Energy History & Trends - From Fossil Fuels to Renewables and Environmental Concerns

Energy Little History

If a (beginning of) 19th century citizen had traveled back in time a hundred or a thousand years, he wouldn’t really get actually surprised by anything special – at least looking into energy standpoint. Energy matrix hadn’t changed a lot on the civilization: human being was relying basically on wood/charcoal as fuel source and muscles (of they own or from horses) as the prime movers. There was a very small utilization of wind (for windmills) and water (as waterwheels) as fuel source, but very marginally on the society, like it used to be a thousand years before.

Due to the high wood dependence for energy (principally for heating on cold regions) or crops for food, for each traditional city square meter another 100/ 150 square meters were needed to supply those feedstock, an obvious relevant limitation for further urbanization. Just for reference, current civilization needs to rely on a coal mine area or an oil field of 1/1000th of the size of the settlement itself.

But when that energy trigger to the new fossil fueled world actually did happen? Although 18th century brought many theoretical background, the real and deep transformation toke place along the following century (19th), when the combination of steam turbine, mobile steam engine, induced motors and commercialization of electrical energy were put in place. Like mentioned on my previous article "Energy, Innovation and Economy Cycles", there were two innovative cluster on that century (1828 and 1880), when majority of these discoveries happened.

The energy framework of the new world rely on fossil fuels as the main source since then (coal, oil and natural gas), and exactly the opposite works fine here: if a (end of) 19th century citizen had traveled to the future and could sit by your side now, he would probably recognize majority of the energy elements being used by us (120 years later), such as turbine, electric energy, internal combustion engine, light, transformers and alternate current, although they have grown in efficiencies, capacities and reliability.

What this citizen had probably not foreseen at that time is the environmental impact that those innovations would cause to all generations from there on.

Climate Change Concern – A Brief History

 All of these reliable and convenient innovations radically changed the way we live: massive goods production and trading, global mobility, urbanization, etc, but are we prepared to pay the environmental price for that? The concern was already highlighted by Revelle and Suess in 1957: “human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years”. Revelle, by the way, was awarded in 1991 with the National Medal of Science by President George H. W. Bush. He remarked: "I got it for being the grandfather of the greenhouse effect”.

The first public experiment that showed the greenhouse effect toke place in Paris by Tyndall in 1859, with Prince Albert as witness. The simple experiment used coal gas (basically methane) to show that, although not visible to the human eyes, the gas turned the light opaque (imprisoning the infrared light) – in other words: our atmosphere let the sun rays enter earth surface, but controls their exit and consequently impacting earth′s overall temperature.

An year after Tyndall death (1893), a chemical engineering called Svante Arrhenius resumed the subject, developing a massive amount of calculations in order to predict earth′s overall temperature versus CO2 content on the atmosphere. He worked for several months, 14 hours per day and without any personal computer, and came into a conclusion that if CO2 doubled its content on the atmosphere, average earths temperature would rise from 5 to 6 Co, an astonishing matching with current calculations developed by modern computers. The most interesting thing is that Arrhenius stated that humanity would love this warmer place to live, with better and more uniform weather!

After that, decades have passed without new attention to the greenhouse effect. But actually there was indeed no reason for additional concerns: Arrhenius supposed that more than 3 thousand years would have to come in order to double CO2 content on the atmosphere! Fossil fuels were not even close to have the importance they have nowadays.

But in 1938, Callendar resumed Arrhenius theory and performed a systematic measure of CO2 content on the atmosphere, comparing to the world climate pattern. Nobody performed these measurements with so methodological background as he did, on a way that “Callendar Effect” now means the correlation between CO2 and earth′s temperature.

And then comes Revelle (that grandfather of the greenhouse effect) and Kelling. The later worked for the former, measuring in all different ways CO2 content on the atmosphere, a truly obsessed man for that subject. He installed a measurement station in Hawaii (3.400 meters high, top of a mountain – a perfect clean air for the measurements). The results were precise and clearly demonstrated the "Callendar Effect": CO2 content in atmosphere was 316 ppm in 1959, 325 in 1970 and finally rose to 354 in 1990. This ascendant line became worldwide known as Kelling Curve.

