Hello, I'm Dr. Sam Shelton and this is Energy 101.
What I'm going to do today at the first module is to give you an overview of what
we're going to talk about in this class. that's covering the basics of energy.
We'll look at the topics and the discussions that we're going to have.
Hopefully when you, when we're covering one topic and you say gee he didn't
answer such and such a question that you'll know from the topics that I'll be
talking about it later. So let's let's just see why.
Why we're interested in energy here first, and w-, how I cho-, chose the
topics, in order to try to interpret what's going on in energy in the US in
particular today. it's, energy is in the news a lot, almo-,
hardly a day goes by there's not some article.
And in front of any newspaper that you want to pick up, or online edition that
you see that doesn't have an article on energy.
gasoline is approaching four dollars a gallon.
It's bouncing around. Down to the mid three dollars up to four
dollars. that obviously is used, so that hurts
everybody's pocketbook, means they don't have money to spend on something else.
we have the revolutions going on in the Middle East, with dictators and
governments being overthrown, and riots in the street, and total destruction of
cities and infrastructure. And we had the.
Fukushima nuclear power meltdown. What does that mean? Does that mean
that's the end of nuclear power and when we look at that closely we say there's no
reason we need to build nuclear power with the kind of risk we're talking about
here. not only from the safety risk viewpoint
but from a financial risk 'cuz because when you're talking about $10 billion or
so for a nuclear plant, that's a substantial economic hit when you lose a
nuclear plant. Shale gas you heard that shale gas will
give us energy independence. Is that true or not.
We'll talk about that and like we saw with the advent of electric cars that
have come out in the last year or two. That electric cars solves our global
warming issue from an automobile viewpoint because they have zero
emissions, co2 emissions. We'll talk about that and find out that
actually is not quite true when we look at, look at that further.
And, the, I'll be presenting a lot of data and a lot of facts that
then lead to conclusions. I don't like before my comments to be the
thought of as opinions to be fact based. I like the old saying that I base my
opinion on facts. And if the facts change, I'll change my
opinion. What do you base your opinion on? So,
don't get too bored with the facts, but try to interpret them in the context of
what it all means when you are looking at questions that come up about oil
independence, energy independence global warming, climate change.
revolutions in the Middle East, oil imports, etc., etc.
So, why is energy so, of such interest to us?
Why is it on the front page every time, every day? Well these are the driving
issues in energy, the reason that we all get so interested in it.
number one we have dollars flowing out of the U.S.
for imported fuels and it's about one billion dollars a day.
That's 1 billion dollars a day flowing out of the US for essentially oil.
It's where you'll find that it's an oil issue and it's not a coal and natural
gas, but it's oil. So, that obviously is an economic issue.
When you have a, it's responsible for half of our balance of payments deficit
that we are running every year, so that's about $400 billion a year that we're,
we're shipping out of this, US, in order to import oil in particular.
National security. We learned about the national security of
depending on certain regions, of the world for oil back in the 70s
when, when OPEC nations in the Middle East didn't like our politics toward and
international stance toward Israel. And they cut off our oil supplies, for
imported oil supplies. And having lived through that era, as a
matter of fact that's when I got into energy, it was a very difficult time,
and we could talk on and on about that issue.
And of course from a security issue, certainly, if we ever get into a war and
that happens to us somebody decides that's a substantial supplier to us to
cut off their oil supplies to us it'll have a great national ins-, security
issue. And finite or, resources, what are,
what's the situation there? You know, we talk about running out of oil.
Are we in danger of running out of oil and if we do obviously we got some
serious problems there. We've got environmental issues that are
mentioned briefly. We got air, air pollution, ground
pollution, climate change, and water issues.
There's a big linkage between water consumption and availability and energy
as we'll learn later on. So, those is the reasons that we're so
interested in energy. This tends to be on our political radar
almost every day. so, just running through some of the
topics in a broad way, we we'll talk about energy and society.
Where we use energy and why we use it, energy and economy, the linkage there,
we'll talk about energy supply type and source, what types of energy do we use
and where do they come from, we'll talk about the pricing of energy, we'll talk
about renewable sources for energy. Ethanol is a renewable source.
wind is renewable. Solar and ocean energy.
We're not getting this, any energies, essentially, from ocean, at this point.
But, ethanol, wind, and solar are sup-, beginning to supply a some energy that
makes some different. We'll look at the physical laws of
energy. What are the limitations that, that laws
of nature put on us about what technologies can we explore and what is
possible and not possible. We'll look at electric power
technologies. When we need all the Power we use for
various things, from lighting, to electric motors, to computers.
where do we get that electricity from, and what's the technologies to produce
that electricity, and wh-, what's the fuel source? Transportation technologies,
that's Mainly oil oriented.
We use most of our oil for transportation.
And then energy efficiencies. Lots of ways we can reduce our energy
consumption by using that energy more efficiently.
So we'll hit that topic also. So, those are some of the topics that
we'll cover in a broad sweep manner. some of conclusions we'll reach, just to
tease you a little bit, is that is that energy use is coupled tight, tightly
coupled to the economy, it's linked. How much energy is coupled to the
economy. If we improve the economy, the energy
consumption goes up. National security is linked to oil
imports specifically. oil is not saved, this might surprise
some people. Oil is not saved by wind energy, solar
energy or nuclear energy. We'll find out why, but just in a
nutshell, it's because we don't use any oil to produce electricity, and all of
those technologies produce electricity. We'll get into that more as we move
through. Electric cars it turns out, do not reduce
CO2 emissions and that's because they may not come out of the tailpipe of the car,
but they get electricity from the grid. That electricity has to be generated back
at the plant, and CO2 emissions occur there.
there are lots of long term options to change that, but for the next 10 or 20
years, that's just the reality. And finally, there's no silver bullet for
an energy solution. So we've got to take a look at all of
these technologies, and all the options, in order to figure out what the best
energy policy should be and develop an energy policy that works.
So that's the, that's the big overview of what we'll be talking about, and I hope
you find it interesting and stay with us. Thank you.