Will fossil fuels run out

Greg Foot, from BBC's Earth Lab, looks into the dirty world of fossil fuels. Will we run out of fossil fuels and what cost will we likely pay for their use?



We've all heard that fossil fuels won't last forever but why. And if they are set to run out, how much is left and when will that happen. To dig to the bottom of this one, we first need a quick refresher on how the fossil fuels are created, and sadly, no, they're not mostly dead dinosaurs.
You see, the vast majority of our fossil fuels come from the remains of plants and animals. They lived around 300 to 400 million years ago. We don't see the first dinosaurs until around about 230 million years ago, so when these plants and animals died, that very, very long time ago, they were covered in layers of earth or silt, and because of the combined actions of three things: one, the compression from the weight of all that stuff; two, the microorganisms in there decomposing the contents; and three, the heat underground that transforms them into potential fuels.
Coal is the remnant of ancient plants while oil and natural gas mostly come from marine creatures. The natural gas being made in deeper hotter regions, where the oil gets a little bit more cooked.
Now we dig or drill this stuff out of the ground, and because it has been accumulating for a long time, initially there was a lot, but because it takes so long to make, we're using it much, much faster than it can possibly be replaced. This means that there is effectively a fixed amount of fuel on earth and we're using it up.
So, yes, fossil fuels are going to run out but what is left and when will that happen. Well, we can fairly easily tally up what's known as our proven resources, the supplies that we know the locations of and we think we have a good chance of getting to.
In their statistical review of world energy, BP estimated that the world had just over 1,700 billion proven barrels of oil in 2014. That's enough to make 52 and a half years of global production. They also estimated just over 187 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. That's enough for 54 years. Then 891,531 million tons of coal, enough for a whopping 110 years of global production.
But there's also the stuff that we know about can't reach but think we might be able to get to some day. Hard figures on that are understandably tougher to come by, but oil and gas consulting firm Rystad Energy estimates total probable global oil reserves at 2,092 billion barrels, which is enough for about 70 years if our use doesn't go up.
The total fuel resource, the amount of fossil fuels that could be out there that we know nothing about, could, of course, be even higher, but around four years ago an idea came out that there actually is plenty of oil left, just that we haven't got around to getting it out of the ground yet. This means the numbers for the potential oil out there could, in fact, be way higher.
We've already seen humanity use new technologies to access new fuels that we couldn't get to before. Things like new techniques to extract oil where it's all mixed up in fine grained sedimentary rocks like shale or using high-pressure fracking to extract more oil and gas from the ground. One thing stopping us using these new technologies to extract fuels is that the rising energy cost of extracting it could be just as damaging as the oil running out.
Despite the cost of oil, the amount being extracted has actually remained constant, about 75 million barrels per day since 2005, and this means a plateau has been reached where supply cannot match demand. It's also worth pointing out that fracking is far from ideal. It's been claimed that it has been linked to earthquakes and toxic tap water.
We've already seen how the economics of getting to the fuel can outweigh humanity's demand for it. In 2016 around 460,000 barrels a day of high cost production like fracking was shut down in the US due to the cost. But that just means surely it’s there for later, when the economics are right, right?
Well, maybe we need to leave it there. The planet is warming due to the burning of those fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, trap heat and it causes a greenhouse effect. It's been estimated that we cannot burn more than about a third of those proven resources if we have any hope at all of meeting plans to keep the temperature rise at 2 degrees centigrade or less. Although it may feel that we don't seem to be in a particular hurry to look for alternatives, energy transitions have always taken a long time. It took over 50 years for coal to replace wood as the world's leading source of energy, and another 50 years for oil to overtake coal.
So here's a promising thought. In the end, with so many options for renewable sources of sustainable power being developed, we might actually never have to answer this question of what happens when the oil is finally all gone.
Right, this is where we really want to hear your opinions about this whole subject. Put your thoughts down in the comments below, subscribe to the channel if you haven't already, and then you'll get to know whenever we release a new one, and if you'd like to know if you can become a fossil, click here, it's an interesting one. See you soon.

BioBus – The UK’s first food and poo-powered bus

The BioBus is the first UK bus powered on gas generated from recycling food waste and treating sewage.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video and answer the questions.



1 How much food is wasted in British households every year?
2 How many homes benefit from the biomethane generated in the Bristol plant?
3 What breaks down food waste to produce biogas?
4 What can biomethane generate?
5 Where is the fuel stored on the Bio-Bus?
6 How much food and sewage waste is necessary for a return journey Bath to Bristol?