Kelling marked an important milestone on climate science. Carbon on atmosphere wasn’t anymore a subject from the past, but principally for the future of humans and our existence. In 1969 he had sufficient confidence to warn humanity about the risks involved in such matter. “Callendar Effect” was replaced to "Kelling Curve" (figure below, from Daniel Yergin), with big influence on the society: a central icon for the global warming topic.

Rio, Kyoto and Paris Agreement

The year of 1992 was a milestone for climate issue topic: for the very first time nations met with a clear goal of seriously discuss climate change, what happened in Rio de Janeiro with more than 160 countries represented, another 10,000 governmental authorities and another 25,000 people (NGO, press, multinational “C levels”). An important discussion toke place there: low income countries had no or little responsibility for the carbon released on atmosphere so far. Industrialized ones have been burning fossil fuels for years, and got industrialized using that fuel as a their framework. The question raised was: why to avoid same opportunity for the others?

After intense discussions, convention was signed by majority of countries with two different approaches. High income countries should stabilize their emissions and low income countries only monitor theirs. Although the goals systematically failed (emissions on year 2000 were pretty higher than 1992), Rio Conference is qualified as an extreme important milestone, just because it happened. Climate change left scientific and academic discussions and entered into a completely new world: politics.

Five years latter (1997) another important climate change conference toke place, now in Kyoto. The goal of that event was to define mandatory objectives and the way forward to achieve them (what was missed in Rio), resulting in concrete KPIs of 6 to 8% reduction until 2012 for affluent countries when compared to 1990. The main issue was, again, the developed versus low income countries “battle”.

Looking backward, it was quite reasonable for the low income countries to claim for greater flexibility for the emissions, but at that time nobody had idea that these countries were starting to take off as the new economic stars, becoming a very relevant contributors for the overall emissions (just look for what China has done since then, figure below from Carbon Brief clearly illustrates that).

But without a biding target for the low income countries, US senate didn’t approve Kyoto Protocol. The claim was reasonable: different rules for different countries would lead to different competitive fields for industries and consequently great disadvantage for US competitiveness.

Another very important achievement of Kyoto Conference was to implement the cap and trade market for CO2 emissions, called pejoratively the “right to pollute”. The fact is that the best incentive for society ingenuity is the free market, propelling entrepreneurs for a positive competition. This concept was successfully tested in US with the goal to reduce acid rain that was generated due to coal thermometric emissions, and this country would like to keep this same approach to deal with the CO2 issue. On the other hand, Europeans were more pessimistic about the magic power of the free market, and believed on a top down approach (command-and-control).

In the end of the conference, US won the ideological battle and the cap and trade market became another important outcome of Kyoto Conference. The concept is simple: government distribute permits for CO2 emission and each company can sell it to others (in case it optimizes its emissions) or buy from others (if not). Since these rights are systematically reduced by government along time, market must finds its way (through ingenuity) in order to achieve targets. It is magically simple – and it usually works perfectly.

The issue is that since US senate didn’t approve Kyoto Protocol, only Europeans companies are trading under European Union Emissions Trading System (since 2005), the largest in the world. It is quite interesting that a mechanism largely imposed by US authorities on Kyoto Protocol negotiation is actually being operated by EU industries and companies.

The last important conference that grouped great part of world was the Paris Agreement, in 2015. Almost 190 countries signed the agreement and consequently became part of it (from the significant emitters, only Iran and Turkey didn’t sign), where the main goal is “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change;”.

Although Paris agreement established some concrete terms about the temperature goals, it failed to define specific target for countries. Each of them had to define theirs own targets (nationally determined contributions, or NDCs), with a clearly measurement and transparency. The agreement stated that these targets should be "ambitious", "represent a progression over time" and set "with the view to achieving the purpose of this Agreement".

