He noted that such energy curves had already occurred for other major energy sources in the United States, including firewood, whale oil, anthracite coal, and bituminous coal.. See also:
Trang 1smaller vehicles, another crucial
ad-vantage of liquid hydrocarbons is that
they can be simply and easily pumped
into an engine The complexity of
feeding coal to a boiler adds to the
cost of running a steam railroad
lo-comotive and is prohibitively
expen-sive for automobiles and trucks
When hydrocarbon fuels from
pe-troleum eventually become very
ex-pensive because of diminishing
re-serves, there will undoubtedly be
replacement fuels, but all potential
replacements currently known have
expensive disadvantages Synthetic
fuels produced from coal have
proved economically unfeasible
ex-cept in emergencies Production of
ethyl alcohol from agricultural
prod-ucts involves energy losses from
farming, from energy used by yeasts
to make alcohol, and from the
en-ergy required to concentrate the
al-cohol Electric automobiles involve
the two-thirds waste from electrical generating plants
plus the cost of buying and moving massive batteries
A revolution in battery technology is changing those
economics
Energy Resource Bell Curves and
Energy Crises
Geologist Marion King Hubbert noted a bell-shaped
curve in the use of resources, now commonly called
the “Hubbert curve” and often used in estimates of
resource use and reserves (Hubbert first applied his
curve to petroleum in the late 1940’s and
subse-quently reviewed and amended his prediction a
num-ber of times.) According to the Hubnum-bert curve, a
re-source is used experimentally at first Then, use
increases rapidly until the resource begins nearing a
point of half exhaustion At that point, difficulty in
ob-taining the diminishing supplies begins driving up
costs, so demand growth begins to slow As prices
con-tinue rising, competing energy sources emerge, and
production of them increases Use of the first
re-source declines in a mirror image of its earlier rise,
and it gradually fades away Hubbert noticed this
pat-tern in the production of onshore petroleum in the
forty-eight contiguous states of the United States In
1948, he correctly predicted that production in this
region would peak in the early 1970’s He noted that such energy curves had already occurred for other major energy sources in the United States, including firewood, whale oil, anthracite coal, and bituminous coal Extension of such analyses to world energy pro-duction suggested that there would be a worldwide energy crisis after production of oil and gas peaked Worries about such a crisis encouraged price in-creases, stockpiling, and government actions that helped create the energy crises of the 1970’s The discovery of new reserves and the develop-ment of new energy sources can cause different kinds
of crises that are as damaging economically as short-ages are In the 1930’s, a Texas oil boom combined with the Great Depression to reduce petroleum prices
to ten cents a barrel, nearly bankrupting the industry The response was a group of state oil regulatory com-missions that limited petroleum production
Energy economics can have a wide range of ramifi-cations A by-product of the cheap energy of the mid-twentieth century was the growing problem of waste materials, from junked automobiles to tin cans and, later, aluminum and plastic containers The serious-ness of the problem was recognized in the 1960’s, but not until the rise in energy prices of the 1970’s was re-cycling of materials widely adopted, slowly reducing
An electric car charges its battery in Essen, Germany By 2020, Germany hopes to have one million electric cars on the road, a development that was made possible by an economic stimulus package that stressed the need for alternative forms of energy (AP/Wide
World Photos)
Trang 2the volume of waste Perhaps most notably,
energy-intensive aluminum was recycled, and waste cans grew
more scarce
The 1970’s energy crises resulted in two major
eco-nomic reforms that will help ameliorate future crises
First, as noted, price increases led to increased
effi-ciency Second, a major energy source was reborn
when the price of natural gas was released from
gov-ernment price controls At twenty cents per 5.7 cubic
meters, gas had been so cheap that it was often not
even reported in drilling logs, so supplies were vastly
underrated The possibility exists that in the
twenty-first century more energy will come from gas than
from petroleum In addition, those crises spurred
re-search that may eventually yield viable new energy
so-lutions
In the 1970’s, some observers saw the energy crises
as an indication that petroleum reserves would be
im-minently sliding down the diminishing side of
Hubbert’s bell-shaped curve Such predictions were
premature, but his analyses nevertheless show that
en-ergy production must continue evolving As noted
earlier, combustion processes will probably be
cheaper than other energy sources for some time, at
least in the United States Nonetheless, if history is an
indication, fossil fuels may eventually be supplanted
In 1850, “rock oil” (petroleum) was used only in small
amounts, natural gas was a curiosity, and nuclear
reac-tions and the electronic interacreac-tions that make solar
cells work were entirely unknown Nonetheless, all
these have become important energy sources
Roger V Carlson
Further Reading
Banks, Ferdinand E The Political Economy of World
En-ergy: An Introductory Textbook Hackensack, N.J.:
World Scientific, 2007
Craddock, David Renewable Energy Made Easy: Free
En-ergy from Solar, Wind, Hydropower, and Other
Alterna-tive Energy Sources Ocala, Fla.: Atlantic, 2008.
