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- Herausgeber: Books on Demand
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Contents Development of the Energy Economy Development of the Nuclear Economy Development of Renewable Energy Sources Climate Development over the Last Century Future Perspectives Paris Climate Conference 2015 Bibliography
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During the course of his studies in mathematics and geography for his postgraduate teaching qualification, among other things the author engaged intensively with the development of the energy economy and wrote the first examination paper in this area.
In his years as a senior teacher at private schools and as a lecturer in the private sector, as well as management tasks and freelance organisational and business consultation, he followed the development of the energy economy in the daily and weekly press and public media as well as in the relevant literature.
Over the course of decades, signs of the first consequences of the intensive use of fossil fuels (coal, crude oil and natural gas) began to appear: Effects on the climate became apparent.
After the time-intensive consulting projects came to a close, the author was again able to focus more intensively on the energy economy and clearly present developments in energy production using fossil fuels, including uranium, along with increasingly important renewable energies.
In comparison to this, climate development over the last one hundred years and the dependency of the climate on the type of energy consumption by humans is presented quite vividly.
Contents
Development of the Energy Economy
Development of the Nuclear Economy
Development of Renewable Energy Sources
Climate Development over the Last Century
Future Perspectives
Paris Climate Conference 2015
Bibliography
1. Development of the Energy Economy
Fossil energy sources have increasingly been used for heating, electricity and locomotion since the industrial revolution. Oil in particular has become the most important source of energy for the world economy over the last century. Its share of world energy consumption in 1976 was almost 45 %, whereas all solid fuels (coal and lignite, peat, etc.) only accounted for 30% and natural gas not even 18%.1
As oil began to be in demand for industry in the second half of the 19th Century (in the United States and Russia, the petroleum industry developed at almost the same time), the demand for this versatile and inexpensive raw material grew at an ever increasing rate. Especially in North America, oil was consumed with increasing intensity, so that the rapidly increasing demand for oil led to an expanding oil industry. In particular, the car boom after 1911, due to which the car became a means of transport for the ordinary man, provided the oil companies with a continually expanding market, so that in the 1920s and 1930s, the search for oil began to expand throughout the entire world.
Taken from: Evers 1976, p. 106
In Iran and Iraq, in Venezuela and in Indonesia, oil was soon being extracted and exploration was intensifying at an increasing rate.
The USA, however, continued to be known as the land of oil between the two world wars, because on the one hand it had large oil reserves and on the other it also had a strong oil industry due to its extensive oil consumption. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were also able to begin exploiting the huge deposits discovered there.
The Second World War interrupted the promising activities of the oil companies in the Middle East. Instead, the American oil reserves were used up to such an extent that American oil exports had to be gradually discontinued.
After the war had ended, oil production in the Middle East gained new impetus, particularly as North America was increasingly becoming a deficit area. Thus, not only the sharp rise in Western European oil consumption, but also the increasing importation of oil to what was at the time the largest producing country, the USA, had to be covered by oil from Venezuela and the Middle East.
In quick succession, huge oil reserves were discovered in the Middle East, so that by the mid-1950s the proportion of Middle Eastern oil reserves in relation to all of the oil reserves discovered throughout the world came to more than sixty percent.
In the USA and the United Kingdom, flourishing oil companies were developing increasingly high-handed methods in their activities, which in turn contributed to the Iran crisis (1951 - 1954). The unsuccessful attempts to emancipate Iran may initially have intimidated the other oil-producing countries, but increasing Soviet influences in the Arab region offset the power of the industrial countries and the multinational oil companies working for them (one only has to think of Egypt in the 1950s).
The Suez crisis caused by Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956 bears testament to the gradually shift in power; the former colonial powers of England and France in the Middle East and North Africa were obviously losing importance. In the meanwhile, the oil-producing countries realised that joint advocacy of their interests made them less defenceless against the arbitrariness of the industrial countries and their oil companies than isolated attempts at resistance.
Thus, in 1960, OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) was formed. The oil-producing countries initially used this new instrument to enforce more stable renvenues against the oil companies for their organization. Later, immediately after the Six Day War with Israel in 1967, they tested their first oil embargo against the United States, the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany.
But despite the embargo lasting for three months, it had little effect, firstly because of policies in the countries concerned, which at that time provided for the stockpiling of reserves, meaning that the embargo could be bridged for a certain amount of time, and secondly because of the additional demand for Venezuelan and Iranian production, which increased by a factor of multiples.2 The result was that this event was seen more as a peripheral phenomenon to the Middle East war staged by the powerless Arabs.
In particular, this led to the policy of stockpiling being abandoned, as it was assumed that the oil-producing countries would no longer use the embargo method because of its ineffectiveness and the disadvantages it caused for the oil-producing countries themselves.