Ooh! Hello. Not everything we flush goes to waste. For quite a while now, energy's been produced from sewage, but there is another source of renewable energy that's right under our noses.
Every year, around 7 million tons of food waste is thrown away by households in the UK, and that contains a lot of potential energy. But what happens to our scraps once we throw them in the food waste bin?
The gas-to-grid plant at Bristol sewage works is the first and largest of its kind in the UK. It uses both food waste and sewage to produce enough biomethane to supply 8,300 homes every day. And biomethane is produced by anaerobic digestion. It's a completely natural process. It's very similar to our own digestive system.
Microorganisms break down food waste, and as they do that, they produce biogas. And biogas can be collected and purified, and it turns into biomethane. And biomethane can be used to generate electricity, to generate heat, and it can even be used to fuel vehicles.
This is the GENeco Bio-Bus, and it's powered entirely by biofuel from food and sewage waste stored up on the roof in dome-like tanks. On a full tank of fuel, this bus can travel about 200 miles.
The Bio-Bus is currently doing the Bath to Bristol Airport route. Now, one passenger's annual food and sewage waste should provide just enough energy for my return trip.
The use of the Bio-Bus and other gas-powered vehicles can significantly improve urban air quality.
The Bio-Bus offers the most sustainable, environmentally friendly way of traveling. I really hope it takes off.

Key:
1 7 million tons
2 8,300 every day
3 microorgamisms
4 electricity, heat, and fuel for vehicles
5 in a tank on the roof
6 the waste generated by a person in a year

Utility vs Homeowners Over Solar Power

In Hawaii, where 12 percent of the homes have solar panels, handling the surplus power is putting pressure on the state’s biggest utility, which is fighting to reduce what it pays for the energy.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video and answer the questions below.



1 How long has Joyce been waiting to have solar panels installed?
2 How much does Joyce’s neighbour pay for their electricity bill?
3 What kind of power does the American public want?
4 What problem does the traditional utility circuit power have?
5 How long did Michael John take to have the system installed and running in his home?
6 How much does he pay for electricity in June and July?
7 How much does the maintenance of the power system cost?
8 When will Joyce have her panels finally installed?

I have been waiting three years, three years, to have solar panels installed. My neighbour across has solar panels. The ones that already have solar panels, they just pay $18 a month. I pay 395, almost $400. They say that the grid is full and I have just to wait and so… I’m still waiting.
Hawaiians have some of the highest electric bills in the country, and so they have rushed to install photovoltaic or PV systems on their rooftops, so they can make their own power.
We’re not just talking about saving the planet here. We’re talking about saving the paying from being held hostage by the utility companies. The American public wants solar energy. I don’t care whether they’re in Oklahoma, New York, California or Hawaii. Whatever happens in Hawaii is gonna happen in the main land. It’s just a matter of waiting.
Nationwide, Hawaii is on the forefront of solar adoption, and other states are watching to see how HE Co, Hawaii’s main utility, reimagines its business.
We don’t have the luxury to look at another state and say how was it done there and instead we sort of have to figure out on our own. The traditional utility circuit power starts off at Hilla substation and flows power one way to each home that we serve.
And the challenges the grid was designed to handle the power flowing in one direction but now it’s going back and forth between our customers’ rooftops back into the rest of the grid.
The combined output of all of our rooftop solar systems up the circuit back into our substation feeding into the grid can really potentially bring the entire island’s system out.
Infrastructure upgrades to avoid that worst-case scenario are expensive and HE Co has moved slowly, some critics say too slowly.
What should have been a ninety-day project turned into five, four months to yet completely install, set up and running. And now I make more electricity than I use, usually June and July it’s free, so that was great.
But, of course, if you play the model business out to the end whereby you get full credit for every bit of electricity that you produce, then the utility company doesn’t make any money and they go out of business. And, of course, we don’t have the grid that we can have the solar energy.
Providing basic electric service, power at night, back-up power, all of that PV customers are not paying for fully and instead of being paid for by customers of ours who don’t have PV systems, and right now it’s to the tune of over $50 million.
Hawaiian Electrics wants to cut the rate it pays customers for their solar energy in half so that the solar customers will be paying their fair share of overall service costs.
Now I’m a total abdicate for this because what it does to us it allows the business model play out to the end. The utility companies, their job becomes store the energy, manage it, move it where is need it, let the public create generation facilities by benefitting everybody.
So it’s an extremely interesting time, you know, it creates a lot of burden for us, a lot of pressure. We have some customers who have been waiting for quite some time. We committed to caring 90% of them by April of this year.
I’ve waited, I’ve waited so long but when you say it’s April, and so I’m all excited. I’ll save lots of money, am I correct?

Key:
1 three years
2 $18
3 solar energy
4 the grid was designed to handle the power flowing in one direction
5 five, four months
6 nothing
7 $50m
8 in April

Solar roads: Can streets become giant solar panels?

The sun's rays can hit some roads for up to 90 percent of the daylight hours, so companies in Europe and the U.S. are experimenting with building solar panels along or above roads. But are such projects worth the cost? In France one company is hoping to distinguish itself—and reduce costs—with solar panels that are laid directly on the pavement



There is a project in the United States called Solar Roadways, which consist of concrete slabs including the solar cells plus tampered glass on top of it. There's a quite similar project in the Netherlands called SolaRoad. A section on a cycle pass was built about one year ago but it's large concrete slabs, which mean that in fact you're completely rebuilding a road. Our technology is different in that way that in fact we just placed our solar panels on an existing pavement; it does not require all that amount of preliminary works.
The first idea was generated about ten years ago and it came from the feeling that in fact the road looks of the sky for more that ninety per cent of the time. So during that ninety per cent of time it can collect energy from the sun.
We had very good opportunity to work together with the people at the national institute of solar energy. Their knowledge is photovoltaic technology, our knowledge is how to build roads, and we worked together to find the solution to the several problems we had to face to be able to integrate this technology on top of an existing pavement.
We had pages and pages of questions, what will be the grip on such a surface, which type of material should we use, which ratio between the active solar surface and the road surface, how can we maintain it, how could we recycle, and so on.
We tested several mixes of resins, of glass beads, of broken glass and so on, until we find a good compromise between the grip level and the light absorption.
These solar panels will produce electrical energy and the use will be quite similar to the one you could have with traditional PV panels placed on rooftops. You can either connect them to the global electricity network and in that case you're re-injecting electricity into the network or in case of more isolated locations, you can simply store the electricity in batteries and then use it for example public lightning, or you could even also imagine in a longer term that you could also supply electricity to electrical vehicles, for example either through traditional plugs, or even trough wireless technology such as induction.
The concept of solar road try to face two major problems of development of solar energy. The first problem is the lack of surface to produce enough energy, and the second problem is a problem of cost of the systems.
And when you use a solar road of course you take advantage of large surface of existing roads, so most of the work has been done, and you just have to integrate your component on a road.
I can see two problems with solar roads. The first one comes from the heating of the solar panels, because when the temperature of the panels increases, the efficiency decreases, and the aging process are accelerated.
And the second one is that for the prediction of the solar energy production you will have to integrate the traffic road modeling to be able to predict accurately the electricity production.
Another interesting parameter to look at is the energy payback time, which is the time necessary to produce the same energy that has been use to produce the panels. So it's a real challenge for engineers.

10 questions for Daniel Yergin

Energy expert Daniel Yergin speaks on peak oil, fracking and how to power the U.S. Economy in this Time Magazine interview.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video and say whether the statements below are true or false.



1 Yergin doesn't think the world is running out of oil.
2 Yergin doesn't think we should be careful with energy resources.
3 The Japanese are planning to turn towards nuclear energy again.
4 As people live longer and longer, that means that oil consumption is going to increase in US.
5 The Chinese buy more cars than the Americans.
6 Yergin is in favour of the shale gas industry.
7 The US very much depends on coal.
8 Yergin seems optimistic about a growing awareness towards energy consumption and preservation.

Daniel Yergin is an energy expert and economic expert, an international relations expert, a Pulitzer prize winner, the author of many books and today’s subject of our Ten Questions. Welcome, Mr Yergin.

Thank you.

In your new book, The Quest, you don’t seem that worried about the world running out of oil. Can you explain why?

Because I don’t think the world is running out of oil. It turns out that when you apply technology the resources that were not accessible or were not economic, as times goes on people crack the code and, and add to the supplies. With that said it’s not we’re saying the resources there, there’s still a lot of things to worry about above ground.

How are you feeling about the story around nuclear energy?

I think Fukushina has definitely changed the nuclear story. Prior to that, people were talking about a nuclear renaissance, the Japanese themselves were talking about going to 50% of their electricity from nuclear, they’re now saying we’re going to have a different kind of mix, going to look for more renewable, other alternatives. We’ll use more gas to generate electricity.

What do you see for our cause down the future?

Well, people talk about peak oil, that we’re gonna run out of oil. But actually I think that in the United States we’ve run into what we might call peak demand. We’ve had the high point of oil consumption, and our oil consumption’s gonna go down. It’s gonna go down because we drive more efficient cars, people are not gonna continue to drive more and more miles. It’s gonna go down because of demographics, because the population is ageing and they drive less. And also we had a big surge in the United States of driving as women entered the labour force, not they’re at the same level as men, so…

A little higher in some cases.

Yeah.

Yeah. But, on the other hand, as you point out in your book all those Indians and Chinese are gonna start driving.

China now consumes more energy than the United States, and it’s really astonishing to see what’s happened in automobiles. In 2000, there were 17m cars sold in the United States and just about 2m in China. Last year, there were 17m cars sold in China and 11m in the United States.

The government gave a $500-m loan guarantee to the company that makes solar panels that went out of business very shortly afterwards. Can we have a manufacturing industry within the United States that can make these things economically compared to, say how cheaply they can make them in China?

For the solar panel manufacturers, they’re competing with Chinese manufacturers who are very driven to drive costs down. The leading solar company a few years ago was in Germany. It really has just been knocked on its back now by the Chinese who are big beneficiaries of German renewable energy legislation. So… but this is a part of a larger picture of how we compete and on what basis we compete.

There’s a lot of promise and controversy around shale gas. What do you think needs to be done so that we can extract the gas in shale and protect the border?

Well, it’s gone from being virtually nothing a decade ago to being 30% of our natural gas production in this country. It’s a major part of our energy mix. It’s developed rapidly, brings us a lot of energy security, and were we not doing shale gas, we would be we would be spending tens and tens of billions of dollars to import liquefied natural gas. And by the way, this also has creates several hundred thousand jobs at a time when jobs is the number one economic issue in the country. But, with that said, you know, it has to be done in an environmentally sound way, and the public has to be convinced of that.

Could there be a lot of green jobs, or is that a…?

The thing is we have a really big complex energy system that sits underneath our -$14 trillion economy. It doesn’t change overnight, so there are green jobs and people have them but I don’t think they’ve been as plentiful as had been expected and it really depends upon  the pace at which renewables themselves grow.

I come from a country that loves its coal, loves it coal and has built a super duper cappuccino fueled economy totally pretty much on coal. Is there a danger with building an economy totally on a sort of a fuel sort.

Yes, we, your… Australia is also, of course, now that they’ve built it internally, but Australia’s economic growth and the strength of the Australian currency is related to the exports of coal and these other raw materials…

Uranium.

I mean, so much of what’s happening in the world economy now is really being set by what’s happening in China. 20m people a year are moving into cities, and these cities are coming from nowhere, and they’re the biggest cities in the world. When you see what’s happened with the price of oil, often now it will move in terms of what’s the latest manufacturing data from China.

Do you get really annoyed when you see people doing really energy wasteful things?

People say, well we waste energy and obviously we can look around and find it. But what strikes me when you look in the last 30 years what’s happened is we’ve become twice as energy efficient as we were in the 1970’s. If you go in the campus in Massachusetts Institute of Technology five or six years ago, there was not an Energy Club. Now there’s an Energy Club and it has several thousand students in it so, kind of this…

I bet that’s the party scene. The Energy Club, MIT.

They go…

Pushing the ladies away.

They go way past nine o’clock at night, I bet. It’s that wild.

Ok. Great. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Key:
1T 2F 3F 4F 5T 6T 7F 8T

A city shaped by steam

With more than 100 miles of steam piping and nearly 2,000 buildings served, New York’s steam system is the largest in the world.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video and say whether the statements below are true or false. The activity is suitable for advanced students.



1 Half a million citizens use steam.
2 Using steam as a source of energy means that chimneys are not necessary.
3 New York´s steam system is the largest in the world.
4 All of Manhattan uses steam as a source of energy.
5 Steam can be used both in winter and in summer.
6 The steam system went underground after the bad weather in 1898.
7 The steam pipe at 32 Gramercy Park South exploded because of the works that had been carried out in front of the building.
8 Steam is more environmentally-friendly than standard electricity.