Dumaine, Brian The Plot to Save the Planet: How
Vision-ary Entrepreneurs and Corporate Titans Are Creating
Real Solutions to Global Warming New York: Crown
Business, 2008
Flavin, Christopher, and Nicholas Lenssen Power
Surge: Guide to the Coming Energy Revolution New
York: W W Norton, 1994
Lovins, Amory B., et al The Energy Controversy: Soft Path
Questions and Answers Edited by Hugh Nash San
Francisco: Friends of the Earth, 1979
Pernick, Ron, and Clint Wilder The Clean Tech
Revolu-tion: The Next Big Growth and Investment Opportunity.
New York: Collins, 2007
Ridgeway, James Powering Civilization: The Complete
En-ergy Reader New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.
Shojai, Siamack, ed The New Global Oil Market:
Under-standing Energy Issues in the World Economy Westport,
Conn.: Praeger, 1995
Stobaugh, Robert, and Daniel Yergin, eds Energy
Fu-ture: Report of the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School New York: Vintage Books, 1980.
Yergin, Daniel The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money,
and Power New York: The Free Press, 2008.
See also: Animal power; Biofuels; Buildings and ap-pliances, energy-efficient; Coal gasification and lique-faction; Cogeneration; Department of Energy, U.S.; Energy Policy Act; Energy politics; Energy storage; Ford, Henry; Fuel cells; Manufacturing, energy use in; Oil embargo and energy crises of 1973 and 1979; Oil industry; Peak oil; Photovoltaic cells; Synthetic Fuels Corporation; Transportation, energy use in
Energy Policy Act
Categories: Laws and conventions; government and resources
Date: Final passage July 29, 2005; signed into law August 8, 2005
The U.S Energy Policy Act of 2005 authorized govern-ment subsidies, loan guarantees, and tax breaks for producers of both conventional and alternative energy
as well as a variety of conservation measures Al-though its true impact upon resource use has been a source of debate, the act has resulted in changes in U.S energy policy and raised numerous issues regarding its future.
Background Introduced as the debate over future U.S energy pol-icy was escalating, in light of supply disruptions and price fluctuations, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 was intended to address concerns about scarcity of energy resources by encouraging increased production of both conventional and unconventional energy re-sources Provisions calling for revision of auto emis-sions standards and permitting drilling for oil in the
Trang 3Arctic National Wildlife Refuge were stricken from
the bill prior to passage It was introduced in the
House of Representatives on April 18, 2005, and
passed the final vote of both houses on July 28 and 29
President George W Bush signed the bill into law on
August 8, 2005
Provisions
The act authorized loan guarantees for energy
pro-duction methods that minimize or avoid creation
of greenhouse gases, such as nuclear energy, “clean
coal” technology, and renewable energy sources such
as wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal power The act
also increased the amount of ethanol required in
gas-oline sold in the United States, provided tax breaks
for property owners installing energy-efficient
fea-tures to homes and commercial buildings, offered tax
incentives to purchasers of hybrid automobiles, and
extended the duration of daylight savings time Some
provisions of the act—such as tax breaks for
produc-ers of fossil fuels, emphasis upon expanding coal
min-ing, tax incentives for oil companies drilling in the
Gulf of Mexico, research into the potential effects of
shale oil extraction on public lands, and making
gas and oil companies exempt from portions of the
Safe Drinking Water Act—sparked controversy and
prompted accusations that the act favored fossil-fuel
producers and failed to provide sufficient
environ-mental protections
Impact on Resource Use
Despite the broad scope of the Energy Policy Act of
2005, many of its provisions had not been
imple-mented as of fiscal year 2008-2009, as Congress had
not appropriated much of the money required to
im-plement the provisions Other provisions were rapidly
implemented but produced lukewarm or unintended
results; the mandated increase in the ethanol content
of gasoline created short-term disruptions in gasoline
supplies as refineries struggled to accommodate the
changes and contributed to sharp global increases in
the price of corn and other cereal grains, exacerbating
problems with hunger in some developing countries
Other provisions, such as incentives for purchases of
hybrid automobiles, realized modest short-term
suc-cess as purchases of these automobiles increased and
escalating competition among automobile
manufac-turers resulted in a wider variety of hybrid
automo-biles entering the marketplace Still other provisions,
such as incentives to make homes and commercial
buildings more energy-efficient, appeared to incen-tivize changes in behavioral patterns
