigrade. At this temperature thewater boils. This means the pressure of the vapor is equal to the pressure ofthe atmosphere. At a little higher pressure, the vapor is able to push the airout of the way. As water approaches the boiling point, little bubbles form inthe water. These bubbles are formed of water vapor in equilibrium with thewater around them. But theyre lighter than the liquid and so they rise and

break at the surface. That is the way vapor is transferred from the liquidphase to the atmosphere.

As the temperature increases, the pressure of the water vapor will increase.This pressure can exert a force and cause things to move. Because boiling isa result of temperature and pressure, at the high altitude of Denver, Colorado,for instance, the atmospheric pressure is lower than at sea level, causingwater to boil at a lower temperature.


Lecture 8:

Steam and the Industrial Revolution

RomanSigaev/shutterstock.com


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History

Thomas Savery, an Englishinventor, received a patent in1698 for an invention thatused steam to perform work.

Thomas Newcomen began toexperiment with what hecalled a fire engine, andNewcomen was subsequentlyforced into a partnership withSavery, because Savery hadlocked up all the patents.

England receives a lot of rainand the ground is typically

waterlogged. The problem ofmining coal underground isthat as the coal is taken out ofthe ground, water seeps intothe vacant spaces and floodsthe mine. So water has to becontinually lifted from the mineto get at the coal. But liftingwater is an energy-intensive

process. The traditional way ofdoing it was to have horseshaul buckets of water out ofthe mine. A more efficientalternative to horses wouldprovide a great competitive advantage.

Newcomen built the first operational steam engine used to draw water out oftin mines in Cornwell, England. It was a massive product, an edifice standingmore than fifty feet above the ground with a wooden beam that was free to

move up and down on the top of a fifty-foot-high brick wall. On one side wasa vertical cast-iron cylinder, open at the top with an accommodating pistonconnected to a rod attached to a chain springing from one end of the woodenbeam. The piston moved up and down to drive a system drawing water out ofthe mine. The wooden beam moved up and down under the action of this pis-ton and drew water out of the mine.

To move the beam, hot steam was injected into the cylinder. That steamdrove all the air out of the bottom of the cylinder. So the bottom of the cylinderwas full of steam, but there was enough pressure to support the atmosphereabove the piston. Then cold water was injected into the steam, condensing thesteam and creating a partial vacuum where the steam was before. That vacu-um meant the pressure of the atmosphere above the piston was higher thanthat below and the atmosphere pushed the piston down. Then air was let intothe region below the piston and more steam was injected so that the processcould begin again.

An illustration of Thomas Newcomens fire engine.

PublicDomain


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The Newcomen steam engine consumed vast quantities of coal to heat thewater to produce the steam. Coal was so plentiful that Newcomen didntworry about the energy economy of running the engine. The system could nothave been more efficient than 1 percent. In other words, less than 1 percentof the energy of the coal was used to lift the water out of the coal mines.

Newcomen and his partner made a great deal of money by building thesemassive structures around England, and under Saverys patent, they wereable to monopolize the business.

James Watt

James Watt was born in 1736 in Greenock, Scotland, and he became a herofor many people, including successful U.S. entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie,also Scottish born.

There was a basic inefficiency in the Newcomen design: not only did water

have to be injected to remove the vapor, but the cylinder itself had to becooled. Watt realized that if he could control the situation with a separatecylinder in which he could draw the steam and cool it, he would have animportant advantage.

It was a simple but ingenious solution to the problem, and most importantly,Watt had recognized that there was a role to be played in increasing the effi-ciency with which steam was deployed.

Watt then had the basis for an interesting innovation in the use of steam.

Watt, however, had the problem of financing the prototype. He partnered withan Englishman, Matthew Boulton, who was a major figure in the Birminghamindustrial establishment. Boulton had built a massive silver works, made agreat deal of money, and also had a good deal of political influence.

In the intervening period, Watt had acquired a patent for his invention. Wattand Boulton needed to build a prototype, which would be quite expensive, andtheir patent was due to run out in 1775. In May of that year, Boulton used hispolitical influence to have the patent extended to 1800 under an act sanctionedby Royal Assent.

The cylinder wouldhave to be fabricatedto an exacting stan-dard, because thepiston needed to fitexactly into the cylin-der without any vacantspace that would allowsteam to escape and

reduce efficiency.

An illustration of JamesWatts more efficientsteam engine.

PublicDomain


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John Wilkinson had built an innovative boring mill use

fueling the planet - the past, present, and future of energy guidebook.pdf

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