Another important fact about Paris agreement is that it recognizes the rights of Parties to use emissions reductions outside of their own jurisdiction toward their NDC, in a system of carbon accounting and trading, requiring then the "linkage" of various carbon emissions trading systems between countries.

Part of the world currently have the sense of urgency and importance that climate change imposes, and there are also political and economical tools in place to address that. But the challenge is still enormous: carbon fuels (oil, natural gas and coal) supply 80% of current primary energy and the expectation is that energy demand will increase 40% along next 2 decades.

How to Get There

There are 4 clear bigger contributors to overall CO2 emissions: Power, Industry, Transportation and Building. Power has an overall share of 40%.

This article is focused on the greater contributors (Power and Industry), that represent together 64% of overall CO2 emission on the atmosphere. Notwithstanding, remaining sectors (Building and Transport) strategy also passes through same discussion that will be raised here, principally Hydrogen and Energy Efficiency.

Power

• Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)

Early experimental tests have shown some worrisome numbers for coal power plants CCS costs: potential electricity increase for up to 100%.

That is the main reason why CCS solution never really toke off, although it is the most straightforward solution to “clean" duty assets, principally fossil fueled thermometric power plants, literally capturing CO2 from the exhaust. What have changed is the possibility to use cap and trade market, adding an extra benefit from this costly projects.

Additionally, American entity “Internal Revenue Service” recently (mid-2020) issued guidance to help developers to take advantage of tax credits for the enterprise, what could release a new era for the technology (https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/treasury-irs-provide-regulations-to-help-businesses-claim-credits-for-carbon-capture). The plan is to concede from $35 to $50 per ton of CO2 captured as tax credit to investor.

Although critics complain that these funds don′t look to the big picture, displacing funds that should be used in renewables and propelling investments on the traditional fossil fueled industry, CCS must be used in large scale and in parallel to renewables in order to meet Paris agreement. I particularly don’t see competition there, since a mix of solution must be used to really decarbonize overall society.

To have a better picture about the challenging scenario: By 2018 there were approximately 20 facilities operating with CCS system globally (dozens others on stream), capturing 37MM t/y (Mtpa) of CO2. In the end of the day, CCS should handle at affordable cost more than 10 Gt of CO2 per year in order to be effective, what would lead to an astonishing number of ~6.000 facilities with carbon capture globally!! (in 2019, more than 40Gt of CO2 were emitted on atmosphere).

• Photovoltaic

Photovoltaic effect was discovered on mid 1800, with several small steps being accomplished along that century, being the most important one the first “solar module”, discovered by Charles Edgar Fritt in 1883, that sent his invention for Werner Von Siemens evaluation, that got quite impressed, stating that he was facing a completely different physical phenomenon that should be further investigated. That task was only accomplished by Einstein in 1905, with the famous paper that allowed him to be awarded with the Nobel prize (and not the relativity one, as though by many!).

Although good progress was reached during first half of 20th century, resulting on the first practical “solar cell” (with silicon) in 1954 by Bell laboratory, the fact is that overall efficiency was quite low for commercial application (averaging ~10%). The unique market niche capable to afford that expensive energy converter was space applications (mainly satellites), where cost wasn’t exactly a constrain.

By the end of millennium, electricity derived from sun was still crawling (with an insignificant amount of 1GW globally), quite a niche market for anyone on that time even imagine how far could it go. Japan dominated the market from 80′s to the beginning of new millennia, but they didn’t notice how close Germans were on the back mirror.

In 2004, German created the global market as we know, with massive subsides from government. From there on, solar power increased massively to 586 GW of installed capacity in 2019 (figure below, from BP) - 3% of share on electricity generation globally, an annual growth of 20% over 2018 (adding 98GW). The fact is that no other energy source has bigger average annual growth than solar, with a 36% year by year, since 1990.

Figure below (from World in Data) illustrate the miracle happening from 2004 on in terms of global peak capacity (increasing) and PV module cost (decreasing).