At the beginning of the 1970s, OPEC suddenly began to attract attention: oil prices were rising. This was repeated on a regular basis, which provoked a wave of indignation in the public spheres of the western industrial countries each time. This development reached its climax after the outbreak of the Fourth Middle East war, the Yom Kippur War on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, 06 October 1973, during which Egypt took back a large part of the territories it lost in Sinai during the Six Day War, including major oil fields.3
Even when the former Soviet Union discovered extensive oil deposits in Western Siberia at the beginning of the 1970s, the Middle Eastern share did not fall below 50 percent and then increased again slightly after that. To this day, the Middle East is the most important oil-producing area, which is also reflected in the extent of production.
The weapon of the oil embargo was applied again and caused major panic among the oil-importing countries, especially in the USA, Japan and Western Europe, where oil consumption had increased from 1.5 billion tonnes in 1967 to more than 2.3 billion tonnes in 1973.4 The oil-producing countries went one further: In order to curb oil production by 12 %, at conferences held in quick succession during a three month period, they agreed to gradually increase the price of oil by 400 percent.5
This triggered such an immense public shock in the western industrialised countries that the resulting political and economic turmoil caused economic growth to falter in these industrialised countries: "Trade and balance of payments instruments are falling into disarray, inflation rates are increasing, growing unemployment is rife, the gross national products of the western industrialised countries are showing only minimal growth and each time the threat of war in the Middle East becomes real again, the lachrymose voices of politicians, the public media and the citizens concerned as sensitive energy consumers are raised."6
While peace efforts were in progress in the Middle East, the western industrialised countries were making increasing efforts to analyse the oil crisis or, as it was increasingly being called, the energy crisis and its causes and consequences, in order to better be able to face similar developments in the future. Thus, the International Energy Agency (IEA), a sub-organisation of the OECD, was set up.
This IEA was to be an instrument for the industrialised states in order to both secure against inconveniences on the part of OPEC and to seek and continue to develop a dialogue with the oil-producing countries, and thirdly to apply alternative energy sources in a more targeted manner than before on order to achieve greater independence from OPEC.
The oil crisis achieved one more thing: The attention paid to developing countries poor in raw materials intensified. Due to the huge increase in oil prices, these poorest of developing countries in particular experienced payment difficulties, with the result that their loans skyrocketed, leaving them barely able to even pay the interest at times.
Thus, OPEC and IEA tried with all means available to assist these already vulnerable countries, which has been seriously damaged by the negative development of the global economy and by their own apathy (as well as their mass malnutrition).
The energy-economic interests of the most important members of the IEA have always varied considerably. Japan had to import all of the oil it consumed, which accounted for more than 74% of its annual energy consumption in 1974.
Taken from Fernau 1976, p. 94
The Japanese public had serious reservations regarding the development of nuclear energy at that time. The American economy, which was traditionally only slightly dependant on imports, was and is not as dependant on foreign markets as the Western European or Japanese economies. In the general political arena, however, the United States, as a leading power in the western world, is particularly sensitive to interactions between economic problems and its freedom to act in regard to foreign policy. Therefore, not only economic, but even more so general political interests motivate the United States to cooperate within the Energy Agency.
The Western European attitude to the IEA was quite differentiated. From the end of the 1960s, considerable reserves of oil were discovered in the British and Norwegian North Sea. In addition to this, the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany have considerable coal deposits. Moreover, the Netherlands and to some extent the United Kingdom have natural gas deposits, which cover almost half of the Netherland's primary energy consumption. In contrast to this, France and Italy are very poor in their own resources from primary energy sources and have to cover a significant share of their primary energy consumption through imports.
The role of the oil and gas companies has changed considerably since the oil crisis. "The oil companies no longer own the crude oil extracted in the OPEC countries. On the one hand, they became crude oil buyers, whereby they were able to contractually secure some long term purchasing options; on the other hand, they became service providers - again on a contractual basis - conducting crude oil production and exploration activities for the oil-producing countries. "7The fact that the oil companies passed OPEC's price dictates on to the buyers was simply a necessity.
The tasks involved in exploring and exploiting new oil fields, which were also becoming more and more expensive and required ever more complex technologies, demanded huge sums of investment capital, so that the concerns only acted with greater determination during the crisis, even if they did contribute a little to the price increases. This was not the first time alternative energy sources were discussed, and not just nuclear energy, which had at times caused unease even before the oil crisis. The expected exhaustion of oil reserves (at a constant production rate of three billion tonnes per year for the oil discovered up to this point, these would last for another 30 years),8 forced alternative methods for the production of energy to be reconsidered.
