Energy >> Overview
"Global oil production will probably reach a peak sometime during this decade. After the peak, the world's production of crude oil will fall, never to rise again." These are the opening words of a book published in 2001 entitled Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage by oil industry expert and Princeton University Professor Emeritus Kenneth Deffeyes. The impending shortfall in the production of conventional crude oil and natural gas along with global climate change and urban air quality problems make the analysis of the supply of and requirements for energy at regional, national and global scales of crucial importance and present challenges to policy makers.
How will these challenges be met? Obviously, by some combination of measures that will encourage a substitution of energy from renewable and non-conventional sources for energy from fossil sources and an increase in the efficiency of energy use. At this time, no single dominant alternative energy source is on the horizon although biomass, wind, solar, and next generation nuclear, among others, all may have a role to play. What is clear, however, is that energy efficiency will have a much more important role in the future as it is inconceivable that the increasing needs for energy from growing populations can be met without significant increases in energy efficiency. Further, the mix of energy supply options and efficiencies and the timing of deployment is apt to vary from region to region and nation to nation.
Energy systems are characterized by technologies embodied in relatively long-lived stocks: facilities for transforming primary energy into fuels and engines for transforming fuels into useful energy at point of use. Alternative fuels and more energy efficient technologies, for the most part, can only be deployed at the margin as the stocks wear out and must be replaced. The choice of technologies to be deployed in the future is influenced by a variety of economic and regulatory factors. whatIf? models representing stocks of supply facilities and flows of primary energy and fuels to support particular end uses are powerful tools for energy systems analysis.