A new industrial revolution for a sustainable energy future
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Introduction Former US Energy Secretary Steven Chu and I co-authored a paper last summer that appeared in Nature.1 In this paper, we talked about a new industrial revolution. Let me explain what we meant. Sit back for a moment and imagine yourself during the time when the United States was being created, during the times of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. What was life like? People were traveling on horses. They were using whale blubber as fuel for lighting; that was the state-of-the-art technology. The last 250 years have been perhaps the most remarkable time in human history because our lives have been transformed, and this transformation is what we called in our paper “from horse power to horsepower.”1 We drive to the grocery store in cars that have the equivalent of 300 horses, we travel across the nation in planes powered by 100,000 horses in about five or six hours, a trip that would have otherwise taken a month or more. That’s a remarkable transition in the history of humankind, and that was just for mobility. Now let us look at the electricity grid. It’s only about 110 years old and, according to the US National Academy of Engineering, it is the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century. At almost every moment in our lives, we are receiving the benefit of 250 years of industrial revolution, and that has led to an immense increase in productivity and economic prosperity. Our gross domestic product per capita
has gone up exponentially due to the Industrial Revolution. When we plot the data on how much energy we have used, it has also gone up exponentially. The Industrial Revolution was all about how we sourced, distributed, and used energy, and it was predominantly fossil fuel-based energy. The question we are asking today is how can we sustain our economic growth? The population has exploded. We had 700 million people in the world at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and today we have 7 billion. We have about 3 billion people in the world who have either no or very limited access to electricity. In the next 100 years, we are going to add another 3 billion people, mostly in regions of the world that are not yet developed. If we want everyone to increase their economic prosperity and have access to energy similar to what we have in the United States, do we have the resources? Since the Industrial Revolution was based on the use of fossil fuels, do we have enough fossil fuels for the future to sustain the economic growth of a growing world population? A lot of people talk about peak oil. If you look at the data, you will not find any peaks, because the technology for discovery and extraction of fossil fuels keeps on improving and keeping pace and, in fact, is ahead of the demand.1 So our oil and gas reserves keep increasing. It’s fair to say that at least in the next 75 or 100 years, we will have enough fossil fuel, and our technology for discovery and production will keep improving. The consequences of using these fossil
Arun Majumdar, Google; [email protected] DOI: 10.1557/mrs.
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