Len Rosen - My Blog

About 4 years ago I discovered Kiva.org, a micro-loan site focused on helping fund business concepts in the Developing World. If you are not familiar with micro-loans and micro-credits, this idea started in Bangladesh and India and has subsequently spread worldwide.

A Kiva loan is typically $25. I started with 4 loans for $100. I read through about a dozen applications for loans running from people setting up a produce stand in Angola, to a family starting a textile manufacturing business in Ecuador, to a farmer looking to buy seeds to plant a newly cleared field. All loan applications are vetted by a local person or group with oversight. In many African communities a village oversight community screens loan requests before they show up as approved for funding on the Kiva.org site.

When you put $25 down it is a fraction of the total loan request and time limits are put on fund raising associated with the loan. Other Kiva members put their $25 down and soon enough money is in place to top up the loan. A micro-loan officer, usually a bank or NGO oversees the loan repayment.

Kiva investors get repaid in full but don't earn interest on the loans they give out. My original $100 has been recycled to generate 28 loans so far. No one has defaulted on the debt and I have been able to help entrepreneurs build businesses all over the world.

Kiva is not a government program. It was founded by a husband and wife after a visit to East Africa. They came back with a desire to invest in the people they met and now the capital loan pool is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

$25 goes a long way to fulfilling a dream when it is invested this way.

It has become very fashionable to talk about more environmentally-friendly energy sources as concerns about our overuse of fossil fuels and their carbon consequences have become central issues in the 21st century. The technical feasibility of producing much of our energy requirements going forward using renewable sources remains a challenge.

Today global renewable energy capacity totals 1,274 Gigawatts. How does this compare to all the energy we consume? If U.S. consumption is an indicator renewable is just a small fraction of the total. For example, wind, solar and other non-hydro renewable energy sources generated 126 TWh of electricity in the United States in 2008, double the 64 TWh of output in 1990. The percentage share from non-hydro renewable sources  amounted to 3.1% up in 2008 from 2.1% in 1990. Hydroelectric production in contrast dropped from 8.9% to 6.2%.

Compare those numbers to coal, oil and natural gas. Coal-generated electricity in the U.S. dropped as a percentage from a 51.8% in 1990 to 48.2% in 2008. In total power produced, however, coal dramatically increased. Petroleum also dropped as a percentage from 3.6% to 1.1% with little increased capacity. But natural gas on the other hand increased dramatically both in the amount of power generated and as a percentage of total generating capacity, growing from 14.7% to 21.4% over the same period.

What are renewable energy sources? They include hydroelectric from water, wind turbines, solar arrays, tidal and wave power turbines, and geothermal. Some of these energy generation types are carbon neutral but other renewable sources have a significant carbon footprint. Most of these sources can be used to generate power continuously without depleting the energy source from which the electricity is derived. Hydroelectric, however, has some significant challenges.  A brief discussion of each follows.

Hydroelectric

Humanity has been converting falling and flowing water into energy for centuries. In fact water represents the single largest contributor to global renewable energy sources on the planet today. We classify the conversion of water power to electricity under the name hydroelectricity or hydro for short. Today hydro projects generate almost one quarter of the world’s electricity usually through sites where there are natural waterfalls or through the damming of rivers to create artificial drops.

The world is running out of usable new sites of this type. This is compounded by environmental concerns. Gradients are critical in establishing enough force for water to turn turbines connected to generators, but dams  are extremely disruptive to the wildlife in rivers, the population displaced by flooded lands,  and for people living downstream from the sites. In addition damming of rivers changes how they deposit silt. Many current dams are dealing with significant build ups of silt in their reservoirs leading to a decline in reservoir capacity. These are just some of the reasons that the 21st century will see hydroelectric power projects not at sites like Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China, but in smaller locales with less environmental consequences.

Wind

Harvesting the latent energy of the atmosphere has been one of humanities great technical achievements.  From windmills to sails we have been using the energy of wind to power machinery from the milling of grain to trans-oceanic expeditions on sailing ships. Farms in rural North America were often not connected to the electrical grid and used the wind as a power source for pumping well water, milling and other purposes. Today wind power is becoming a significant source of electrical power in many countries through the development of large wind farms featuring turbines that can be several hundred meters in height with propeller vanes as large as 60 meters.