The main drawbacks of solar energy is the well-known intermittency of its generation, varying according to the sunlight incidence, what might lead to a derisive 10% to 20% of useful time under generating conditions (and only one fifth of useful capacity over the peak/plate installed capacity).

That leads also to the second main drawback, low generation density (power per area), that in this case is usually in between 1.7 hectares per megawatt, meaning that a 100 MW plant would need 1.7 km2, at least 10 times more area than a simple gas turbine would need to generate the same capacity. From the main energy sources, only wind has a density lower than this one.

• Nuclear

Nuclear energy might be described as one of the greatest failures from all energy sources, principally due to the huge early expectation that was created along. On a famous speech in 1954 by the US chairman of atomic energy, Lewis Strauss said: “Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter…”. At that time, researches about generating electricity through nuclear energy were on the fast lane, as were the expectations. Nuclear energy was already successfully deployed for massive destruction and to propel submarines, so control it to generate peaceful electricity shouldn’t be a problem.

After being officially launched for power generation in 1956 (Calder Hall, UK), a strong roll out toke place in several different parts of the world. But Three Mile Island accident in 1979 caused the definitive cancellation of dozens of new plants (with more than 100 reactors that already had Purchase Order in place), and the last reactor commissioned in US was ordered in 1976. The same effect was seen in Europe after Chernobyl accident in Ukraine in 1986 and in Japan after Fukushima in 2011.

These accidents evoked an immense public reaction that Lewis Strauss wasn’t able to predict at that time that he said his famous speech. The fact is that nobody really measured the social negative perception, repeated budget overrun issues for new plants, challenging environmental licensing and the challenging issues for proper disposal of the radioactive materials (that must be well handled for millenniums to come).

These factors almost banned new nuclear power plants and what we have seen is a stagnation of new nuclear stations on the last 20 to 30 years, with China and India being the most notorious exceptions with their expansive nuclear program. Graphic below (BP) illustrates the nuclear energy consumption by region (in Million tonnes oil equivalent), with a clear and almost instant fall right after Fukushima (2011) and a constantly increase since then, principally due to China contribution. Overall share of electricity generation by nuclear is constantly decreasing over time, what used to be over 15% is currently averaging 10% globally.

Considering the immense government and overall society concerns about global warming, nuclear power plant role should be carefully evaluated due to its cleanest operation conditions from all other sources of energy, compatible only with renewables (wind and solar) but without the intermittence and low energy density, that are majors drawbacks of the later.

In my opinion, nuclear energy source should be included in any serious long term decarbonization program, with a relevant share on overall electricity generation. It is hard to believe how a clean, safe, predictable and energetic dense source like this is actually losing space on overall matrix.

There are several new designs with inherently safe reactors that eliminate any possibility of core meltdown. The fact is that overall hazards of burning fossil fuels are higher than nuclear power plants, but public perception is quite sensible to visual and impressive disasters, but not to the invisible and silent acid rain, global warming or particulate matters.

• Wind

Wind energy has been used from humans for milling and pumping water for irrigation from more than a thousand years. Holland, UK, China and several Islamic countries have used that free energy from our mother nature. But at that time wind energy was transformed in mechanical energy only, and just in 1887 Charles Brush could generate electricity from wind. He built a 18 meters high wind mill connected to a dynamo, generating electricity that was able to illuminate his house. With his machine, for the first time electricity was generated from wind.

Interesting to note that already in that time, the current concern of misbalance between wind generation (according to wind blow) and demand was already noted by Scientific American newspaper, what is still an unsolved drawback for renewables today, even 150 years later.

But along 20th century wind energy was nothing but a very niche market, with some sparkly moments after first oil crises in 1973 (California being one of good example of that). But the real boom started after Golf War in 1991, combined with the already mentioned increasing social concern of global warming (remember that Kyoto Protocol toke place in 1992). Electricity generated from wind doesn’t emit CO2, particulate matters, NOx or SO2. Why not?

