Recent energy conferences are highlighting the huge growth in energy consumption both in Australia and around the world. In spite of serious concerns held by many academics about global warming, people are just getting on with life and that means using ever more energy. The last two decades have seen Australian electrical energy consumption double but that pales into insignificance when compared to China which currently is installing the equivalent of Australia’s entire electrical grid every YEAR!

Truly, the economic growth and accompanying growth of infrastructure in China is enormous and it is well on the way to becoming the dominant world economy in the next 20 or 30 years. (Most commentators reckon that the Chinese will achieve world dominance within 50 years but having seen a small fraction of their recent infrastructure development, I think it will be much sooner.)

So where is all the world’s energy growth to come from? Much of it will continue to come from oil but coal is seen as ever more important in spite of its large contribution to green-house gases. Many energy experts see carbon sequestration, the burying of carbon dioxide gas, as the solution, along with the idea of "carbon trading" which is set to boom if the Kyoto protocol is ratified by Russia.

Personally, I regard carbon sequestration as a bad joke, even though it has already been demonstrated with carbon dioxide extracted from gas production in the Norwegian North Sea. I suspect that carbon sequestration will never happen in a big way, just as the burial of nuclear power station radioactive waste products deep in stable underground rock strata has never happened.

Unfortunately too, renewable energy resources such as solar and wind power seem unlikely to ever make a really major contribution to the world’s energy needs. Wind power is being taken up in a big way, even in Australia, but the electrical grid then requires big reserves (provided by thermal power stations) to provide for times when the wind is not blowing. If Australia had large solar generation it could complement wind power, on the basis that when the wind is not blowing on the coastal regions, the sun is probably shining strongly in the central Australian regions. But that is unlikely in the near future.

Still, coal power stations are not really the way to go, especially as we have huge reserves of gas. Gas-fired power stations are much more efficient (due to co-generation techniques), have much more benign greenhouse gas emissions and do not need huge open-cut mines which blight the landscape.

For the rest of the world, nuclear and coal-fired power stations seem likely to continue as the main electricity sources and regardless of how systems are tweaked to improve efficiency, coal-fired power stations seem destined to be built in increasing numbers. Does that seem pessimistic? Yes, but short of asking the rest of the world to limit their living standards in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions, there does not seem to be a realistic alternative. In the far future, maybe we will have a mixture of solar and fusion power stations, giving a cleaner environment.

Leo Simpson