Energy and Climate Change E-Book

David Coley

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 925

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

For more information on this title, including student exercises, please visit, http://www.people.ex.ac.uk/DAColey/ Energy and Climate Change: Creating a Sustainable Future provides an up-to-date introduction to the subject examining the relationship between energy and our global environment. The book covers the fundamentals of the subject, discussing what energy is, why it is important, as well as the detrimental effect on the environment following our use of energy. Energy is placed at the front of a discussion of geo-systems, living systems, technological development and the global environment, enabling the reader to develop a deeper understanding of magnitudes. Learning is re-enforced, and the relevance of the topic broadened, through the use of several conceptual veins running through the book. One of these is an attempt to demonstrate how systems are related to each other through energy and energy flows. Examples being wind-power, and bio-mass which are really solar power via another route; how the energy used to evaporate sea water must be related to the potential for hydropower; and where a volcano's energy really comes from. With fermi-like problems and student exercises incorporated throughout every chapter, this text provides the perfect companion to the growing number of students taking an interest in the subject.

Leseprobe

Contents

Copyright

Preface

Corrections and additional material

1 Introduction

PART I

2 Energy

2.1 What is energy?

2.2 Units

2.3 Power

2.4 Energy in various disguises

2.5 Energy quality and exergy

2.6 Student exercises

3 The planet’s energy balance

3.1 The sun

3.2 The earth

3.3 Comparisons

3.4 Student exercises

4 A history of humankind’s use of energy

4.1 Energy and society

4.2 Wealth, urbanization and conflict

4.3 Our current level of energy use

4.4 Student exercises

5 Sustainability, climate change and the global environment

5.1 Sustainability

5.2 Climate change

5.3 Other concerns

5.4 Debating climate change and answering the skeptics

5.5 The atmosphere

5.6 Student exercises

6 Economics and the environment

6.1 Key concepts

6.2 Environmental economics

6.3 Student exercises

7 Combustion, inescapable inefficiencies and the generation of electricity

7.1 Combustion

7.2 Calorific values

7.3 Inescapable inefficiencies

7.4 Heat pumps

7.5 Double Carnot efficiencies

7.6 The generation of electricity from heat

7.7 Student exercises

PART II

8 Coal

8.1 History

8.2 Extraction

8.3 The combustion of coal

8.4 Technologies for use

8.5 Example applications

8.6 Global resource

8.7 Student exercises

9 Oil

9.1 Extraction

9.2 The combustion of oil

9.3 Technologies for use

9.4 Example application: the motor car

9.5 Global resource

9.6 Student exercises

10 Gas

10.1 Extraction

10.2 The combustion of gas

10.3 Technologies for use

10.4 Example application: the domestic boiler

10.5 Global resource

10.6 Student exercises

11 Non-conventional hydrocarbons

11.1 Oil shale

11.2 Tar sands

11.3 Methane hydrate

11.4 Student exercises

12 Nuclear power

12.1 Physical basis

12.2 Technologies for use

12.3 Environmental concerns

12.4 Waste

12.5 World resource

12.6 Example applications

12.7 Is nuclear power the solution to global warming?

12.8 Student exercises

13 Hydropower

13.1 History

13.2 Technologies for use

13.3 Example application: Itaipu hydroelectric station

13.4 Environmental impacts

13.5 Pumped storage

13.6 Global resource

13.7 Student exercises

14 Transport and air quality

14.1 Present day problems

14.2 Air quality and health

14.3 Example application: air quality in Exeter, UK

14.4 Student exercises

15 Figures and philosophy: an analysis of a nation’s energy supply

15.1 The economy

15.2 Production

15.3 Consumption

15.4 Oil and gas production

15.5 Prices

15.6 Fuel poverty