Michael H Burchett
Web Site U.S Department of Energy Energy Policy Act
http://www.energy.gov/about/EPAct.htm See also: Biofuels; Buildings and appliances, energy-efficient; Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Act; Department of Energy, U.S.; Electrical power; Energy economics; Energy politics; Ethanol; Hydro-energy; United States; Wind energy
Energy politics
Category: Social, economic, and political issues
Energy systems affect politics, social mobility, and eco-nomic performance Although wood and human labor continue to be important sources of energy in many countries, modern industrial civilizations have been shaped by access to fossil fuels—principally coal and, more recently, petroleum and natural gas—and they depend on these fuels to function Energy resources thus are inevitably a concern of governments and a subject of fundamental importance in the making of both domestic and foreign policy Sometimes those deci-sions involve issues of war or peace.
Background Historically, civilizations have rested on their energy base Those that controlled slaves when human labor was the principal source of energy erected pyramids and temples thousands of years ago Civilizations that did not possess that energy source are buried in the past, often surfacing only as footnotes in ancient his-tory texts
Modern history can be similarly written In 1800, nearly a score of countries—including Spain, Portu-gal, Austria, and Holland—of roughly equal power contended for influence A century later, those capa-ble of significantly influencing world affairs num-bered approximately one-half dozen, some of which were not included in the earlier listing The winnow-ing process revolved around coal, the essential fuel for full participation in the Industrial Revolution
Trang 4Among the Northern Hemisphere powers, only the
United States, Britain, the newly formed Germany,
Russia, and Japan possessed it in abundance Fifty
years later, this number had been reduced to the two
superpowers of the postwar era: the United States and
the Soviet Union These were two industrialized
coun-tries with large indigenous sources of oil: the most
ef-ficient, utilized, and strategically important source of
energy in the twentieth century Lacking it, Adolf
Hit-ler planned Germany’s World War II strategy around
an early acquisition of the oil fields of western Russia
and North Africa Similarly, to maintain access to oil,
the United States and a grand alliance composed
pre-dominantly of industrialized, oil-importing states
fought a war in 1991 to eliminate the threat Iraq
posed to the vastly important Saudi Arabian fields in
the Persian Gulf, the Earth’s late twentieth century
geopolitical heartland
Pre-1973 Energy Politics in United States
Perhaps because of its vast energy resources, the
United States did not have a definitive domestic
en-ergy policy prior to the oil crisis of 1973 It did have, as
David Howard Davis notes in his Energy Politics (1982),
fuel policies for each of the three fossil fuels it held in
abundance (coal, gas, and oil) as well as for the
nu-clear power industry, whose development the
govern-ment encouraged after World War II These policies
often differed widely from one another, reflecting the
different physical properties and periods of origin of
each of the four fuels An overall energy policy did not
exist Moreover, much of the time, the individual fuel
policies were by-products of other policy concerns;
for example, the attention given to oil in the United
States in the postwar era was related to the
impor-tance of oil to postwar economic growth, whereas
en-vironmental considerations led to a 1970 freeze on
the construction of the Alaska oil pipeline
Energy in general and oil in particular were much
more direct concerns of the makers of American
for-eign policy, especially after the U.S Navy converted
from coal to oil in the early twentieth century To
se-cure a supply of oil for refueling the fleet, the
govern-ment encouraged American oil companies to go
abroad Although the U.S government never created
its own public oil company to seek a secure oil supply,
it frequently used its political, economic, and
diplo-matic power to assist the American-based
multina-tional corporations that developed that oil Thus,
af-ter World War I, antitrust laws were never applied to
the cooperative activities of the principal U.S oil firms, much less to the international activities of the five great, American-based multinational oil compa-nies (Exxon, Texaco, Gulf, Mobil, and Standard Oil of California) that collaborated with Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum in the “Seven Sisters” cartel that effectively controlled the world oil market be-tween 1926 and 1966 To the contrary, Congress re-wrote U.S tax codes after World War II to benefit those American oil companies in the Arabian Penin-sula that suddenly had to share their profits with Per-sian Gulf governments Likewise, President Dwight Eisenhower pressured Britain into including Ameri-can firms when it reopened the British Petroleum venture in Iran after covert American operatives top-pled the Iranian government, which had nationalized Iran’s oil industry, in 1954 Prior to 1973, foreign pol-icy required attention to energy far more than domes-tic policy did, and in the international arena, energy politics was oil politics