The average individual wind turbine generates enough electricity to power 600 homes when the wind is blowing. Wind farms tend to have a cluster of turbines from as few as ten to hundreds. Once installed operational costs are practically non-existent. The real challenge is the reliability of wind as a power source. When it doesn’t blow no energy can be produced making wind less reliable than hydro and other renewable sources.

Wind turbines have been blames for the killing of migratory birds and bats. Many people fear having them installed near their homes because of medical and environmental concerns. Others don’t want a forest of these giant windmills dotting their shorelines or fields on purely aesthetic grounds. Yet despite consumer resistance wind power continues to grow globally with global capacity reaching 70,000 Megawatts in 2009. At the present rate of growth wind power may contribute as much as one-third of the world’s electrical generation capacity by the mid-21st century.

Solar

All the energy of the atmosphere comes from the warming effect of our sun including wind and the water cycle that gives us the ability to harness water. Even biomass derives its energy from the sun which is then converted into plant material. But when we talk about solar energy we are usually referring to the renewable energy generated through a number of technological inventions.

What makes solar energy so attractive is its abundance. The sun is always shining somewhere on the planet and when you look at the amount of energy that reaches the surface even on cloudy days the numbers dwarf our current energy generating capacity. In fact, the upper atmosphere of our planet receives the equivalent of 174 petawatts (PW) of incoming solar radiation of which 30% is reflected back into space with the rest getting absorbed by our atmosphere, oceans and land.  To put this in perspective in terms of our average requirement versus the amount of solar energy available, let’s look at Australia as an example. That continent receives 15,000 times the amount of energy it currently generates from all other sources through solar.

Although passive solar has been the traditional way humans have used the sun’s energy historically, it is the advent of photovolatics (PV) where research and development is focused today. What we call solar cells are used to convert sunlight directly into electricity. The manufacture of solar cells and photovoltaic panels is a growing industry. The  industry-wide challenge is to maximize the efficiency of these devices in their ability to convert the sun’s energy intro a reliable power source.

Ultimately the evolution of 21st century photo-exchange technologies should yield artificial photosynthesis and the almost unlimited energy that we will derive from solar as a result.

Tidal and Wave

We owe the moon a lot. The gravitational forces it exerts on the world’s oceans create an enormous amount of energy in the form of tides. In addition wind blowing over open ocean has enormous energy potential. What exactly is the total potential of tides and waves?

It is estimated at 2-3 million megawatts. The Bay of Fundy off the eastern coast of Canada, the western coast of the United States and Europe, the coast of Japan and coastal New Zealand are considered to be the best sites for harnessing energy derived from waves and tides.

At the beginning of the 21st century we are only beginning to experiment with the right kind of engineering designs to to harness wave energy effectively. Today there are only small commercial wave energy projects in place but the ability to harvest the latent energy potential should yield significant breakthroughs in the near future. The immediate benefit with small wave and tidal energy plants is the effective delivery of power to local and often isolated shoreline communities.

Geothermal

Geothermal energy is derived from two types of sources, one natural and the other helped along by human intervention. For example, natural geothermal can be found in New Zealand and Iceland, where below ground heat sinks represent an enormous energy resource. New Zealand generates approximately 10% of its electricity from geothermal sources. Iceland derives 23% of its electrical energy this way.   Other countries with existing geothermal programs include Italy and Japan. California has an active geothermal program as well. And the rest of the world is sitting up and taking notice.

Geothermal resources can be classified as high, moderate and low  temperature.

High temperature geothermal is usually located on the edge of continental plates (New Zealand and Iceland for example) where magma from the Earth’s mantle is close enough to the surface that the heat from the melted rock is reachable. Typical magma heat sources provide temperatures between 200- 350 degrees Celsius at accessible depths.

Moderate temperature geothermal is usually associated with fault lines. California, Italy and Japan have these types of deep faults. Geothermal sources of this type have temperatures at accessible depths of approximately 140 degrees Celsius. This type of resource is often found close to high temperature geothermal sources.

Far more common is low temperature geothermal. A typical low temperature geo-exchange system involves drilling a number of holes in the ground to depths between 90 and 110 meters where temperatures year-round are a consistent 13 degrees Celsius. Pipes inserted into the holes are used to pump water or other heat conducting fluids. The closed system is combined with a heat exchanger, providing air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter. In Iceland 89% of homes use heat exchangers to provide warmth in the winter.

