In 1845, the Dietz Company of New York introduced the sperm oil lantern, which nearly wiped out some whale species. A decade or so later, Dietz began to manufacture lamps using other oils, and gas lighting fixtures, giving whales a reprieve. More than a century has passed, and we’re “about to do it again,” says Daniel Nocera, consuming a precious resource and endangering this time not whales but our world. Nocera wonders, “What will be the savior,” the answer that will save the entire planet?
He ticks off the grim details of our fossil fuel habit -- how the world is rapidly moving from its energy consumption of 12.8 terawatts per year, to 28 terawatts by 2050. This is a simple calculation, Nocera tells us, requiring only population, GDP per capita and energy intensity. The upshot, unfortunately, is that though we do have enough carbon-based energy (oil, methane, coal) to last all of us quite a while, the CO2 we’re emitting may choke off our current way of life long before the end of the fuel.
Nocera advises his audience to put aside dreams that biomass or nuclear energy will give us what we need. Plaster the entire planet with crops we can convert to energy, and you’d still only get seven to 10 terawatts. And you’d “need one nuclear plant every 1.6 days for the next 45 years” to get eight terawatts of power. “There aren’t enough whales to get there in 45 years,” says Nocera.
His alternative for saving the planet is “far from pragmatism and reality.” Nocera’s ultimate solution seems almost magical: “water plus light equals oil.” The proposal is to emulate photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert the energy of sunlight to fuel. Scientists are racing to design structures that can catch light the way a leaf does, then capture the energy of this light using chemical bonds, and then somehow store this energy. Some researchers are focusing on photobiological water splitting. Nocera’s group is working “on a wireless current, an artificial leaf.” While the goal “is to see what nature’s structures tell you,” Nocera acknowledges that “if you try to place what’s in nature in a beaker, it probably won’t work.”
There’s massive urgency to working out the basic science of solar energy conversion. Forget 2050, says Nocera. “Science has got to get it done in the next 10 years, because it will take an enormous amount of time to implement".
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
In 2005, Daniel Nocera was awarded the Italgas Prize, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Nocera has received the American Institute of Chemists Award, and was appointed a Presidential Young Investigator and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.
Whales to Wood, Wood to Coal/Oil- What?s Next?
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Nadya Anscombe
If wind power is going to meet 20% of our predicted energy needs in 2100, millions of wind turbines must be installed around the globe. Modelling performed by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, has shown that these vast wind farms, if installed in offshore regions, could reduce the temperature of the lower atmosphere above the site by 1 °C.
This is in contrast to earlier work that found that a land-based deployment of wind turbines large enough to meet one-fifth of predicted world energy needs in 2100 could lead to a significant temperature increase in the lower atmosphere over the installed regions.
Chien Wang and Ronald Prinn say their findings show how important it is that rigorous scientific assessments are made before deployment of large-scale wind farms. "We were surprised by our findings at first but we soon realized that the cooling we predicted is due principally to the enhanced latent heat flux from the sea surface to the lower atmosphere," Wang told environmentalresearchweb.
Wang and Prinn found that the effect varied depending on the location of the wind farm. In tropical and mid-latitude sites, the temperature of the lower atmosphere was reduced by up to 1 °C, whereas even greater reductions were seen in the high-latitude sites.
The consequences of such a temperature change are not clear but the researchers believe that it will have an effect on temperatures, clouds, precipitation and large-scale circulation beyond the installed regions. "However, these non-local impacts or teleconnections are much less significant than we saw in the land cases," said Wang. "This is likely due to the much lower response of the ocean to the imposed surface-drag changes relative to the response of the land to the imposed changes in both surface roughness and displacement height."
Wang and Prinn also examined the issues of intermittency and hence reliability, of large-scale deployment of wind-driven electrical power generation by seasonally averaging the available wind power in various regions of the world. They found that intermittency would be a major issue for a power generation and distribution system that relies on the harvest of wind power from large-scale offshore wind farms.
"Intermittency presents a major challenge for power management, requiring solutions such as on-site energy storage, back-up generation and very long-distance power transmission for any electrical system dominated by offshore wind power," said Wang.
Wang is also keen to point out that the method he and Prinn used to simulate the offshore wind-turbine effect on the lower atmosphere involved simply increasing the ocean surface drag. "While this method is consistent with several detailed fine-scale simulations of wind turbines, it still needs further study to ensure its validity," he said.
Wang and Prinn published their work in Environmental Research Letters (ERL).
The report is available here.