Oil Crises of the 1970’s and Energy Politics in the Energy Importing World
Events beginning with the 1973 Arab embargo on the United States and other countries friendly to Israel during the October, 1973, Yom Kippur War vastly in-tensified the importance of energy as a policy issue
To be sure, Arab embargoes had been threatened during both the 1956 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars; how-ever, on those occasions the threat had little meaning Most Western countries either were still producing most of the energy they consumed or were able to pro-cure ample imported oil in an international buyer’s market where supply often exceeded demand
By 1973, imported oil had become essential to the economy of much of the developed world Even the United States, although still one of the world’s major petroleum producers, was importing nearly 30 per-cent of the oil it required to maintain the high liv-ing standard of American consumers In Japan and Western Europe, where postwar economic recovery had been based on oil rather than on indigenous coal supplies, and where imported petroleum ac-counted for 60 to 80 percent of all energy being used, petroleum imports had become essential to life it-self The oil embargo thus came as a terrifying shock
to the industrialized world Western civilization, or
at least the materially rich lifestyle associated with
it, had become dependent on an energy source that the Western, oil-importing countries did not control
Trang 5and for which there was no immediately available
en-ergy substitute
Vulnerability of this nature is normally exploited in
the amoral world of international politics, and so it
was in 1973 In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War,
the U.S allies were pressured—by the threat of losing
their shipments of Arab oil—into endorsing the
United Nations resolution calling for Israel to return
the Arab land it acquired during the 1967 Arab-Israeli
war The same states also bid, almost hysterically,
against one another for available oil supplies By the
end of October of that year, the Organization of
Pe-troleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had exploited
this situation, taken over the control of oil production
from the Seven Sisters, and established the official
price of OPEC oil at four times its prior cost In its
turn, this sudden jump in the price of oil to nearly
twelve dollars per barrel ignited a global recession
The recession had barely ended before the fall of the
shah of Iran in January, 1979 The outbreak of war
be-tween Iraq and Iran in the fall of that year significantly
reduced the supply of exportable oil, producing a
sec-ond oil crisis in which the price of OPEC oil
cata-pulted to more than thirty-six dollars per barrel
The oil crises of 1973 and 1979 made energy the
key policy issue throughout the developed,
energy-importing world for several years The crises triggered
double-digit inflation and
unemploy-ment figures in most Western
coun-tries and collectively cost the
West-ern world as much as $1 trillion in
lost gross national product Lest
OPEC oil again become available
only in limited amounts and/or at
prohibitive costs, countries sought
a mix of energy sources capable of
minimizing their dependency on
im-ported petroleum Toward that end,
most states without domestic oil or
natural gas options gravitated toward
a “co-co-nuk” strategy of enhanced
conservation efforts, a greater use
of coal, and more reliance on
nu-clear power in their national energy
systems As a result of these efforts,
and of economies reshaping around
the service sector and less
energy-intensive industries, Japan and most
industrialized states in Western
Eu-rope subsequently reduced the
pro-portion of imported energy in their overall energy profiles—even after recovering from their oil-crises-induced recessions However, in most instances they also still remained dependent on oil imports for one-half or more than one-one-half of their total energy needs Like the United States, these countries have had diffi-culty reconciling their continued dependency on oil and use of coal with the commitments that they have made to reducing fossil fuel emissions under the environment-related agreements negotiated during the 1990’s
Energy Politics and U.S Foreign Policy from
1979 to September 11, 2001 The United States has had less success than other in-dustrialized states in lowering oil imports A number