Geothermal is a clean energy resource and low temperature geo-exchange can be implemented widely with a reasonable cost recovery whether large scale or for single residential use. The 21st century should see a rapid expansion in use of this low emission energy resource.

Easily accessible oil and gas finds, usually referred to in the industry as conventional hydrocarbon reserves, are a thing of the past. Instead resource developers are increasingly turning to unconventional alternatives such as deep ocean exploration and extraction, the mining of bitumen deposits and oil shales, and the creation of oil products from biomass and garbage.

In 2013 Canadians will celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the first commercial extraction of oil from what has been labeled the Athabasca Tar Sands, the oil sands of Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. That first attempt to exploit these saturated sand deposits used hot water to separate the bitumen. To date this remains the way bitumen is extracted from oil sands.

What is bitumen? If you think of asphalt then you have a sense of what this material is like. When extracted from the sand to which it is attached it has the consistency of cold molasses and is black in colour. Bitumen is not transportable in its extracted state. Nor can conventional refineries use it to create oil and oil byproducts. It needs to undergo significant change to give it the viscosity to travel through pipeline. Upgraded bitumen from Western Canada consists of naptha and heavy and light gas oils.

The cost of upgrading, the environment in which oil sands are located, and the remoteness of the location, had made bitumen commercially unfeasible for much of the 20th century. But as oil prices rose and geopolitical considerations began to impact more easily extracted oil resources, oil sand operations became much more attractive to investors. In 1967, the Great Canadian Oil Sands Syncrude project finally came on stream extracting bitumen from the sands using similar hot water processes to those employed back in 1913. Since 1967 many other companies have started  bitumen extraction operations in Western Canada. Today there are an estimated 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen locked up in the oil sands with from 175 to 315 billion barrels of recoverable hydrocarbon product  using present and developing technologies. This makes these deposits the single largest hydrocarbon source on the planet.

Is bitumen only found in Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan? No, in fact bitumen oil sand deposits can be found in countries all around the world including the United States, Venezuela, Russia, Cuba, Indonesia, Brazil, Trinidad & Tobago, Jordan, Madagascar, Colombia, Albania, Romania, Spain, Portugal, Nigeria and Argentina.

Currently the oil sands of Western Canada produce almost a half-billion barrels of oil annually. At current extraction rates the sands can remain commercially active for the next three centuries. Even if annual production were to double or triple the oil sands would remain viable for the remainder of the 21st century as a petroleum resource. Having said that there is a fly in the ointment and it has to do with the planetary impact of current oil sands production technology.

The biggest knock against bitumen is in its extraction and environmental impact. When the first commercial operations in Western Canada started the extraction process used large volumes of water to flush the oil from the sands in which it was embedded, in fact between 2 and 4.5 cubic metres for every cubic metre of oil.  In Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan the major water source for these oil sands projects was one river, the Athabasca, a tributary of the Mackenzie River that flows into the Arctic Ocean. What happened to the water during the process raised further alarms. With only 10% being returned to the river and the rest being held in storage ponds that contained significant pollutants, it was only a matter of time before drawing water from the Athabasca became a public relations nightmare.

A study released at a UN climate conference in Kenya in 2006  stated that oil sands extraction projects were threatening both the quality and quantity of water in the Mackenzie River system of which the Athabasca is a tributary. The study by the Sage Centre and World Wildlife Fund-Canada  pointed out that water drawn from the Athabasca had contributed to a drop in water flow of 20% at Fort McMurray according to data records from 1958 to 2003. The study further stated that oil sands projects were using 359 million cubic metres of water from the Athabasca, twice the water used by the city of Calgary, Alberta’s largest urban centre with over 1 million people. The study forecasted increased Athabasca water extraction of 50% as new projects came online. This growth in water usage was deemed to be unsustainable having a significant impact on agriculture, cities and the environment of the river system. The recommendation was to shut down any new oil sands projects until the water problems was solved.

The biggest use of water in oil sands production today is to generate steam for underground injection. Some oil sands projects are now using underground aquifers rather than the Athabasca. In many cases the water being drawn from the aquifer is not potable with a high saline content. One oil sands project, Imperial Oil’s Cold Lake facility has been able to decrease fresh water use from 3.5 barrels for every barrel of bitumen in 1985 to half a barrel per barrel of bitumen produced today.

