Publication: Daedalus
Publication Date: 22-SEP-06
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Nocera, Daniel G.
Article Excerpt
Energy is the greatest concern of our future. The rising living standards of a growing world population will increase global energy consumption dramatically over the next half century. The challenge for science, and particularly for the discipline of chemistry, is to meet this energy need in a secure, sustainable, and environmentally responsible way. This essay will frame the magnitude of the problem, show the insufficiency of conventional energy sources to meet these needs, and pose an alternative solution.
By 2002, the global population burned energy at a rate of 13.5 TW. (One TW equals [10.sup.12] watts, or [10.sup.12] joules per second. This unit is convenient because it normalizes energy use per unit of time.) In the next forty-five years, this burn rate will rise with alarming alacrity. To gain a sense of the scope of the problem, we can perform a simple but powerful analysis: we can multiply a country's TW consumption per person by the projected global population of 9 billion people for the year 2050 (see table 1). For example, if 9 billion people adopt the current standard of living for a U.S. resident (which takes 1.1361 x [10.sup.-8] TW of energy to sustain), the world will need an astronomical 102 TW of energy in 2050.
The next three entries--China, India, and Africa--are cause for concern. These countries--and, in one case, an entire continent--have very low per-capita energy use but possess the largest populations on our planet. Since energy consumption scales directly with a country's GDP, global energy use will increase drastically as China, India, and Africa modernize.
So how...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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