New fuels is an interesting one. I'll pick up there if I may. What I know on the subject applies only to the UK - I haven't looked into anyone else's problems yet.
Personally, I doubt if there'll be any new fuels in just a decade, unless we have an astonishingly large war: of the scale that'd put all previous wars in the shade. Historically, this seems to be the only way to drum up the funds for truly groundbreaking research. Sure, it may be possible to heat houses and run cars using... oh, I don't know... orange peel - but the R&D that would lead to this discovery I find unlikely to happen without massive funding. Even then, if there were to be a almighty war, new fuels are not guaranteed.
I find it more likely that we'll see changes in our dependence on existing fuels. We'll also start to move away from thinking solely about fuel as a commodity, and more about energy.
Current rates of fuel consumption are unsustainable. Energy is cheap, so we hardly notice how we're using it. The fact is, we use an awful lot, for an awful lot of things, and rely on an awful lot of different fuels to make it all happen.
When you consider the fact that, in many parts of the UK (notably London, at certain times of the day), the price you pay per mW of electricity is less than the cost of production. The competition caused by privatisation and continued deregulation have left many of the power producers in a terrible financial state. Most worrying is British Nuclear Fuels who, on at least two occasions since being privatised, have run out of money to continue managing their reactors. As these things have a habit of going pop when mismanaged, this makes for one hell of a bargaining tool when you approach the government for handouts. While the UK government's position is officially anti-nuclear, and "we really must try not to build any more of those reactors", they've had to shovel frightening amounts of cash into BNFL in recent years, just to manage the ones we have.
So, the first challenge is to make people aware of the energy they're using, and we all know how government makes you aware: tax. Energy taxation within the next decade is practically a certainty - the landfill tax drove recycling into the headlines in the early nineties, next it'll be a tax on energy.
Of course, any tax brings about an almighty hoo-hah. When the energy tax arrives on the table (and the front pages) as I'm confident it will, it'll stimulate familiar discussions. Wind farms, tidal generation, hydro, solar, biofuels, etc etc. No doubt they'll use some of the tax to offer grants to such schemes - but the reason they'll struggle is the reason they've always struggled: in terms of output and scale, nuclear's cheaper.
So, then you're faced with the problem of how to persuade people that what we really need is more nuclear power stations at the bottom of their school's playing fields. We'll also need to buy more and more nuclear-generated energy from our neighbouring countries, possibly causing them to build some more reactors too.
I don't oppose nuclear because they have a habit of going off and being rather dangerous, like most of the CND crowd. It is a fair point, I have to admit, but my objections have always been financial. Nuclear may be cheap, but it has a habit of deferring the problem. It's like a high-interest loan you pass on to your grandkids. Someone's got to pay to clear all this shit up when we're done with it.
Of course, if we're clever, we don't need to build any more reactors - we just need to think creatively about energy. There's a piece of kit in my house that burns gas to make the radiators warm. Next door, there's something similar - and so on and so on. Down the road, there's a hypothetical office block or factory or something, with some piece of kit that produces heat. It doesn't take a nuclear scientist to put two and two together, and realise that the heat they're trying to get rid of is a source of energy I'd happily buy to heat my house... if the price is right.
There's a few smart buggers in Sweden running timber mills. They farm spruce using crop rotation forestry (yay! trees!), and then cut them up in their mill to make doors and beams and chess pieces and toothpicks and whatever else. Timber mills require an awful lot of electricity, and produce an awful lot of sawdust (incidentally, sawdust is quite explosive in a confined space - open your physics textbooks and look up gunpowder and the old high-surface-area to low-volume thing). So, these clever Swedish buggers press the sawdust into a stable fuel (pellets - think cat litter), and throw it into a gasifier. They then burn it (well, gasify it - burn without oxygen making Carbon Monoxide instead of Carbon Dioxide - CO not CO2) and put the resulting gas through a turbine that generates electricity. Then they take the waste heat from this, raise steam, and put this through another turbine, generating more electricity. So now they're powering their mill for nothing, selling off the surplus energy to the grid, and condensing the steam to make hot water they can pipe into the locals' homes.
That's one business in one small town in some other country, but it serves as an interesting example of thinking differently about who produces energy, how they do it, and to whom they distribute it. Either we'll keep the huge grid and build more nuclear plants to keep it ticking, or we'll localise everything and start finding sources of energy all over the place.
With regard to petrol for your Hummer, frankly I've no idea. But when the price is seven times what it is now, you're going to be none too happy about it. Maybe that's how the war starts. |