The oil sands projects are generators of greenhouse gases.  The energy to process bitumen comes from the burning of natural gas containing methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and hydrogen sulfide. Every barrel of synthetic crude requires enough natural gas equal to warm 1-1/2 houses daily. Natural gas is abundant and fairly clean but in burning it the carbon dioxide generated contributes to increased greenhouse gases.

The equipment needed to dig up and transport the oil sands further contributes to greenhouse gases.  When added up the percentages are 13% of greenhouse gases come from the extraction process, 30% from the upgrading process and the balance from the burning of natural gas. The total amount is a staggering 29.5 megatons. That’s 29.5 million tons of greenhouse gases and as more projects come online that number may grow even higher.

The industry is looking at solutions such as carbon sequestration, that is pumping the carbon dioxide underground into stable rock formations where it can be permanently captured. The challenges of sequestration go beyond cost considerations. Carbon sequestration science is relatively new. If forecasters are right, we will need reservoirs capable of containing a trillion tons of carbon dioxide by the end of the 21st century. Salt water saturated sedimentary rock formations are currently considered the best bet for sequestration. These sedimentary formations are more than 800 meters deep so that they do not impact on potable water, and where high the depth pressure can maintain the carbon dioxide in a high-density state. But no one knows if storage of this type is sustainable for hundreds if not thousands of years. How can you account for seismic activity that could fracture the rocks creating seams where the carbon dioxide can escape.

Scientists and engineers are also looking at sequestering carbon beneath the ocean floor. theorizing that the pressure from ocean water and the sediments would keep the carbon dioxide permanently locked up and incapable of entering the sea water.

The 21st century may also come up with new methods for sequestration. Some scientists cite historic carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations as evidence that the Earth can naturally deal with the excess. They theorize that when atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide became high the gas was absorbed by ocean water and combined with calcium ions to form limestone.

So as long as our modern world economies and those of the developing world continue to rely on oil the oil sands will remain a significant source of production and an environmental challenge.

Easily accessible oil and gas finds, usually referred to in the industry as conventional hydrocarbon reserves, are a thing of the past. Instead resource developers are increasingly turning to unconventional alternatives such as deep ocean exploration and extraction, the mining of bitumen deposits and oil shales, and the creation of oil products from biomass and garbage.

In 2013 Canadians will celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the first commercial extraction of oil from what has been labeled the Athabasca Tar Sands, the oil sands of Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. That first attempt to exploit these saturated sand deposits used hot water to separate the bitumen. To date this remains the way bitumen is extracted from oil sands.

What is bitumen? If you think of asphalt then you have a sense of what this material is like. When extracted from the sand to which it is attached it has the consistency of cold molasses and is black in colour. Bitumen is not transportable in its extracted state. Nor can conventional refineries use it to create oil and oil byproducts. It needs to undergo significant change to give it the viscosity to travel through pipeline. Upgraded bitumen from Western Canada consists of naptha and heavy and light gas oils.

The cost of upgrading, the environment in which oil sands are located, and the remoteness of the location, had made bitumen commercially unfeasible for much of the 20th century. But as oil prices rose and geopolitical considerations began to impact more easily extracted oil resources, oil sand operations became much more attractive to investors. In 1967, the Great Canadian Oil Sands Syncrude project finally came on stream extracting bitumen from the sands using similar hot water processes to those employed back in 1913. Since 1967 many other companies have started  bitumen extraction operations in Western Canada. Today there are an estimated 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen locked up in the oil sands with from 175 to 315 billion barrels of recoverable hydrocarbon product  using present and developing technologies. This makes these deposits the single largest hydrocarbon source on the planet.

Is bitumen only found in Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan? No, in fact bitumen oil sand deposits can be found in countries all around the world including the United States, Venezuela, Russia, Cuba, Indonesia, Brazil, Trinidad & Tobago, Jordan, Madagascar, Colombia, Albania, Romania, Spain, Portugal, Nigeria and Argentina.

Currently the oil sands of Western Canada produce almost a half-billion barrels of oil annually. At current extraction rates the sands can remain commercially active for the next three centuries. Even if annual production were to double or triple the oil sands would remain viable for the remainder of the 21st century as a petroleum resource. Having said that there is a fly in the ointment and it has to do with the planetary impact of current oil sands production technology.

