This is a good concept Off Shore Wind Energy , but not the only solution towards taking mankind’s dependency away from fossil fuels. In order for us to meet the efficiency of oil and natural gas we will need to implement various forms of alternate energy – solar, wind, hydroelectric.
I was flying into San Diego this Monday evening, and I was amazed by how the San Gabriel basin and San Diego county looked on a clear night 20,000 miles up. If a 17th century pirate were in my seat he would see thousands of torch lights ablaze. Resources such as wood, fuel, and perhaps metal would be implemented to sustain constant illumination.
So what energy source feeds these glowing cities today? Have you ever considered how we have such an infinite amount of energy to power our hot water heaters, lights, and computers? In order for our power plants to generate energy, they also need an energy input. In the 1970s and 1980s, most electric power plants were fueled by coal or nuclear power. In 2000, some 23,453 megawatts (MW) of new electric capacity was added in the U.S. and almost 95 percent of this, or 22,238 MW, was fueled by natural gas. (Source: American Gas Association)
There appears to be enough natural gas in the world to supply our system in the short term, but perhaps alternate forms of energy should replace natural gas since the former is also used to feed the planet’s 6.5 billion people.
Crop plants assemble carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen into proteins that are essential both to plant growth and to the diets of humans and other animals. Of those four elements, nitrogen is the one that's too often in short supply. If you see yellowish, stunted crops, whether they're in an Indiana cornfield or an Indonesian rice paddy, it's likely that you can blame it on a lack of nitrogen.
Stan Cox, senior scientist at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, wrote, “A world of 6.4 billion people, on the way to 9 billion or more, needs more protein than the planet's croplands can generate from biologically provided nitrogen. Our species has become as physically dependent on industrially produced nitrogen fertilizer as it is on soil, sunshine and water. And that means we're hooked on natural gas.”
Perhaps we should save natural gas for food production and use other sources to power our refrigerators? Cox later writes, “Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor at the University of Manitoba and author of the 2004 book Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production, has demonstrated the global food system's startling degree of dependence on nitrogen fertilization. Using simple math -- the kind you can do in your head if there's no calculator handy -- Smil showed that 40 percent of the protein in human bodies, planet-wide, would not exist without the application of synthetic nitrogen to crops during most of the 20th century.”
That means that without the use of industrially produced nitrogen fertilizer, about 2.5 billion people out of today's world population of 6.2 billion simply could never have existed. This also means that if there is a long-term disruption in the natural gas supply, people will starve.
The momentum of past population growth is expected to add two to four billion people to the world's population by 2050, even with concerted efforts to rein in growth. Almost all of the increase will occur in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. That will double the demand for nitrogen fertilizer in those regions, and by that time, says Cox, “60 percent of their inhabitants will depend existentially (in the literal sense, not the philosophical one) on natural gas-derived nitrogen fertilizer.”
Aside:
Some say human population is exceeding earth’s carrying capacity. There is not enough, water, fish, timber, steel, oil etc. to sustain human consumption. In nature when a species experience a population explosion, it is only able to last as long as the environment permits. Usually famine or disease will minimize the numbers in order for the ecosystem to return to a state of equilibrium. Should nature run its course in terms of human population or should we continue to beat nature with ingenuity?
Here are some fun facts about natural gas:
http://www.pge.com/microsite/safety_esw_ngsw/ngsw/more/facts.html
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