Fossil Fuels – Easily Substituted and Hard to Replace

Namaste Everybody!

This week we conclude the series on Fossil Fuels. In the last few weeks, we had seen some of the popular fossil fuels from the GHG list. We had started by ranking the fossil fuels from the most preferred to the least preferred. We had then described some of them – understanding a bit more than we already knew, and including where they are applied and what could the possible alternatives.

In the GHG list there were over 53 types of fuel classified under 5 fueltypes.

From Figure 1 we notice that there were over 22 types of Oil, 16 types of Coal and 12 types of Biomass-based fuels.

Each fuel was provided with their values describing the following:

1.????? Specific Energy (Energy per unit of Mass of Fuel – Terajouls per Gigagrams)

2.????? Emissions Intensity by Energy basis (Mass of CO2 emissions per unit of Energy – kg of CO2 per Terajoule)

3.????? Emissions Intensity by Mass basis (Mass of CO2 emissions per unit Mass of Fuel – kg of CO2 per Ton of Fuel)

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The following figure had been a consistent chart all through.

We had ranked them in the following manner:

1. Specific Energy – Higher the better
2. Emissions per unit Energy – Lower the better (Reciprocal is More Energy for Less Emission – Higher the better)
3. Emissions per unit Mass – Lower the better (Reciprocal is More Mass for Less Emission – Higher the better)

From the above ranking we rank which fuel-type has the highest scores. By choosing the median of the scores, we notice that Gas is the most preferred and Coal has the least preference. From figures 1 and 3, we notice that Gas has only one type of fuel, oil has 22 varieties and coal has 16 varieties. This gives us an idea how important a role oil plays in the industry.

Below fig. 5.1 shows the number of fuel types used in a particular manner. Fig 5.2 shows the scoring of the particular manner of usage.

From figure 5 we notice that there are 38 applications as fuel while 5 applications each as Raw Material, Chemical Feedstock and Primal Matter. But when we score them according to preference, we notice that the application as a chemical feedstock has a higher score and fuels have a lower score. High scoring fuels used as Chemical Feedstock are highly preferred and therefore, may have no easy substitutes. By comparison, low scoring fuels used as Fuel indicate that they can easily replaced.

In figure 6 we see that Chemical Feed-stock scores higher than Fuels. It also finds more applications in industrial processes and refining. We also notice that a large number of coal varieties are used as fuel. Based on the above we can conclude that many coal varieties that are also used as fuel, can be replaced because of the low median scores. However, certain varieties of oil and biomass used as chemical feed-stock may be difficult to replace.

Therefore, we are witnessing the replacement of low-preference Coal fuels used in power generation with renewable alternatives. These may give an indication of what type of replacements to expect in the coming future.

#ghg #solarenergy #renewableenergy #greenpower #fossilfuel #climatechange

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