The biggest knock against bitumen is in its extraction and environmental impact. When the first commercial operations in Western Canada started the extraction process used large volumes of water to flush the oil from the sands in which it was embedded, in fact between 2 and 4.5 cubic metres for every cubic metre of oil.  In Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan the major water source for these oil sands projects was one river, the Athabasca, a tributary of the Mackenzie River that flows into the Arctic Ocean. What happened to the water during the process raised further alarms. With only 10% being returned to the river and the rest being held in storage ponds that contained significant pollutants, it was only a matter of time before drawing water from the Athabasca became a public relations nightmare.

A study released at a UN climate conference in Kenya in 2006  stated that oil sands extraction projects were threatening both the quality and quantity of water in the Mackenzie River system of which the Athabasca is a tributary. The study by the Sage Centre and World Wildlife Fund-Canada  pointed out that water drawn from the Athabasca had contributed to a drop in water flow of 20% at Fort McMurray according to data records from 1958 to 2003. The study further stated that oil sands projects were using 359 million cubic metres of water from the Athabasca, twice the water used by the city of Calgary, Alberta’s largest urban centre with over 1 million people. The study forecasted increased Athabasca water extraction of 50% as new projects came online. This growth in water usage was deemed to be unsustainable having a significant impact on agriculture, cities and the environment of the river system. The recommendation was to shut down any new oil sands projects until the water problems was solved.

The biggest use of water in oil sands production today is to generate steam for underground injection. Some oil sands projects are now using underground aquifers rather than the Athabasca. In many cases the water being drawn from the aquifer is not potable with a high saline content. One oil sands project, Imperial Oil’s Cold Lake facility has been able to decrease fresh water use from 3.5 barrels for every barrel of bitumen in 1985 to half a barrel per barrel of bitumen produced today.

The oil sands projects are generators of greenhouse gases.  The energy to process bitumen comes from the burning of natural gas containing methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and hydrogen sulfide. Every barrel of synthetic crude requires enough natural gas equal to warm 1-1/2 houses daily. Natural gas is abundant and fairly clean but in burning it the carbon dioxide generated contributes to increased greenhouse gases.

The equipment needed to dig up and transport the oil sands further contributes to greenhouse gases.  When added up the percentages are 13% of greenhouse gases come from the extraction process, 30% from the upgrading process and the balance from the burning of natural gas. The total amount is a staggering 29.5 megatons. That’s 29.5 million tons of greenhouse gases and as more projects come online that number may grow even higher.

The industry is looking at solutions such as carbon sequestration, that is pumping the carbon dioxide underground into stable rock formations where it can be permanently captured. The challenges of sequestration go beyond cost considerations. Carbon sequestration science is relatively new. If forecasters are right, we will need reservoirs capable of containing a trillion tons of carbon dioxide by the end of the 21st century. Salt water saturated sedimentary rock formations are currently considered the best bet for sequestration. These sedimentary formations are more than 800 meters deep so that they do not impact on potable water, and where high the depth pressure can maintain the carbon dioxide in a high-density state. But no one knows if storage of this type is sustainable for hundreds if not thousands of years. How can you account for seismic activity that could fracture the rocks creating seams where the carbon dioxide can escape.

Scientists and engineers are also looking at sequestering carbon beneath the ocean floor. theorizing that the pressure from ocean water and the sediments would keep the carbon dioxide permanently locked up and incapable of entering the sea water.

The 21st century may also come up with new methods for sequestration. Some scientists cite historic carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations as evidence that the Earth can naturally deal with the excess. They theorize that when atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide became high the gas was absorbed by ocean water and combined with calcium ions to form limestone.

So as long as our modern world economies and those of the developing world continue to rely on oil the oil sands will remain a significant source of production and an environmental challenge.

The energy derived from fossil fuels has been the most significant factor in the rise of our industrial technology-based civilization in the last three centuries. Fossil fuels include coal in all its many forms, oil, and natural gas. When experts are asked to estimate the energy we derive from fossil fuels today, the answer varies from 75% to 90% of the total energy generated by our species. The 18th and 19th centuries were dominated by coal. When our industrial society moved from the steam engine to the internal combustion engine, oil moved to dominance becoming the principal energy source of the 20th century. Throughout the 20th century control of oil resources drove national agendas. World War II was a war over oil as much as it was one fought over competing racial ideologies. The post-war period of Cold War and the Israel-Arab confrontation also featured oil as a political weapon driving up the cost of energy, and contributing to worldwide hyperinflation and currency volatility. In the first decade of the 21st century we have witnessed oil prices rise and fall dramatically, as much a function of the changing view that the worldwide supply is either stable or in decline, as well as a strategy driven by stock market futures speculators.