of factors have combined to preclude an easy shift from petroleum to other energy sources Among these causes are the declining productivity of U.S do-mestic oil fields, political opposition to nuclear power following the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, and the high economic and en-vironmental costs of such alternatives to imported oil, such as coal liquefaction Lifestyle decisions made during the era of cheap energy (such as single-family suburban homes remote from work sites and a re-liance on the automobile for transportation) also
Anticipating the gas and oil shortage that would result from the energy crisis of 1973, Austrian motorists wait in line to fill up their gas tanks Issues related to oil and gas domi-nated energy politics in the latter half of the twentieth century (Rue des Archives/The
Granger Collection, New York)
Trang 6have made the shift difficult Consequently, oil
im-ports have accounted for one-half or more of the oil
that the United States consumes each year
Mean-while, even with imports at this level, the country’s
domestic oil reserves have steadily declined, from
more than 45 billion barrels of oil in 1973 to fewer
than 25 billion by the mid-1990’s, and to fewer than
10 billion in 2009
For the United States, securing oil at a stable price
for itself and its import-dependent allies became a
central foreign policy objective following the oil crises
of the 1970’s The focus has been on the Persian Gulf,
where three factors have shaped U.S policies:
long-standing U.S relationships with the oil-exporting
states in the region, the geopolitical importance of
this oil-rich area, and the special relationship the
United States has with Israel
The U.S government has supported and
culti-vated the friendship of governments in the Persian
Gulf area for a long time A little-noted feature of the
U.S lend-lease deal with Britain before U.S entry into
World War II involved London paying millions of
dol-lars to the king of Saudi Arabia to assure continued
ac-cess to Saudi oil More publicized was the sucac-cessful
U.S effort to restore the shah of Iran to power in 1954
and its extensive arming of the shah during the 1970’s
to enable Iran to serve as America’s “policeman” in
the Persian Gulf Most visible of all were the
deploy-ment of U.S warships to the Persian Gulf during the
latter stages of the 1980-1988 war between Iraq and
Iran in order to protect oil shipments and U.S efforts
to organize an international force to restore the
Ku-waiti monarchy after Iraq’s 1990 occupation of that
country Both ventures dramatized the growing
im-portance, in both U.S foreign policy and the world
energy market, of the oil-rich states along the Arabian
Peninsula’s Persian Gulf
The overthrow of pro-Western governments in the
oil-producing states of Iraq, Algeria, and Libya during
the 1950’s and 1960’s and the fall of the shah of Iran in
1979 intensified the importance of the oil-rich states
of the Arabian Peninsula: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the
United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman
The vast majority of all known petroleum reserves is
located in a very small percentage of the known pools
of oil, and the richest of these pools lie under the
lands of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the
smaller Arabian states in the area In fact,
approxi-mately three-quarters of the total proven oil reserves
of petroleum-exporting states and more than 60
per-cent of the known oil reserves in the world lie in this region
Saudi Arabia is the linchpin, with not only the larg-est reserves (conservatively larg-estimated at more than
200 billion barrels in the mid-1990’s) but also the abil-ity to produce more than one-third of the oil im-ported by the Western world during the 1990’s and early twenty-first century Maintaining the stability of Saudi Arabia’s government and access to its oil have thus become central objectives of U.S foreign policy The protection of Saudi Arabia was the first goal for the United States in deploying its troops to the Per-sian Gulf following Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait in Au-gust, 1990 Energy concerns similarly explain why, fol-lowing the war against Iraq and the liberation of Kuwait, the United States chose to retain a large mili-tary presence in the area in order to keep Iraq in check and better defend the Saudi fields should the need arise to do so
United States as Mediator Petroleum politics after the Yom Kippur War also ex-plain in part the mediator role that the United States assumed following that war in trying to negotiate an overall settlement of the Arab-Palestinian-Israeli con-flict Keeping friendly governments in power and maintaining access to Middle East oil for itself and its allies have been two of the enduring goals of U.S pol-icy in the Middle East Ensuring the survival of Israel has been a third Prior to 1973, support of Israel was arguably the highest priority of the three goals This was true despite the fact that pursuing it frequently handicapped U.S pursuit of the other two goals, be-cause Arab states found it difficult to be publicly close
