Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Don't worry about energy?

In an article in Slate Peter Huber and Mark Mills suggest that even when we run out of oil, we will be nowhere near running out of energy.
Humanity currently consumes roughly 60 billion barrels of oil or its energy equivalent (referred to as BBOE, for billion barrels of oil equivalent) every year, about half of that as oil itself and half from other fuels. But the planet offers us, within quite easy reach, about 30,000 BBOE of coal and 2 million BBOE of oil shale. The winds of Nantucket Sound are powered by a tiny fraction of the 1 million BBOE of solar energy that reach the surface of the Earth every year. And the waters of the sound itself, and the oceans beyond, contain 2 trillion BBOE worth of deuterium, the fuel that lights the sun.
They elaborate in their book, The Bottomless Well.

No comments: