Energy crisis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2007)

This article is about energy crises in general. For other uses, see Oil crisis.

An energy crisis is any great bottleneck (or price rise) in the supply of energy resources to an economy. It usually refers to the shortage of oil and additionally to electricity or other natural resources.

For the consumer, the price of gasoline (petrol) and diesel for cars and other vehicles rises. Industrialized nations are dependent on oil, and efforts to restrict the supply of oil would have an adverse effect on the economies of oil producers.

1 Historical crises
2 Future and alternative sources of energy
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Historical crises

Image:Gcprrets.gif

1973 oil crisis - Cause: an OPEC oil export embargo by many of the major Arab oil-producing states, in response to western support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War
1979 energy crisis - Cause: the Iranian revolution
1990 spike in the price of oil - Cause: the Gulf War
The 2000-2001 California electricity crisis - Cause: failed deregulation, and business corruption.
The UK fuel protest of 2000 - Cause: Raise in the price of crude oil combined with already relatively high taxation on road fuel in the UK.
Oil price increases of 2004-2007 - Cause: increasing demand from the U.S and China, the falling state of the U.S. dollar, and stagnation of production due to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Iraq is #3 in the world (besides Saudi Arabia and Iran) for its oil reserves. However some observers have stated the global oil production peak occurred in December 2005. If this is correct it is also to blame.
Argentine energy crisis (2004)

[edit] Future and alternative sources of energy

Image:Kuwait city 1996.jpg

Kuwait's Al Burqan Oil Field, the world's second largest oil field, is starting to run out of oil.^[1]

It is possible that the world is heading towards an unprecedentedly large and potentially devastating global energy crisis due to a decline in the availability of cheap oil and recommendations to a decreasing dependency on fossil fuel. This has led to increasing interest in alternate power/fuel research such as fuel cell technology, hydrogen fuel, biomethanol, biodiesel, Karrick process, solar energy, geothermal energy, tidal energy and wind energy, and fusion power. To date, only hydroelectricity and nuclear power have been significant alternatives to fossil fuel (see Future energy development), with big ecological problems (residues and water spending). Hydrogen gas is currently produced at a net energy loss from natural gas, which is also experiencing declining production in North America and elsewhere. When not produced from natural gas, hydrogen still needs another source of energy to create it, also at a loss during the process. This has led to hydrogen being regarded as a 'carrier' of energy rather than a 'source'.

There have been alarming predictions by groups such as the Club of Rome that the world would run out of oil (and out of food) in the late 20th century. Although technology has made oil extraction more efficient, the world is having to struggle to provide oil by using increasingly costly and less productive methods such as deep sea drilling, and developing environmentally sensitive areas such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The world's population continues to grow at a quarter of a million people per day, increasing the consumption of energy. The per capita energy consumption of China, India and other developing nations continues to increase as the people living in these countries adopt more energy intensive lifestyles. At present a small part of the world's population consumes a large part of its resources, with the United States and its population of 300 million people consuming far more oil than China with its population of 1.3 billion people.

Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution transformed agriculture around the globe, world grain production increased by 250%. The energy for the Green Revolution was provided by fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers (natural gas), pesticides (oil), and hydrocarbon fueled irrigation. The 20th century population explosion is strongly correlated with the discovery and extraction of hydrocarbons. The peaking of world hydrocarbon production (Peak oil) may test Malthus critics.

Efficiency mechanisms such as Negawatt power can encourage significantly more effective use of current generating capacity. It is a term used to describe the trading of increased efficiency, using consumption efficiency to increase available market supply rather than by increasing plant generation capacity. As such, it is a demand-side as opposed to a supply-side measure.