Currently of the 105 miles of steam piping, there’s almost 2,000 buildings that utilise steam. The largest 300 buildings are over half a million square feet.
Had it not been for the steam system, the postcard skyline that you see of Manhattan would be totally different. You´d be looking at every one of these high risers with some type of chimney coming out it.
When you go to a restaurant, the dishwasher that cleans the dishes it’s powered by New York City´s steam. When you go to a hospital, the air is humidified with district steam.
Steam allows us to very closely moderate the relative humidity in the gallery, both for the long-term preservation of our own collection and for the preservation of works that are entrusted to us on loan.
We’re doing a few of our cheese-making steps, we have actually have our curd, we’re going to heat that up to 100 degrees, and so we’ll use the steam to set it through jackets and circulate it through our vats right here and heat up the product.
One of the uniqueness about New York´s steam system is that it’s the largest in the world. If you took the next nine steam systems and added them together, New York´s steam system is still the largest.
We have a pretty active complex here. We produce steam and electric to, I’d say, 55% of all steam in Manhattan. It´s all through that technology of these big boilers heat up the steam and then that steam gets distributed outside of the plant, with these big, big pipes, and then it traverses out of the plant and down underneath the streets of Manhattan.
Alright, so here, so we’ll give you a quick tour of what the steam lines do. So in here now it’s about 90º, it´s about 90% humidity. This is a typical steam room. We´ve got steam flowing over here, it´s messy business. Con Ed comes in, comes in over here, it comes across all these meters, these are the Con Ed steam meters and it comes in a feed this header over here, so all the steam for the entire facility gets brought to this header and fed out to all the different places.
That steam has a lot of energy. And it goes in infrastructure and it rises up through the building and then gets distributed to individual rooms throughout the building for heating, for cooling and air-conditioning.
Since instead of driving a motor on an air-conditioner with electricity you can use steam, so steam actually offsets a lot of the electric demands in the summer by providing cooling power to these buildings.
New York City´s first steam system was built by Wallace Andrews. In 1881 a plant opened up and within four years they had over 350 customers in place in Lower Manhattan, which was incredibly successful. But then after the blizzard in 1888 which essentially destroyed all the above-ground wiring, they finally agreed to an underground system. As they lay the electricity cables, they lay the steam pipe down and they essentially built New York City around electricity and steam coming into all the large commercial and residential buildings, starting in Lower Manhattan and then as Midtown was built in the earlier part of the 20th century, they built steam and electricity coming into the basement of each of the buildings. The New York City´s steam system by the 1920´s and 30´s fed 2500 locations and reached over 100,000 commercial and residential buildings.
We really apply a lot of really neat sciences to a huge of steam now compared to in the past. In the past, it wasn´t as efficient as it is now. Right now we monitor a ton of parameters that are… that can create mortal havoc in that steam.
My wife and I were in our apartment which was on the 3rd floor of 32 Gramercy Park South, and the building started to vibrate, there was an incredibly loud roaring noise and then somebody figured it out that the steam pipe that had been worked on in front of the building had exploded.
What happens when steam hits cold water is that it collapses at an incredibly high rate, and creates a hydraulic shock called water hammer, and that is the force that blew apart the line and then it sent asbestos and created the incident down in Gramercy.
I came through and came through Grand Central Station and as I looked south I heard this huge noise and saw all sort of chaos.
2007 was again an anomaly in the, both these incidents are, you know, unique over the last 100+ years. They’ve changed pretty much every aspect that had any sort of contributing factor to that.
Steam is throughout the city and is used for just a tremendous amount of reasons. NYU has the largest private land … facility in Manhattan right now. The first year of savings was around  $5m, so there was an immediate savings by producing our own power. The environmental benefit, because the plant is much more efficient and much greener were tremendous as well, over 30% of reduction in emissions. For sustainability and environmental reasons and also resiliency reasons, having onsite smaller co-generation plants around the city makes us a greener city, makes us a more resilient city.
We´re using engineering to make a more comfortable life for people in our society. If we pretend that we are in some bizarre parallel universe and the New York City’s steam system was never built, it would be a different city than it is right now.

Key:
1F 2T 3T 4F 5T 6F 7T 8T

Inside some of the UKs most eco friendly homes

In the UK and throughout much of Western Europe, housing alone generates more than a quarter of all CO2 emissions. So builders and architects in Chichester are embracing new technology to make houses both greener and more attractive to buyers.

Self-study activity:
Watch this short video clip and answer the questions below.



1 How many sustainable homes will be built?
2 Where do the homes get hot water from?
3 What was Graylingwell originally?
4 What are the economic benefits for homeowners?

These sustainable homes may not look so different but the carefully selected systems and appliances combine to minimize emissions. (1) Over 800 will be built in and around the solid red brick buildings of an abandoned hospital. Developers Linden Homes work with social housing providers Affinity Sutton and the UK Homes and Communities Agency.
The site’s CO2 saving secret is that every home gets hot water fed (2) from the landmark tower in the middle. Emissions are minimized in each home and further offset around the entire development.
We try to tailor it so that, um, so that the technology we use – it is a direct benefit and it’s not something which is purely, um, giving us that zero carbon credential but not necessarily something that the customer would notice or…or be a direct reason to buy a property here at Graylingwell. (3) This site was originally a hospital. So that, this is the original water tower that supplied the-the water to the hospital. Uh, we’ve now utilized it as the-the chimneys for the, uh, energy center.
Well I’ve come right into the energy center and this is the old idea of district heating brought up to date. And this is…all people will have in their homes. It runs on hot water, where you control your central heating and hot water for your baths and taps. It’s powered by these vast boilers, I mean, like you’d have in your home only very much bigger. The hot water runs through these pipes and pumps here to this accumulator tank. Uh, there’s room for even more of these and more plant here which, eventually, will allow this entire area to generate electricity which can be sent back to the grid.
And (4) homeowners get lower monthly bills. The house holds its heat extremely well so there’s not much concern to have the central heating on and the hot water supply is consistent at a safe temperature and a good pressure, too.
Until now it’s all regulation which has forced most of the climate saving measures but sites like this show that eco-friendly homes be cost effective.
Nigel Cassidy, BBC News on Britain’s South Coast.

Germanys Offshore Wind Push

The small German island of Heligoland, a popular tourist destination, is undergoing dramatic change as the wind industry takes over.

Self-study activity:
Watch this New York Times video and say whether the statements below are true or false.



1 When the mega watt project is finished, the power it will generate will reach 300,000 people.
2 The turbines are 200 metres high, without considering the blades.
3 The energiewende is a European energy project.
4 The energiewende project involves a group of renewable energies.
5 It is more difficult to build off-shore water farms in Germany than in the UK.
6 No tourists are admitted at the hotel where the wind farm workers are staying.
7 With the massive use of wind energy, coal consumption in Germany is on the decline.
8 One of the reasons for the delays in building the farms is unexploded bombs.