to the strongest ally (the United States) of their worst enemy (Israel)
The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OAPEC’s) oil embargo during the Yom Kippur War effectively linked access to oil to the Arab-Israeli conflict After the war, the United States adopted a more evenhanded approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict and accepted the long-term role as me-diator The 1978 Camp David Accords—in which Egypt recognized Israel in exchange for Israel return-ing the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt—and the 1990’s agreements between Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab leaders—which led to Palestinian home rule zones in Gaza and the West Bank being created—were more than just significant U.S foreign policy accomplish-ments To the extent that they helped avert future
Trang 7Arab-Israeli wars, they also represented successes in
U.S international energy policy
Energy Politics in the Early Years of the
New Millennium
During both the era of low oil prices in the 1990’s and
the era of high oil prices between 2005 and 2008,
Western governments struggled to reconcile their
de-sire to create a cleaner environment with their
contin-ued dependency on fossil fuels During the first of
these two periods, the low cost of imported energy
si-multaneously deflected their attention away from
de-veloping alternatives to imported sources of energy
and encouraged consideration of environmentally
friendly legislation, even if it increased energy costs
Not surprisingly the latter proposals were invariably
opposed, frequently successfully so, by lobbyists for
the energy industries in those societies The
environ-mentalists, however, also scored their victories In the
United States, for example, the efforts of the oil
com-panies to acquire exploration and drilling rights in
the Arctic reserve were consistently beaten back by
en-vironmentalists, and European environmentalists
have had some success in getting major European oil
companies to endorse, verbally at least,
environmen-tally friendly energy plans
The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, reshaped the energy debate, and subsequent de-velopments quickly made energy politics
a mainstay of international relations be-tween 2001 and 2008 In a world with a tightening oil market resulting from the increased demand for oil by India and China, both of whom accelerated devel-opment projects of relatively inexpensive imported oil, pursuing policies deemed offensive by oil-exporting states suddenly became more difficult for the United States Thus, U.S efforts after 9/11 to track down and cut off the funding of ter-rorist groups supported by Saudi reli-gious organizations floundered when the U.S government was, under the changed economic and political conditions, un-willing or unable to lean heavily on the Saudi government to crack down of such bodies Similarly, U.S efforts to isolate Iraq, a country seemingly bent on acquir-ing nuclear weapons, came to little when Western U.S allies proved to be unwilling to antag-onize Iran, Iraq’s eastern neighbor, in a time when Iranian oil exports were important to the world’s eco-nomic health Perhaps most important, the U.S inva-sion of Iraq in 2003 radically altered the world oil mar-ket and produced both a series of foreign policy problems for the United States and aggressive foreign policy actors on the world stage
A collateral consequence of the U.S decision to re-move Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from power was that it eliminated a central element that had en-couraged OPEC to keep its prices in the moderate range throughout the 1990’s Iraq was operating un-der U.N sanctions and was only permitted to export a small amount of its production capacity; however, it was within the power of the U.N to remove those sanctions at any time The threat of substantial Iraqi oil exports suddenly being unleashed on the world market in response to irresponsible OPEC pricing ac-tion influenced OPEC’s decision makers for more than a decade, encouraging them to keep their price increases modest The disruption of Iraq’s oil produc-tion capacity as a result of the U.S invasion, and the subsequent turmoil in Iraq, removed that factor When the growing demand for oil subsequently coin-cided with the political uncertainties surrounding its
Top Energy-Consuming Countries, 2005
Total (quadrillion Btus)
Per Capita (million Btus)
Source: Data from U.S Energy Information Administration, International
Energy Annual, 2005.
Note: Values are in British thermal units (Btus) Totals are in quadrillions;
hence U.S consumption of 100.7 is 100,700,000,000,000,000 Per
capita consumption is in millions; hence U.S per capita consumption
of 340.0 is 340,000,000.