Europe started first (lead by Germany and Spain), and on year 2000 they had 5 times more wind energy than US. The later really toke off after 2005 – from there to 2009, wind energy faced an impressive growth rate of 40% per year in US. China was a latecomer, but today is definitely on the first line and with the biggest additional capacity per year.

Figure below (from BP, in GW) presents the increasing presence of wind energy into the global energy matrix, a massive slope of 4 times in a decade in regards installed capacity.

Similarly to the PV cells, intermittency of wind generation is also a problem, with the aggravating factor that wind blows more at night than during the day, exactly the opposite of daily social energetic needs. Although generating factor is something to concern, wind is usually better than solar cell, averaging from something in between 20 to 50% (upper limit for the offshore fields). The second important drawback of wind energy is the extreme low energy density per area, averaging 7.6 hectares per megawatt, one of the lowest from all kinds of traditional energy sources used.

Mainly due to this significant drawback (low energy density, leading to huge wind park fields), lack of onshore available area is an important concern for further development of the wind energy. Additionally, there is an increasing social dissatisfaction from wind parks neighborhood: “renewables are beautiful, but not in my backyard”. The best alternative to attend everybody needs is to move these wind fields to offshore, and that is exactly what is going on right now.

First semester of 2020 showed a strong increase on FID for offshore wind, with a robust US $35 billion finance (above 2019’s record full-year figure - $31.9 billion), including the largest ever, a Netherlands offshore wind with a 1.5 GW capacity (US $3.9 Bi). This massive result compensated the poor investments in solar and onshore wind due to Covid-19, and thanks to the offshore wind renewables proved to be resilient even on one of the biggest crises ever.

Some additional facts support the overall optimism about offshore wind: according to DOE (Department of Energy) of USA, currently there are 28 offshore wind projects under development on that country. There are also 15 projects under licensing process, with an overall capacity of 25 GW of energy in US. It is clear that USA is definitely going into offshore wind, a traditional European market, where their 5.000 offshore grid-connected turbines over 12 countries are able to generate 22 GW (all data from 2020).

The so called “scale factor” is clearly seen on these offshore wind fields. From 2014 to 2020, average size of turbine increased from 4 MW to 8 MW (16% increase every year) and average size of each generating farm increased from 300 MW to 600 MW on the same period. The outcome is an each time bigger share of wind on overall electricity generation global matrix, with a 7% slice.

The current status of renewables (sun and wind) generation into the global electricity mix is a share of 10.4% (versus 9.3% in 2018), 1429.6 TWh for wind and 724.1 TWh for solar (figure below, from BP).

Another fact to mention is the extent of wind and solar into the globe. Their presence is not located in one specific area, but rather in several continents, meaning that they are not anymore a niche market for some specific countries like it used to be before (figure from Enerdata).

But when looking into overall primary energy supply, the share is still at 5%, even including biofuels, what shows again how immense is the challenge to substitute a so spread and consolidated energy matrix, currently based on fossil fuels.

Industry

Another important contributor to CO2 emissions is the industry sector, with a 24% of the global share, that together with electrical sector (previously discussed) adds 64% of overall global emissions.

Approximately 75% of the industry energy source come from fossil fuels, including those hard to abate industries such as steel and cement. There are three main pillars where industries rely on for further decarbonization: Hydrogen usage, Energy Efficiency and Electrification.

I will discuss a little about hydrogen and energy efficiency, but needless to discuss the later since electrification is basically the end use of Power Generation Sector.

•  Hydrogen usage:

Maybe the most spoken and with the highest expectation about energy tendency is the Hydrogen. But why? Hydrogen has been used for decades on several industries across the globe, principally refineries and fertilizes, but the vast majority of the dedicated hydrogen production (+99%) come from fossil fuels (mainly splitting hydrogen atoms from natural gas), a high intensive emission process (the famous grey hydrogen). If it were a country, current global hydrogen industry would be positioned on the sixth position on the greenhouse emission ranking, almost one entire Germany.