15.7 Carbon emissions

15.8 Sustainable energy in the UK: the current state of play

15.9 Student exercises

PART III

16 Future world energy use and carbon emissions

16.1 The world’s future use of energy

16.2 Student exercises

17 The impact of a warmer world

17.1 Climate models

17.2 Natural variability and model reliability

17.3 Future climate change

17.4 Impacts

17.5 Costing the impact

17.6 Student exercises

18 Politics in the greenhouse: contracting and converging

18.1 Climate negotiations

18.2 Another approach

18.3 Bringing it all together

18.4 Conclusion

18.5 Student exercises

PART IV Sustainable energy technologies

IV.1 Current world sustainable energy provision

19 Energy efficiency

19.1 Cogeneration

19.2 Reducing energy losses

19.3 Energy recovery

19.4 Energy efficiency in buildings

19.5 Student exercises

20 Solar power

20.1 Passive solar heating

20.2 Heat pumps

20.3 Solar water heating

20.4 Low temperature solar water heating

20.5 Example application: solar water heating, Phoenix Federal Correction Institution, USA

20.6 High temperature solar power

20.7 Low temperature water-based thermal energy conversion

20.8 OECD resource

20.9 Student exercises

21 Photovoltaics

21.1 History

21.2 Basic principles

21.3 Technologies for use

21.4 Electrical characteristics

21.5 Roof-top PV

21.6 Example application: Doxford Solar Office, UK

21.7 OECD resource

21.8 Student exercises

22 Wind power

22.1 History

22.2 Technologies for use

22.3 The modern horizontal axis wind turbine

22.4 Environmental impacts

22.5 OECD resource

22.6 Example application: Harøy Island Wind Farm, Sandøy, Norway

22.7 Student exercises

23 Wave power

23.1 Wave characteristics

23.2 Technologies for use

23.3 Example application: the Pelamis P-750 wave energy converter

23.4 Student exercises

24 Tidal and small-scale hydropower

24.1 Tides

24.2 Small-scale hydropower

24.3 OECD resource

24.4 Student exercises

25 Biomass

25.1 History

25.2 Basic principles

25.3 Technologies for use

25.4 Example application: anaerobic digester, Walford College Farm, UK

25.5 Global resource

25.6 OECD resource

25.7 Student exercises

26 Geothermal

26.1 Background

26.2 History

26.3 Resource and technology

26.4 Technologies for use

26.5 Environmental problems

26.6 World resource

26.7 OECD resource

26.8 Example application: Hacchobaru geothermal power station, Kokonoe-machi, Japan

26.9 Student exercises

27 Fast breeders and fusion

27.1 Fast breeder reactors

27.2 Fusion

27.3 Example application: JET Torus, Culham, UK

27.4 Student exercises

28 Alternative transport futures and the hydrogen economy

28.1 Improving energy efficiency

28.2 Alternative transport fuels and engines

28.3 Hydrogen powered vehicles and the hydrogen economy

28.4 Fuel cells

28.5 Example application: the greening of natural gas

28.6 Student exercises

29 Carbon sequestration and climate engineering

29.1 Capture technologies

29.2 Storage technologies

29.3 The reflection of solar radiation

29.4 Example application: Statoil, Sleipner West gas field, North Sea

29.5 Student exercises

30 A sustainable, low carbon future?

30.1 Methodology and assumptions

30.3 Worldwide reductions

30.4 Conclusion

30.5 What can I do?

30.6 Student exercises

References

Appendix 1 National energy data

A1.1 Oil (2004)

A1.2 Gas (2004)

A1.3 Coal (2004)

A1.4 Electricity (2004)

A1.5 Primary energy (2005)

A1.6 Definitions

Appendix 2 Answers to in-text problems

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Appendix 3 Bibliography and suggested reading

Appendix 4 Useful data

A4.1 Useful data and constants

A4.2 Conversions

A4.3 List of symbols

A4.4 Common prefixes (see Chapter 2 for others)

Index

List Of Figures

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coley, David A.

Energy and climate change: creating a sustainable future / David A. Coley.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-85312-2 (cloth) – ISBN 978-0-470-85313-9 (pbk.)

