| The World Energy Production and Consumption |
| Here |
Today we use about 90 Gboe energy a year ,mainly as Oil, Coal, Gas, Bio, Hyrdo Nuclear (90,000,000,000 barrels of oil a year when everything is converted to oil). That corresponds to about 240,000,000 boe per day and only one third of that is actually crude oil or about 80 million barrels a day. BP publishes the annual raw data in downloadable Excel format. You can also play interactive statistics since 1850 by using a Java model at "Quaker Economist". The statistics are excellent and their simplified model works just fine. However, be careful if you use the model results as without real facts as input the result will be just another classical example of: "garbage in - garbage out".
For most people renewable energy is already an important energy provider for the world. Taking the Bio energy (wood) and hydro out makes the energy production of the remaining renewables just a mirage brought up ny the totally ignorant news media. As of 2008 these renewables hardly even show up in global energy supply statistics. Only the Wind energy is there as a tiny blip. The others Solar, Wave, Tide, etc., do not impact these statistics at all.
To make these renewables more important we must have means to store huge amounts of energy both overnight and over the calm wind and ocean conditions. The technology for this is about the same we need for the electric car. We know that it can be done but there are still hurdles on the way. The charging of these batteries must be short for automobiles to become practical, while the discharging time must be short for the utility power sector. We have already clumsy solutions like switching the batteries at "gas" stations but not yet anything on a fully proven commercial. That means we have functional prototype batteries for both but we do not know how many charges or how long they will last in real commercial duty.
"Free" energy forever - that is the promise of a fusion reactor like our Sun
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionize our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.
Two beams of subatomic particles called 'hadrons' – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyze the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC.
There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions, but what's for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator, as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe. For decades, the Standard Model of particle physics has served physicists well as a means of understanding the fundamental laws of Nature, but it does not tell the whole story. Only experimental data using the higher energies reached by the LHC can push knowledge forward, challenging those who seek confirmation of established knowledge, and those who dare to dream beyond the paradigm.