 Note from figure below (from IEA) how fossil fueled dependent this process is currently:

What has changed now for so much hype? There are two main points: 1) the “each time cheaper” electrolysis equipment, that uses water to produce this hydrogen (the famous green hydrogen), a highly electric energy intensive process; 2) the ubiquitous renewables energy (wind and sun), that are also becoming each time cheaper (and sometimes negative prices!), that are allowing emission free hydrogen production under those electrolysis. Combining these latest trends with the increasingly global warming concerns, you have a perfect environment for hydrogen.

Hydrogen burns hot and clean, making it an ideal energy for those hard to abate sectors, such as heavy industries. It can also play an important role on energy store – whenever you have an energy surplus (might be from hydroelectric, wind or solar panel), just turn it on and store the hydrogen produced (cheaper than batteries for higher capacities).

It can also make the so called power coupling, that is basically to use the clean electricity generated on the power sector (that current responds for "only" 40% of the emissions) and bring it to industry, transportation and building (the other emitters):

• In transportation: you can have either a hydrogen car or a fuel derived from green hydrogen (through Fischer Tropsch process) to be used in any kind of transportation, be it car, ship or planes. Jet and large ships, by the way, are on the hardest to abate sectors of all, due to the high volumetric energy density of jet fuel and diesel (virtually 100% of large ships and planes are currently being fueled by fossil fuels). Direct use of hydrogen is not expected on planes (it would need cryogenic tanks and redesign of planes), but jet fuel derived from hydrogen is perfectly known and maybe the unique scalable and reasonable solution for this sector.
• In buildings: you can change city natural gas grid to hydrogen - or starting mixing current NG grid with hydrogen (depending on the rate, there is no need for any adjustments on the pipeline or on the consumption point);
• Industry: just burn it instead of natural gas (the heat generated from this burning process cannot be reached only with heating pumps), or use it on the hard to abate industries, such as steel (instead of coal)

Figure below (from Siemens) perfectly illustrate this coupling role of hydrogen. Note the great variety and flexibility that this molecule brings to the overall energy system. It can store surplus energy from renewables and make the “bridge” between power sector to buildings, transportation or several other industries, such as agriculture, chemical and petrochemical.

These package of advantages are so positive that countries all over the world are pursuing the development of this new energy carrier, willing to be in the first line when massive demand appears.

Several natural gas European infrastructure companies just launched a plan (mid 2020) foreseen massive expansion of their grids to transport hydrogen all over Europe (6,800 km by 2030 and 23,000 by 2040, 75%being converted natural gas pipelines). German launched in 2020 an EUR 9 Bi incentive package specifically for Hydrogen, Japan contracted IEA to develop a study about this molecule and there are also others investments or plans in several countries, such as South Korea, Chile and Australia. Everyone wants to take a share on the US$ 500 billions until 2030 or US$ 2,5 trillions until 2050, the expected investment estimated by McKinsey on the green hydrogen chain.The wave is coming sooner than we might expect.

What is expected in a mid to long term is that these massive investments will lead to reduction costs on the overall chain (eletrolyzers equipment, storage, fuel cell, etc), similarly to what have happened with wind and solar energy. This reduction might narrow the current price gap between grey hydrogen to blue (grey + CCS) and green (purely from electrolysis using renewables). Figure below (from IEA) illustrates this current gap that needs to be addressed in order to bring green hydrogen production to a massive scale:

The message of this graph is quite simple. Taking into consideration and pricing global warming, be it with carbon capture and storage or through a price for the CO2 trade, on the long term hydrogen produced through electrolysis is expected to be competitive with traditional current fossil fueled production.

It is always a tough task to predict the energy future (and history has shown several immense failures about that), but I will give my try here: hydrogen is the molecule that will build the future of energy.

• Energy Efficiency

Energy efficiency is the first “fuel” we need to look carefully if we are willing to decarbonize society. There is no other fuel or technological change that could lead to a faster response than that. The beauty of the Japanese word Mottainai is not easily translated to any other language, but it means “don't waste anything worthy” – a perfect culture for a country with so limited natural resources.