1. Power resources–Textbooks. 2. Climatic changes–Textbooks. I. Title.

TJ163.2.C625 2008

621.042–dc22

2007046622

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-470-85312-2 (HB)

ISBN 978-0-470-85313-9 (PB)

To Helen, Scarlett and Theo

Preface

Please visit the book’s website www.wileyeurope.com/college/coley for additional teaching resources, web links and energy data

This book was written with a passionate belief that humanity needs to change the way it treats the planet and treats many of the people who inhabit it. For millennia, humankind has had an ever-increasing need for energy. Initially we relied on heat from the sun and biomass as food and firewood. Then we learnt to use animals other than ourselves as agricultural labour; by 100BCwe had harnessed the power of moving water, then the winds. Up until this point our use of energy had been largely sustainable – with the possible exception of excess forest cutting – and our impact on the planet was only of a local nature. The industrial revolution brought a requirement for much larger amounts of power in locations far from any natural resource, necessitating a radical change. Fossil fuels (first coal, then oil) proved ideal for providing this power. Unfortunately the emissions from their use have altered not only the local environment but also the atmosphere itself, and the concentration of carbon dioxide has risen from 280 parts per million to 370 today – a level unknown for millions of years. Because carbon dioxide acts as an insulator, this has slowly warmed the planet, in turn melting ice and raising sea levels.

It has taken us a long time to realize the seriousness of the situation. The basic phenomenon and its consequences were first described in 1859, and now terms such as global warming and climate change appear regularly within the media, political debates and dinner-table chitchat.

The common realization of the problem is proving to be the easy part. We want energy and we want lots of it. The developed world uses the equivalent of 12 kilograms of oil per person per day and this ensures a reasonably affluent existence for the vast majority of its citizens, where starvation is non-existent, heating and lighting sufficient and travel the norm. In some parts of the world energy use is equivalent to as little as 80 grams of oil per day. At this level it would appear impossible to meet the fundamental needs of a society and individual opportunities are severely limited: child morbidity high and life expectancy low.

For any degree of equality, humanity needs to be using more energy, not less. Yet failure to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases will lead to a level of climate change that will affect the wealth and survival of many of the poorest people on the planet and harm the economies and landscapes of the wealthiest. The only sensible solution would appear to be that we use energy more efficiently in the short-term and that we give up our reliance on fossil fuels in the medium term.

This book discusses what energy is, why we need it, the harm we are doing to the planet and future generations, the current range of energy technologies and fuels (coal; oil; gas, including methyl hydrates, shale oil and tar sands; hydropower; and nuclear power), attempts by the international community to write treaties to reduce emissions, and future, sustainable, energy technologies (energy efficiency, solar, wind, wave, tidal, biomass, carbon sequestration and fusion). The text has been designed to be used as either a stand-alone course or as the major part of a course on traditional energy technologies, renewable energy, the history of energy use or climate change. It should appeal to, and be suitable for, those studying science, engineering, geography or politics (and hopefully other disciplines). Such a wide-ranging audience has meant some compromise has been necessary: the physicists may have liked more equations, the geographers fewer, and the political scientists more on international treaty arrangements. However, compromise has its rewards. The author strongly believes that scientists and engineers should study the history of their subject and its impact on the world, and that those in the humanities should not be short-changed when it comes to science. The book tries to take an international and inclusive approach. Real-world installations of the technologies and fuels studied are presented, and these are as likely to be sited in, say, Japan as the USA. The text is peppered with numerical problems (the end of each chapter contains essay-type alternatives), and again, these are as likely to involve data from India as well as the UK. Climate change is no respecter of national boundaries, and as we will see, only a global approach will provide the tools to solve the problem.

Many individuals and companies have helped with the production of this book, but in particular I would like to thank Helen Coley, Ronald Coley, Mark Brandon, Adrian Wyatt and Andy Forbes. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Centre for Energy and the Environment, for putting up with the disruption writing any book inevitably causes.

David A. Coley

University of Exeter January 2008

Corrections and additional material

It is hoped that you will enjoy studying (or teaching) the material presented, and appreciate solving some of the in-text problems. Like any work of this size that relies upon secondary sources and commercial data, it may contain a few errors and I hope that readers report any that they find via the book’s website (www.wileyeurope.com/college/coley). Amendments can then be posted on the site for the benefit of all. If you have non copy-right material that might be of interest to others, please feel free to send it to me for inclusion in future editions of the book and the website – full acknowledgement will be given. The website also holds colour versions of most of the tables, graphs and photographs found in the book. These are for teaching purposes only. Please remember that this material is copyright-protected by those kind enough to provide it and that all the usual restrictions on its use apply.