When I was the first time in the turbine I see nothing else, water. You are alone and for the first time just a little bit you think, what I’ m doing here?
This offshore wind with all its investment is a kind of Germany’s moon landing.
… are spending around a billion euros in constructing these 295 mega watt project, enough to power 300,000 homes, so yeah, it’s a big revolution in Europe right now.
Off the coast in Northern Germany, in the frigid waters of the wind lashed North Sea, a vast array of massive wind turbines is being constructed to feed the booming German economy.
These machines are huge and they are, you know, 100 metres up high and the tip pipe that means up to the blade tip is 150 up to 200 metres. This is big.
Well off shore is actually part of the so-called energiewende, the energy change into renewables, and the German politics decide[d] a couple of years ago to really go full force into off-shore and so since then ten, eleven projects emerged in the German bay, they are all in sorts of different stages and they’re about to be completed now within the next couple of months to actually produce energy to support this energiewende.
The energiewende, or energy transition is arguably the most ambitious national effort to combat global warming on the planet. It involves not just off-shore wind, but also on-shore wind, as well as solar, bio-gas and other renewable sources. While it’s still in its early stages, the German energy transformation has made impressive advances. In the first quarter of 2014 renewable energy sources contributed 27% of the country’s electricity demand, more than double the US number. This figure is expected to grow as the wind farms being installed here go online this year.
It’s really a massive deal. All of the wind farms have been built but the specialty in German is here, is it’s water depths.  In Denmark and UK you have off-shore wind farms up to water depth of 10 meters. Here is German North Sea you have the water depths of 25, 26 meters this was really the challenge to build a wind farm that can adapt to that water depth, of course to much harsher environment like the wind and waves.
This massive effort is transforming not just the German energy sector but also many aspects of German life.

Here on the small island of Heligoland, 29 miles off the coast, the off-shore wind industry has virtually taken over this popular vacation spot.
Off-shore wind industry is really our base harbour for maintenance and production of wind farm. We have at the moment here 150 to 200 people on the island to assemble the wind farm, there has been a massive change on the island. We built a big facility here, a storage area. We rented here a hotel and its 49 hotel rooms in total or 80 beds for the next ten years. This island is so small there was no space to build up a new accommodation. We decided just to rent a complete hotel for the next 10 years.
Some have welcomed the changes.
Of all the stores better because we have a lot of work here so more work, more personnel, more jobs.
Others, not so much.
For the workers who have come here all over Germany and Europe, the wind farms offer opportunity.
I start[ed] last year in October in the wind industry and it’s very safe. There you can earn more money. Then I’ll say that is what I want. I have a wife, children, we have a good life, you can go out for dinner, not for one time in a week maybe for two or three times in a week.
But for all its success, the transition to renewables has not gone entirely smoothly for Germany. Coal production has soared and the country’s electricity sector has difficulty turning a profit with the massive influx of renewable energy into the German grid. In the case of off-shore wind, the clean-up of the sea bed from unexploded World War II ordnance has added significantly to the cost. And construction of the on-land grid connection where the wind farms will send their energy was delayed, leaving hundreds of tons of unassembled turbines to idle on the docks in the port of Bremerhave.
Despite the setback, when these wind turbines are finally running, they will together produce enough electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes.
It’s all awesome, it’s hard, sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s easier, a little bit of adventure, rural freedom, everything of what you want this year you can have.


Key:
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We Welcome Nuclear Waste

Some people in Loving County, Texas, the second least populous county in the United States, think that storing the entire country’s nuclear waste would be a good thing for their community.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video and say whether the statements below are true or false.



1 There are no petrol stations in the area.
2 The fuel stored in the casks will generate power for all the US states.
3 The nuclear plant or facility will bring a tax cut for residents.
4 Everybody in Loving County supports the idea.
5 The best way to store the fuel is underground, according to recent studies.
6 Loving County is half the size of New York.
7 Some residents would rather the facility was installed in the neighbouring counties.
8 The decision about how and where to install the plant is imminent.