One of the main downsides of the energy efficiency is that it doesn’t have an electorate, and it doesn’t cut the ribbon.

The importance of energy efficiency is clearly shown in numbers. Along last century it increased in 2.5x – just imagine the number of oil barrels per day saved with that better performance. In the other hand, global overall energy efficiency is still ridiculous 11%, meaning that from the ~600 EJ (exajoules) currently consumed in the world, only ~60 EJ are converted to final useful work, such as sound, screen, light or heat.

EE is a continuous improvement process, with slow increments along years. There are several good examples that clearly illustrate that:

• Steam turbine efficiency was merely 10% on the beginning of 20th century, now is over 40% (figure below, from Smil)
• Light overall efficiency was 0.1% on that same period of time (10% for the thermometric and 1% for the bulb), currently overall efficiency is close to 9% (60% for the thermometric and 15% for the bulb) – an impressive increase of 90 times!
• Small furnace ranged from 20% beginning of last century to over 90% nowadays.

The main motivators for those great achievements are the constant human being wiliness to do more, waste less and a constant pursuit for ingenuity.

In addition to these constant pursuit for better performance, we are facing today a combination of digital tools that might lead to another step gain on overall performance. Analytics, Big Data, Cloud computing, High Processing Computing, Internet of Things, Digital Twin, Blockchain, Augmented Reality, Logistics 4.0 and Additive Manufacturing are just some few examples of this new toolkit readily available for performance improvement on the Oil and Gas industry, pejoratively called “fast follower” by others industries due to its laziness for innovation (that is clearly changing nowadays).

There are several studies about this potential, such as the one released by Mckinsey saying that “Advanced analytics for energy also has the potential to increase energy efficiency by as much as 10 percent”. On the real world, there are also several concrete cases, such as a Modec′s platform located in Brazil (Cidade de Campos dos Goytacazes - MV29) with its 10,000 sensors and analytics intensive that lead to a 65% reduction on the downtime, as well as a Siemens project for a platform located in the North Sea, highly automated and with its control room located 1,000 km away, leading to a 60% reduction on the POB.

At last, worth saying Petrobras current goals: reducing the 1st oil from the current 3,000 to merely 1,000 days, drastic reduction on exploratory wells (targeting 100% of success) and an overall simulation time reduced by 50% - all of these new ambitious goals just possible due to that new digital toolkit.

History has shown that energy efficiency step gains are not common, usually it happens when you have a new prime mover or technology. This technology step might be those digital tools previously mentioned (the so called Industry 4.0) or any “hard technology improvement”, such as Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production, one of the most important invention ever, that significantly reduced the amount of energy needed per ton of ammonia produced (and consequently allowed massive agriculture at an affordable cost, for an exponential global population growth).

In regards the new prime movers, humanity faced some impressive step gains, but usually spaced along time on an average of every 50 years. Steam engine to steam turbine, and from the latter to gas turbine at combined cycle power plants.

Along 19th century, for example, steam engine efficiency rose tenfold (from 2,5% to 25%), principally due to the hundredfold pressure operation increase (from 14 kPa to 1.4MPa) of the machines. Spite of that, the average steam engines operating during the 1900 new year′s celebration had an efficiency of only 8%, meaning that 92% of the coal fed into their boilers were wasted, generating pollution without any useful output energy. Overall picture didn’t change a lot at the beginning of World War I, when average steam engine efficiency rose to only 11-17% (figure below, from Smil). At that same time, Parson′s steam turbine could already achieve efficiency that surpassed 25%.

Same pattern can be seen for gas turbine prime mover, that used at combined cycle power plants can reach efficiency up to 60%, and for diesel engines that currently can achieve efficiency over 50%, while internal gasoline combustion engine average half of that (~25%).

The most interesting thing about energy efficiency is that it usually doesn′t need high investments, or even if needed the payback is always attractive and the investment pays off.

