The greatest energy technology of all time
Earlier we discussed that for energy to be useful, it must be cheap, plentiful, and reliable, and to be cheap, plentiful, and reliable, every element of the process to create energy must also be cheap, plentiful, and reliable. We saw how this can be difficult to achieve with some alternative energy sources, such as solar.
It’s important to know this because if somebody tells you “Let’s replace the way we currently produce energy with this other way,” you have to be able to evaluate whether or not the process is really viable.
Fossil fuels: cheap, plentiful, reliable energy for billions
The subject of this column is that the hydrocarbon, or fossil fuel, industry is the only industry that can produce cheap, plentiful, reliable energy on a scale of billions. That means that without such an industry, we don’t have the amount of food we need, the amount of technology we want, really the amount of anything we need or want.
The first thing to realize is that the vast majority of the world’s energy is in fact produced by the hydrocarbon industry. This was true back in 1980, and it’s also true in the present.
There is currently no other industry that can match what the fossil fuel industry is producing and on the scale that it’s producing it.
Why? The reason is that the hydrocarbon industry has developed a highly resource efficient process to find, extract and harness a naturally concentrated, plentiful, and stored source of energy. It’s the only industry that has come up with a process that is cheap, plentiful and reliable.
To understand why that is, it’s important to understand what fossil fuels are and how to explain it to someone who doesn’t work in the fossil fuel energy. We’ll take that up next week.
RELATED ARTICLES:
EPA Revision of Obama-Era Fuel Standards Will Make New Cars More Affordable
U.S. Energy Facts – U.S. Energy Information Agency
Fossil fuel is king, but Nuclear power is clean power far into the future. The USA has thousands of years worth of power generation in uranium and thorium reserves. The ONLY thing that makes these energy sources super expensive in the USA is the plethora of idiotic environmental obstacles that other power generators do not face. These add delay, legal costs, and more delay, so that here, Nuclear power plant construction costs 10x more than any other type, whereas in Asia, they cost no more than any other power plant.