Trang 8availability from other suppliers such as Iran and
Ni-geria (whose oil-producing region is hotly contested
by several tribal groups), the result was a stratospheric
rise in the price of oil from the $35-per-barrel range
that existed prior to the invasion to $150-per-barrel by
2008 By that point the governments of the developed
oil-importing world had already begun reconsidering
energy alternatives—this time of a “green” variety—
and the global demand for oil was contracting
Be-tween 2003 and 2008, however, the high prices made
the leaders of oil-exporting countries such as Iran,
Venezuela, and Russia aggressive in the realm of
for-eign policy
Joseph R Rudolph, Jr.
Further Reading
Anderson, Irvine H Aramco, the United States, and
Saudi Arabia: A Study in the Dynamics of Foreign Oil
Policy, 1933-1950 Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
Uni-versity Press, 1981
Baev, Pavel Russian Energy Policy and Military Power:
Putin’s Quest for Greatness New York: Routledge,
2008
Beaubouef, Bruce Andre The Strategic Petroleum
Re-serve: U.S Energy Security and Oil Politics, 1975-2005.
College Station: Texas A & M University Press,
2007
Campbell, Kurt M., and Jonathon Price, eds The
Global Politics of Energy Washington, D.C.: The
As-pen Institute, 2008
Davis, David Howard Energy Politics 4th ed New York:
St Martin’s Press, 1993
Deece, David A., and Joseph S Nye, eds Energy and
Se-curity Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1981.
Falola, Toyin, and Ann Genova The Politics of the Global
Oil Industry: An Introduction Westport, Conn.:
Praeger, 2005
Gallagher, Kelly Sims, ed Acting in Time on Energy
Pol-icy Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press,
2009
Goldman, Marshall I Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the
New Russia New York: Oxford University Press,
2008
Klare, Michael T Blood and Oil: The Dangers and
Conse-quences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported
Petroleum New York: Henry Holt, 2005.
_ Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New
Geo-politics of Energy New York: Metropolitan Books,
2008
Mattson, Kevin “What the Heck Are You up to, Mr
Presi-dent?” Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise,” and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country New
York: Bloomsbury, 2009
Morris, Paul M., ed National Energy Policy: Major
Fed-eral Energy Programs and Status New York: Novinka
Books, 2006
Roberts, Paul The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous
New World Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
Rosenbaum, Walter A Environmental Politics and Policy.
7th ed Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2008
Shaffer, Brenda Energy Politics Philadelphia:
Univer-sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2009
Standlea, David M Oil, Globalization, and the War for the
Arctic Refuge Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2006
Stoff, Michael B Oil, War, and American Security: The
Search for a National Policy on Foreign Oil, 1941-1947.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980
Yergin, Daniel The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money,
and Power New ed New York: The Free Press, 2008.
See also: Alaska pipeline; Coal; Coal gasification and liquefaction; Department of Energy, U.S.; Energy eco-nomics; Energy Policy Act; Iran; Oil and natural gas distribution; Oil embargo and energy crises of 1973 and 1979; Oil industry; Resources as a source of inter-national conflict; Russia; Saudi Arabia; United States; Venezuela
Energy storage
Categories: Energy resources; obtaining and using resources
When more energy is available than is needed at a given time, the excess energy can be stored for later use
in a number of ways, including electrochemical cells, pumped storage, and solar heat storage.
Background Energy storage is important for utility load leveling, electrical vehicles, solar energy systems, uninter-rupted power supply, and energy systems at remote lo-cations Two important parameters to consider when discussing energy storage are the duration of storage and the amount of energy stored per unit weight or volume Duration of energy storage may vary from a fraction of one second to many years In a nuclear
Trang 9power plant, nuclear fuel is stored within a reactor for
a year Coal piles, gas and oil storage tanks, and
pumped hydro (hydroelectric power) are maintained
by power utilities for several days’ use, depending on
the need Similarly, for a solar energy system, energy
storage may be required on an hourly, daily, or weekly
basis The amounts of energy stored per unit weight
(specific energy) and per unit volume (energy
den-sity) are critical in determining the size of a storage
system
Other factors of importance in the design of a
stor-age system include the time rates at which energy can
be stored (charging) or removed (discharging) and
the number of useful cycles of charging and
discharg-ing Depending on the nature of available energy, it
can be stored as mechanical, thermal, chemical,
elec-trical, or magnetic energy Electrical energy can be
ei-ther stored as chemical energy in batteries, called
electrochemical cells, or stored as mechanical energy
by pumping water from a lower elevation to a higher
elevation (pumped hydro) Electrical energy can also
be converted to thermal energy and then stored as
thermal energy
Electrochemical Cells
An electrochemical cell consists of an anode, a
cath-ode, and an electrolyte When a cell is connected to a
load, electrons flow from the anode to the cathode In
this operation, oxidation (loss of electrons) takes
place at the anode, and reduction (gain of electrons) occurs at the cathode The cell chemistry of the well-known lead-acid battery is as follows: The anode is lead (Pb), the cathode is lead oxide (PbO2), and the electrolyte is sulfuric acid (H2SO4) The overall cell re-action is as follows:
The forward reaction represents the change during discharge when the cell is connected to a load, and the backward reaction represents the change that occurs when electric energy is stored The theoretical voltage and capacity of a cell are functions of the anode and cathode materials The theoretical voltage can be cal-culated from the standard electrode potentials of the materials The capacity of a cell is expressed as the to-tal quantity of electricity involved in the electrochemi-cal reaction and is defined in terms of coulombs or ampere-hours Theoretically, one gram-equivalent weight of a material will deliver 96,487 coulombs or 26.8 ampere-hours A battery consists of one or more cells connected in series, parallel, or both depending
on the desired output voltage and capacity
Electrochemical energy storage is more commonly known as battery storage Batteries are classified as primary and secondary batteries Only secondary
Discharge Cathode Anode Cathode Anode PbO2 +2 H2SO4+ Pb PbSO4 +2H2O+ PbSO4
Charge
Specific Energy Storage Capacities of Various Materials
Uranium-235 (fission reaction) 7.0 × 1010 Glauber’s salt (at 32.4°C) 251
Reactor fuel (2.5% enriched Calcium chloride hexahydrate
Natural uranium 5.0 × 108 Water (temperature change = 40°C) 167
Hydrogen (LHV) 1.2 × 105 Sodium acetate trihydrate (at 58°C) 180
Methane (LHV) 5.0 × 104 Cross-linked high density
Falling water (altitude change = Flywheel (uniformly stressed disc) 79
Note: All values are in kilojoules per kilogram LHV stands for “lower heating value,” indicating that the nonuseful energy given
off in steam has been subtracted from the figure.
Trang 10teries are rechargeable and are therefore suitable for
energy storage applications Lead-acid and
nickel-cadmium are well-known rechargeable batteries and
are the most commonly used Lead-acid batteries
have been used for more than a century and are still
the most popular batteries An example is the
auto-mobile battery Large numbers of electrochemical
cells have been identified that can be used for storing
electricity; a few of these are nickel-cadmium, nickel
metal hydride, and lithium-iron sulfide Electric
stor-age in batteries has shown great potential in
applica-tions such as cell phones, laptop computers, tools,
and electric vehicles and as a means of storing
elec-tricity for load-leveling purposes in power plants The
growing interest in electric vehicles is driving
innova-tion in the battery industry The automobile industry
is looking for a better-performing, lower-cost battery
The current favorite, the lithium-ion battery, has led
to research into lithium-air and lithium-sulfur batter-ies, which have much higher energy capacity and lower weight
Pumped Storage Another means of storing electricity is to pump water from a lower reservoir (which can be a lake or a river)
to a higher reservoir The potential energy stored in water by virtue of its elevation can be used later to gen-erate electricity when needed by using hydraulic tur-bines The motors that drive the pumps are reversible and act as electrical generators when water falls from the upper reservoir to drive the turbines The main components of a pumped storage plant are the upper reservoir, waterway passage, power house, and lower reservoir
W ater flow (pumping)
Wa ter flow (g en eratin g)
Penstock
Pump-turbine
Upper reservoir
Lower reservoir
Pump-Turbine
The development of the reversible pump-turbine, which acts as a motor and pump when rotating in one direction and as a turbine and genera-tor when rotating in the other, has made pumped sgenera-torage more practical.