Coal

There is a lot of misinformation about fossil fuels circulating if not in the popular press in the minds of people these days. Are we running out of fossil fuels as a resource? The truth is we are not even close to exhausting fossil fuel sources that we can extract from the planet. There’s lots of coal around, whether lignite, bituminous or anthracite.  According to the World Coal Institute, at the current rate of consumption and assumed future demand, our coal reserves will last us well into the 22nd century.

Oil

What about oil? More than any other energy source, the amount of recoverable oil is directly correlated to the price per barrel of oil. When one talks to industry experts today, recoverable oil numbers at $85 US per barrel are much higher than when that number drops to $70 or less. That’s because we are beginning to see an end to the easy-to-find oil sources. In 2009 the biggest oil field discoveries were in what a few years ago would have been deemed inaccessible – deep seabeds. These include finds in the Gulf of Mexico, in the South Atlantic off Brazil and Angola, and in the Indian Ocean off Australia’s west coast and the east coast of Mozambique.

Unconventional oil sources like the bitumen deposits in Western Canada and Venezuela, and the oil shales in the Western United States represent both proven and yet to be counted barrels of oil.

New technology is being used to exploit old oil reservoirs. Traditional extraction techniques often leave up to 80% of the oil in the ground. Through enhanced recovery techniques operators can increase extraction from these exhausted sources by as much as 60%. Techniques include pumping sequestered carbon dioxide into existing oil reservoirs, injecting steam, horizontal drilling to find previously inaccessible pockets of oil, or introducing natural or genetically engineered microbes to feed on the oil generating gas as a byproduct and concentrating oil into recoverable pools.

With proven oil reserves today amounting to over 1.34 trillion barrels, an increase of 200 billion from 2007 statistics, we can conclude that we are not running out of oil, not by a long shot.

Natural Gas

This source of energy is often found in association with oil although many natural gas finds are autonomous. The chief component in natural gas is methane.  Other natural gases include ethane, ethylene and propane. Like its counterpart, oil, easily found natural gas has been displaced by exploration and discovery in areas previously considered climatically or physically challenging. For example, one of the major natural gas finds lies in the Mackenzie River delta in the Northwest Territories in Canada. Extraction and transhipment challenges remain the biggest impediment to exploiting this find. Similarly, Siberia, another area where natural gas has been found, provides similar challenges. One solution to transhipment challenges is the creation of liquefied natural gas production and  storage facilities. From these locations the gas can be transhipped by rail, trucks  or ocean going ships.

Proven natural gas reserves in 2009 exceeded 6.25 quadrillion cubic feet. That number has not significantly changed from previous estimates so current exploration is continuing to find new sources to keep up with worldwide demand. Consumption rates today are in excess of 100 trillion cubic feet per year and projections forecast worldwide demand to reach 150 trillion cubic feet by 2030. Even at this rate of consumption and without new finds we will not run out of natural gas in the 21st or even 22nd century.

So What is the Problem?

Fossil fuels continue to be inexpensive when compared with other energy sources. It costs more for a liter bottle of spring water than it does for a liter of gasoline in Canada and the United States. So what is the disincentive to use gasoline and oil as a source of relatively cheap energy?

Fossil fuels are a finite resource. We don’t just burn them. We also use them to create products. Why burn something of such value if we can find other energy sources to use that are comparatively infinite?

Fossil fuels by their nature when burned produce byproducts that have created environmental challenges that have become compelling issues for all of us on this planet. Coal is inherently a dirty fuel and “clean coal” technologies are unproven.

The burning of oil contributes to greenhouse gases whether it’s coming out of geothermal plants or the tailpipes of automobiles and trucks.

Oil extraction and transhipment is a source of potential pollution, particularly when that oil is being extracted from deep seabeds and being shipped along ecologically fragile coastlines.

Natural gas is the least polluting of the fossil fuels but the one that offer great challenges during transhipment. Liquefied natural gas is a highly volatile commodity.