We got two taco stands. No café, no store. We got a gas station. You’re not going to see a whole lot of anything, but mesquite bushes and some run-down stuff, that’s about it. The nuclear waste plant or facility, I’m 100% for it if they do it the right way.
Welcome to Loving County in West Texas. According to the last census estimate, it’s the second least populous county in the United States. With 95 residents, the local government is proposing something unusual. It wants nuclear waste from power plants across the country to be stored here. The highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel stored in casks like these was once used to generate power.
With the money that this will generate for the county, we might even be able to pay the tax payers back.  We can build some roads, we can bring in some more water and maybe even have a Wallmart.
Skeet Jones who heads the county government here is trying to gather support for the idea because it would mean hundreds of millions of dollars from the Federal Government to the state and the county. But there’s one person whom he just can’t seem to convince: his father.
It’s going to be a problem and some, some people are going to get hurt. Whatever that thing is at, is there, that’s where they should put their storage. They shouldn’t be dumping it out here on some place where there’s not many people because I know they’re gonna have some accidents.
Whenever you say nuclear waste, a big red flag goes up. And everybody throws up their hands and say oooh, no! Whenever a person really researches it and studies it, this fuel is not that dangerous.
Experts say that if stored carefully above ground, the casks would likely be safe for several hundred years, impervious to earthquakes.
The county is about twice the size of New York City and the proposed storage site is about 400 acres, about half the size of Central Park. Two other counties may be positioning themselves to accept the waste: Eddy and Lea Counties are just across the state line.
So what do you think about the used nuclear fuel interim storage coming in here?
Well, I’d put it here.
Wow, that’s what I say.
His uncle agrees with him.
If it’s going to be right across the land in New Mexico, if we turn it down and they put it right across the land, why not put it here and reap the benefits of it, because we’re going to be in the same situation with it across the land.
A decision on how and where to store the waste may be years away. In the meantime Skeet’s parents wonder what it can mean for their family if Loving is chosen.
I think it’s dangerous.
I’m 83 and he’s 86 and we’re not long for this world, and after we’re gone, who knows? I worry about my children and my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, what they’ll have to put up with.

Key:
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CNN explains fracking

CNN explains fracking to us.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video and say whether the statements below are true or false.

The activity is suitable for intermediate students.



1 The traditional drilling for oil and gas and the new technique of fracking do not differ very much.
2 Fracking involves breaking the rock.
3 US is the leading country in the world as far as fracking goes.
4 US has abundant amounts of oil and gas if compared to other countries.
5 US laws allow fracking in the same places as traditional drilling.
6 Fracking companies use air to push fluid down into the rocks and fracture them.
7 Fracking companies are reluctant to explain their technique.
8 Fracking is safe as far as pollution goes.
9 Fracking is synonimous with money.


One of the things that oil companies and gas companies and geologists always kind of knew is that there were pockets of oil and natural gas under big rock formations, big layers of rock that you couldn’t get at by drilling straight down, so this process involves drilling horizontally.
Fracking gets its name from hydraulic fracturing. And what that means? Hydraulic, they are using water and a lot of chemicals and some sand and other things and they fracture the rock by pushing it out at a very high speed. That fractures the rock and releases the oil and the natural gas.
About 87% of the fracking that was done last year worldwide was done in North America. The Bakken Shale which is out in North Dakota, you have the Marcellus Shale, which spreads through New York and Pennsylvania, so that’s the kind of rock, shale, that you find these oil and gas pockets underneath.
The US doesn't have that much oil or gas if you look at it compared to the rest of the world. And also, remember there are a lot of places in the US where you can't drill for oil and gas: the governement only allows it in some places so they allow fracking in different places that they do, say, traditional drilling. It is also and can be less expensive to frack for natural gas in, say, Pennsylvania, than it is to drill for oil off the coast of Louisiana.
This is the image that people know about fracking, right? A drinking water tap catching on fire. That happens when you have methane in the drinking water. So what you hear from advocates, environmentalists or those who live near there is that the drinking water is contaminated either because there is natural gas in it or because there’s chemicals that is… that are being used to kind of push the fluid down into the rock, fracture it and it could seep into ground water.
A lot of these chemicals are dangeours. We don't quite know exactly what’s in it because nobody requires the companies to say exactly what's in it and they say that if they told us the secret ingredients, that would put their business model at risk.
This is the central debate about fracking : whether or not things get in the ground water. The companies who do this say, no, it's completely safe largely because there’s space, there’s a lot of rock in between the fracking operations and drinking water, be it wells or reservoirs.
Fracking can bring a lot of money, a lot of development and a lot of jobs to an area that didn't have that option. So there are places in Pennsylvania, there are places in North Dakota that because of fracking have put a lot of their residents to work. Then also you have these companies who pay home owners to be able to drill on their land so they make money out of it too.

Key:
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Germany’s coal mine 'ghost town'

Chancellor Angela Merkel has massively reduced Germany's dependence on nuclear power, but other forms of energy have had to be used more extensively to fill the deficit.

Self-study activity:
Watch this short BBC clip and answer the questions below about it.

The activity is suitable for intermediate students.



1 What has happened to the cemetery in Immerath?
2 What source of energy has replaced nuclear energy in the last two years?
3 What result has Angela Merkel's energy policy had for consumers?
4  Where are the people standing in the new village built to replace Immerath?
5 What is the percentage of wealthy people in Germany?

To check your answers, you can read the transcript below.

