Fossil energy amount

Today ethanol and biodiesel (FAME) are the most common biofuels. Alternative fuels from fossil energy sources are mainly LPG and CNG. Synthetic gasoline and diesel from coal (CTL) and natural gas (GTL) are produced mainly in South Africa. Electricity used in battery-electric vehicles plays a minor role today. The fuel consumption for road transport in the world today amounts to about 65 700 PJ per year (IEA, 2006a) in total, the share of alternative fuels for transport at the time of writing was about 2.7% (Table 7.24). 

It should be marked that value of individual RES also depends on the amount of fossil fuel that can be replaced by them. Power produced by hydroelectric plants, WPPs, PV units replaces almost three times bigger amount of fossil energy necessary for the generation of the same amount of power. In 2030... 

A study by the University of Miami s Clean Energy Research Institute estimated that the environmental costs of burning fossil fuels amounted to about 2.3 trillion for 1990—equivalent to about 460 for every man, woman, and child on the planet. For the United States, the researchers said this was equivalent to adding roughly 1 to each gallon of gasoline in real costs.17... 

How much carbon can the ocean sequester At over 70% of the Earth s surface and an average depth of 3800 m, the ocean has enormous storage capacity based on physical chemistry, the amount of CO2 that could be dissolved in the deep ocean far exceeds the estimated available fossil energy resources of 5000-lOOOOGtC. However, a more realistic criterion needs to be based on an understanding of ocean biogeochemistry and expected environmental impact. 

Typically, conversion to organic farming leads to a lower total fossil energy use. However, organic farming practices also result in a lower amount of production per area of agricultural land, a different product quality, and eventually another product price than per unit of similar conventional products. 

In the third method, the land need for fossil energy is estimated by the area needed to compensate the amount of energy burned from fossil fuels with renewable resources at the same rate at which the fossil energy is depleted. For instance, forests with the same energy content as the burned fossil fuels have to be planted. According to this philosophy, the energy contained in the earth should not decrease. 

Economic studies on the production of biobutanol from corn determined that distillation recovery of butanol from the dilute ABE fermentation broth is not economical comparing to the butanol production from the current petrochemical route (Ezeji et al., 2007c). However, the life-cycle analysis on the corn-based butanol production indicated that the use of corn-based butanol as a biofuel can lead to substantial fossil energy savings relative to the use of conventional petroleum gasoline, and it can also avoid a large amount of GHG emission burdens (Wu et al., 2008). 

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