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Saturday, 11 September 2010

The Energy Challenge of the World (Essay)

These days, majority of international media are focusing on the flooding issues in China, Russia and Pakistan. The flood has devastated most of their lands and put them into a plight. The main reason of the flood is the climate change caused by global warming. In general, global warming effect increases the average temperature of the Earth and causes imbalance in the ecology. From these incidents, it can be seemed that global warming effect is becoming more significant and horrendous. Everyone starts to realize that the Earth is sick and we, human beings are the culprit of this issue. We burn the fossil fuel to meet our demands in energy that is the main source for all the industries. Without energy, the economics cannot grow and mankind is unable to survive. Fossil fuel combustion will emit a green house gases which are carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. These gases are the contributions to the global warming. The global is facing the energy challenge in boosting the economic growth while protecting the environment.

Undoubtedly, energy is highly demanded for one nation’s economic development. Nowadays, the energy demand is growing rapidly as the big developing countries like China and India enter the most energy-intensive phase of economic development. These countries have an abundant supply of cheap manpower in the world. Majority of the international investors enter their nations to access to the low-cost manpower and increase their profits. Due to the surge of investment in these countries, enormous energy is needed to construct building, infrastructures and maintain operations. If the countries fail to ensure their energy security, the growth of economic development will be retarded. As a matter of fact, the investors incline to the country which can ensure the sufficient energy supply and the cheaper labour cost. The competitions of getting more investors become more tensed and fiercer. As a consequence, the energy demand in these countries increases at a great accelerated rate.

However, the supplies of easy accessible fossil fuel are hard to keep up with the energy demands in the future. The world will enter a predicament when supplies cannot meet the energy demand. All the industries will be affected and all the operations will be slow down. Electricity generation and all the productions using energy will be halted. All the works will be unable to continue. The global economics will become disorder and there will be probably higher rate of retrenchments and unemployment. It will have great impact on the transportation sector as it is the main consumers of fossil fuel. Although alternative and renewable energy can be used to substitute the fossil fuel, it takes a long time for these energies to provide as high power as fossil fuel. Therefore, the world will have to utilize the energy more efficiently and increase the use of other energy sources like renewable and alternative energy gradually.

In general, the future energy challenge is to meet energy demands while protecting the environment. In order to meet the energy demands, advanced cutting edge technologies to unlock more oil and gas from difficult-to-reach remote or hostile environments have to be implemented. Besides that, new techniques for prolonging the existing oil field lives, renewable and alternative energy are the essential remedies to ensure sufficient energy supply. As carbon dioxide emitted from combustion is the main element of contribution to global warming, research and development of the carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects become more vital. To ensure energy security, coalition among countries is very significant.

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