Welcome to Immerath, or rather, what remains of it: A ghost town, where the streets have no life, where most of the graves in the cemetery have been dug up and moved elsewhere, moved because Immerath is to be destroyed to make way for a coal mine, itself the size of a small town.
When Angela Merkel abandoned nuclear energy two years ago she said renewable fuels would fill the gap. One day they should, but for now coal is still needed.
Angela Merkel has led a massive push in Germany to get it using more solar power and wind power, and yet her critics say her energy policy is a mess that has resulted only in higher energy prices for consumers across Germany, a country that is still dependent on coal.
A lot of windmills around here…
Green energy revolution has cost a fortune in subsidies, costs that are passed on to energy consumers like Georg. Will that affect how he votes?
All the persons who will need energy have to pay much more for the energy because of the change.
What do you think overall about the way Germany has been run at the moment?
It’s a good life, yeah.
People are happy, they want to continue with all they have?
Yeah. And therefore I think if you see the election, it wouldn’t change because they have no reasons.
In the village built to house those expelled to make way for the coal mine, they were blessing the ground where one day the new church will stand. Most are now positive about the move. Some, however, are less optimistic about their country.
They don’t care anymore, so in a lot of people are not choose not to go for vote, which I find this very…  it’s a pity.
At the moment in Germany only a minority is wealthy, more and more people are becoming poor, and that’s building up problems for the country. Put simply, people won’t be able to survive on the minimum wage or on their pensions.
Back in abandoned Immerath, a solitary Angela Merkel poster hangs outside the old church. She’s likely to win this election, even though here there is no one to vote for her.

Matthew Price, BBC News, Immerath.

Alternative energy in American town

The first commercial tidal energy project in North America is in its last test phase.

Self-study activity:
Watch this AlJazeera English news clip and say whether the statements below are true or false.

The activity is suitable for Intermedio 2 students.



1 Money was the reason why the project failed in the past.
2 The new energy project is being built on the beach.
3 The project uses the power of water above the surface of the water to create energy.
4 The turbines look like airplanes.
5 At the moment 1,200 homes get power from the turbines.
6 The project doesn't receive any subsidies from the administration.
7 By 2020 the project will be economically viable.
8 It has been proved that the environment does not suffer with this type of energy.
9 Alice Cates’ family arrived in the area in the 1970's.
10 A hundred people have got a job thanks to this project.

You can read the transcript and check the answers below.

Trying to capture the power of the sea to light the shore. It was tried here 75 years ago by President Franklin D Roosevelt but the massive construction project in Eastport Maine failed early, after running way over budget.
Decades later there’s a new high tech approach. A 20 minute boat ride from Eastport, the first cimmercial tidal energy project in North America is in its final test phase. The tides here are huge, more than six meters in height.
We’re on an anchored barge at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. Now, it has the largest tidal movement of anywhere in the world. This is what it looks like when the tide is going out. Now, this project uses turbines below the surface of the water, harnessing this power and converting it into electricity.
The turbines are engineered so that they will always turn in the same way, whether the tide is rolling in or out. They are made from racing boat material and are shaped like airplane wings. The turbines power a generator creating electricity. Cables carry it on shore and directly into the power grid. In three years they hope to power 1200 homes.
Believe it or not there’s one moving part in this.
Chris Sauer says he can see light at the end of the tunnel for his startup company but there’s work ahead before profits will be made. Offsetting the 21 million dollar startup cost, 10 million came from the department of energy.
We are not economically viable yet, by 2020 we are gonna be we believe competitive with any new sources of power and that includes fossil fuels.
And other questions still have to be answered. The long term repercussions of the project are being studied, including the impact on marine life.
We need to look at the environmental effect and know how much energy we can get out of it. Then we can have the conversation with the community and as a society about whether we’re gonna develop this resource.
As for the economic impact, Eastport has seen better times and is hoping to feel the benefit. Alice Cates’ family arrived in the 1700s.
When I grew up we had 13 canneries along the waterfront here. We couldn’t get down the sidewalk on a Friday night.
But the local seafood industry collapsed, businesses left town and many residents went with them. Now this project is employing a hundred people so far.
One job here’s a lot of jobs. It really is and it’s been... they’ve been extremely good and it isn’t just in this community, it’s Lubec and it’s all over... I think 13 of the 16 Maine counties have some supply econnection into this company.
So once again Eastport looks to the sea for a lifeline, hoping to avoid the disappointment of seven decades ago and become a center for alternative energy.

Key:
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Energy in Iceland

Self-study activity:
Watch this video from the OUP YouTube video channel and answer the questions below.



a Roughly, what percentage of the population of Iceland lives in the capital?
b How often do the geysers erupt?
c How much power can the Nesjavellir geothermal plant produce?
d What are the two ways that the switch to geothermal power helped Iceland?
e What two things still use oil in Iceland?

You can read the transcript here.

Key:

a 62.5% b every few minutes c up to 120 megawatts per second d cut fuel bills by $8 billion and carbon emissions by 37% e the majority of cars and the fishing fleet