What drives an efficient industry are their soft skills, such as culture and processes. Looking to the country, good regulations creates the perfect environment for an efficient economy.

Regulations stands for ISO 50001 certification, tax incentive, obligatory financing, mandatory energy audit, R&D investment and obligatory energy efficiency managers for some energy intensive industries, for example.

There is no time to wait. Energy efficiency is much more related to will and organization than money or technology.

Conclusion

There is not only one single answer for the global warming concern. Actually we need to embrace a combination of technologies and processes in order to reach that Paris agreement target ("well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels"). Energy efficiency, Hydrogen, Wind, Solar and Nuclear are the most suitable and proved solutions.

It is definitely not an easy task. We should not only substitute current fossil fueled energy based civilization, that today accounts for more than 80% of primary energy supply (figure below, from BP), but also guarantee that annual increment of this energy primary demand will be based on alternative fuel rather than those fossils.

Energy inertia is quite impressive principally due to the huge investments needed to change current base. No other primary energy shift toke less than a generation (~50 years), considering the starting point when the new fuel source reached 5% of the share.

Coincidentally, renewables are close to this important 5% milestone (from figure above), but we definitely can′t wait for additional 50 years to have them as the predominant fuel source.

Like previously mentioned, we should also conciliate environmental concern with the constant increase on global energy demand. Have in mind that affluent nations use as an average 14 oil barrels per person / year, and countries under development merely 3. United States electric consumption doubled since 80s, and there is a general expectation that global electrical consumption will double until 2030.

The importance of that is quite reasonable and is clearly represented below (from BP). World primary energy consumption increased from ~400EJ to ~580EJ just in this current century (less than 20 years):

Predict energy future is always an extremely tough task, but read the past is quite simple, and history doesn′t play in our favor here. Due to the energy market natural inertia, current share of fossil fuels on the overall matrix and lack of mature technology or scale for some hard to abate sector, my guess is that Paris agreement target (net zero carbon economy by mid century) is only a dream.

Figure above (from Carbon Brief) shows the challenging scenario. Emissions started to flatten during most recent years (2019), but this far from being enough. What we really need is a strong decrease, as seen in figure below (also from Carbon Brief), that shows how far we are from the Paris Agreement targets, where the black line presents past emissions (until 2018), thicker blue and purple the reference scenario for the mitigation target.

The matter is the pace, but not the content. It is quite clear that civilization will get rid of carbon fuels, and actually it has happening from a long time. All primary fuels shifts we have seen are always from a higher carbon content to a lower one (wood to coal, coal to oil, oil to natural gas). The H:C ratio of wood combustion is no higher than 0.5, while the ratios are 1.0 for coal, 1.8 for gasoline and kerosene, and 4.0 for methane.

Coal is the first carbon fuel that we will not see on a long term exactly due to its higher carbon content. As we could see from previous figures, it is already happening and it will never rebound again. Coal will be the first major energy resource whose extraction will be limited because of environmental concerns, and not due to its resources (that are still quite abundant, by the way).

The same will happen for Oil. There is no more concern about lack of oil resources availability in the future, since its extraction will also be limited due to environmental concern. Finally, natural gas, the last survivor from carbon fuels.

Probably ours sons and daughters will still live on a hydrocarbon society, but our grandchildren will probably visit museum to see platforms, FPSOs, oil rigs, liquefaction plants and coal mines. They probably will be living on an electrical and hydrogen based economy.

Referências

• Energy at the Crossroads (Vaclav Smil)
• Energy and Civilization (Vaclav Smil)
• Energy (Vaclav Smil)
• The Quest (Daniel Yergin)
• https://about.bnef.com/blog/colossal-six-months-for-offshore-wind-support-renewable-energy-investment-in-first-half-of-2020/?sf125242974=1
• Bloomberg
• BP
• Enerdata
• IEA
• https://ourworldindata.org/energy
• Windeurope
• Mckinsey
• Carbon Brief