PART I

Energy: concepts, history and problems

“Shame on us if 100 or 200 years from now our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are living on a planet that has been irreparably damaged by global warming, and they ask, ‘How could those who came before us, who saw this coming, have let this happen?’ ”

–Joe Lieberman

In this first part we will ask the question, what is energy? Despite being a concept central to the teaching of science in schools and universities, the concept of energy will prove to be difficult to tie down with a single satisfactory definition. We will then move on to discuss some of the environmental problems caused by the way we currently meet our energy needs. Central to this will be an introduction to climate change (often termed global warming), but other topics such as air pollution, acid rain and sustainability will also be covered.

The possibility of meeting all our energy requirements from sustainable renewable sources has been a dream of many for a long time. By reviewing the natural energy inputs to which the planet is exposed, we will see that there is in theory no reason why this cannot be achieved.

Another question that needs to be asked is: how important is energy to the functioning of society? In the past energy use was much lower, and only by considering how the evolution of society is connected to the development of new sources of energy will we realize the importance of the link. By appreciating the connection between energy use, wealth and development, we can see why poorer nations will, and must be allowed to, substantially expand their demand for energy. This connection is also possibly why many of the world’s politicians have shied away from the issue of climate change. Without a change to the way we derive our energy, this expansion will have significant implications for the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Finally we will examine some of the physical limits to the efficiency with which we can supply energy (or work). This will lead to an analysis of how our most valued form of energy – electricity – is generated and distributed.

2

Energy

“Our planet… consists largely of lumps of fall-out from a star-sized hydrogen bomb… Within our bodies, no less than three million atoms rendered unstable in that event still erupt every minute, releasing a tiny fraction of the energy stored from that fierce fire of long ago.”

–James Lovelock, Gaia

Before embarking on our journey through current and future energy systems and the problems that their use might cause, we need to achieve a firm understanding of what energy is in all its guises, its units and any fundamental constraints that exist in transforming it from one form to another.

2.1 What is energy?

So, what is energy? If you have a background in physics or engineering this might seem rather a strange question to ask. Using terms such as potential energy and kinetic energy might almost seem second nature to you now, but pause for a moment and ask yourself the question, what actually is energy?

We know from common experience that a rotating wheel, a hot cup of tea, the current flowing through a wire or a crashing wave are all objects or systems displaying ‘energy’, whatever this might mean. We also know that we can make good use of energy in our lives: to cook with, warm us, light our homes, transport us and power our bodies. Yet this familiarity does little to help us with a definition.

In this book we will be particularly interested in understanding transformations of energy from one type to another. In order to do this, we need to equate an amount of energy of one type with the same amount of a very different type. We need an instinctive way to relate the amount of ‘energy’ contained in an electromagnetic wave with that of a spinning top.

The most common way to relate such disparate systems is in terms of the amount of work they have the capacity to do. And indeed, the phrase the capacity to do work is often used as the standard textbook definition of energy. Unfortunately this still leaves us with the problem of defining work1.However, work is certainly less of an ethereal concept than energy and is much closer to what this book is about. Energy is not something we want per se. It is what we can do with it that is important. People want to drive from a to b; to keep their drinks cool; make their houses warm. It is the result of such energy transformations and the resultant amount of work we can achieve that is of interest, not energy itself.

1 Physicists often define work as the product of force and the distance through which the force acts. The force being provided by an object such as a person, an electric motor or a falling weight.

If all this seems nothing more than an attempt to dodge the issue and avoid formally defining energy, then in some ways maybe it is. Some of the finest minds in science have tried to answer the question. The result of this process can be summed up by the comment of the Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman:

‘It is important to realise that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is’ [FEY63].

What we do know is that the concept of energy allows us to quantitatively connect a wide variety of phenomena easily. By only considering changes in energy, we escape any definitional problems, and energy becomes a very easy and intuitive concept to work with.