Hello. Welcome back to Energy 101.
Today we're going to be talking about carbon dioxide, C, carbon emissions.
And carbon is obviously a hot topic regarding global warming and climate
change. And is dominantly energy-related.
So far we've covered a lot of fundamentals about energy, our energy system, how we,
society uses energy, how we get, where we get that natural energy from.
And then, the conversion processes that we use to convert it from the natural energy
forms that nature provides it to us into, into the form that society wants it and in
order to use it usefully. Like heat or heating our homes and air
conditioning and electricity and so on and so forth, that we've talked about.
But the topic that, that really almost dominates this point, everything else is
climate change issues, and which, as I've said, is essentially totally linked to
energy and fossil fuels. So lets take a look quickly at that the
global warming gases that cause the atmosphere to, to change the amount of
great solar radiation that is transmitted through the atmosphere is CO2, and, but
it's not the only gas. The other gas that's dominant in, in
producing global warming in our atmosphere and climate is methane, which as we've
said, originally, methane is used interchangeably with natural gas.
Methane is a carbon, hydrocarbon atom CH4, 4 hydrogens and 1 carbon that we've talked
about before and some 98% of opinion on where you get the natural gas from is made
up of methane. And then there's some other stray gases
with the, the 98% methane. But methane and natural gas are
essentially used interchangeably. The other one is nitric oxide, NOx.
Nox is produced when we have combustion that produces high flame temperatures.
And the reason the NOx is produced, the, there's no nitrogen in the fuel, but
there's nitrogen in the air that we have to put into our combustion process to get
the oxygen. And the nitrogen that's in there, about
88%, 89% percent of our atmosphere is nitrogen gets heated up.
And that nitrogen is there present with the oxygen, approximately 20% excuse me.
Yes, approximately 20% oxygen and that gets formed with nitrogen.
I said that nitrogen makes up 88, 89%, that should have been 88, 89, excuse me,
78, 79%. So, the high temperature causes some of
the nitrogen to react with the oxygen, even though, that's not the whole purpose
of the combustion process, but it just happens almost unavoidably.
And then, the other gas that produces global warming and climate change effects
is, are refrigerants. Refrigerants that we use in our
refrigerators, that we use in our air conditioning systems and that's had a long
history. Originally, in the 90s had concern about
refrigerants commonly called freons that, which was a brand name of DuPont that has
quit been utilizing that name because of, of the depletion of the high, high
atmosphere, high altitude ozone, and, the ozone is there and absorbs solar
radiation. If we get rid of the ozone, which are
refrigerants that are released into the air do, get kill some of the ozone, then
that causes more radiation and increased radiation to the earth.
But we changed refrigerants, the industry did, and the whole world essentially
changed from those ozone destroying refrigerants to more suitable refrigerants
from that view point. But some of the refrigerants still cause
global warming issues and those are, are fluorinated gases.
So those are the four gasses that, that cause our climate change and the global
warming effects. Here is a pie chart that shows how, what
percentage each one of them contributes this as it comes from the Environmental
Protection Agency the US, EPA and you can see 84% of the gases that cause global
warming of the effect is carbon dioxide. Methane causes 10% of the global warming
effect and nitric oxide is 4% percent, and then the refrigerants, 2%.
So, and then this mother gas is a cause of small impact.
By the way, the methane, this does not mean that, that methane is approximately
12 times what are eight times less in amount of gas and carbon dioxide.
What it means is that the effect of the methane that we're releasing to the
atmosphere causes about eight times less global warming effect.
But each methane molecule causes about 25 times as much global warming impact as a
molecule of carbon dioxide, so all that's gotta be factored in.
But this is the impact of these gases on our radiation-absorbing atmosphere
qualities that caused global warming. And so, obviously carbon dioxide is the
domino we need to worry about. And the carbon dioxide, methane and nitric
oxide dominantly, of course, comes from fossil fuel utilization.
If we get rid of carbon, fossil fuel utilization for energy, then we would
essentially totally get rid of the, the big impact for any climate change effects.
This shows a trend of carbon dioxide emissions by country.
We need to sit, in order to determine what we can do about it we need to look at
who's producing it. We now know what gases are causing it.
Let's look and see what countries are producing the carbon dioxide that's 84% of
the impact. Well, here, the green line is the US.
You can see we were the champions, unfortunately, in carbon dioxide
emissions. On the left, it shows the, the tonnes,
metric tonnes of carbon dioxide produced per year and we're up above 6 million and
six 6,000. Yeah, 6,000 million tonnes of carbon
dioxide. Those are metric tonnes, so small, 10%
difference between a metric ton and, and the English ton or British ton which is
what, regular tons are what we use here in the US.
But, for relative scale, you can see that China surpassed the US back in the late
90s. So we, excuse me, late 2000s.
And so, that is a problem and unfortunately China and US don't have any
hard regulations. That set severe hard limits on how much
CO2 we're going to produce and how to reduce them.
We have some policies that will help that, but it's difficult to turn it around.
And the rest of the countries are shown down there in the bottom and you can see
that they, when you get down to India, Russia, Japan, etcetera, those are fairly
small world CO2 emissions. Here, they are a little bit clearer.
China is 25% of the total CO2 emissions. North America, 21.
Europe, 14. Middle East, 6.
India, 5. Russia, 5.
South and Central America, etcetera. Let's go to the next slide, which is a
complicated slide, but it's got a lot of information on it and let's study it for
just a minute. This, by the way, comes from an
organization and website called co2now.org.
And the data comes from the EIA but, but then, but the graphics was done by CO2
Now. The lard, the circle size is proportional
to the amount of CO2 each country produces, and it's divided into regions.
So let's start with the US over here on the left and North and South America, and
so, excuse me, North America. North America is, of course, Canada, the
US, and Mexico. And you can see, we, of course, dominate
the North America, with that's shown there with 5,425 million tonnes which was on the
previous graph. So that is the North America.
If we move, and you notice it's got a two by North America, by the US, and that
means we're number 2 in countries. If you move over to the blue on the right
over here, then you can see that we are we, we have China and China is the
champion, now past us at 7,711 million tonnes.
We're number 2 after that. If you look at the rest of Asia, you see
that you have, India is number 3, behind America and they're down here, India
number 3. And then you have Japan, which is number 5
right here. And Australia which is number 15.
And Indonesia which is number 16. So you can see, look at all the countries
that make up the Asian region. But, as a matter of fact, this circle
right here is the, makes is at sum of all of the Asian countries that are shown
individually by the solid circles. If we look at some other countries, you
other regions in countries, you can see that Eurasia, which is basically Russia
and, and Eastern Europe area you got Russia, that's number four.
That they're behind India, that's, that's number 3.
India was number 3 and Russia. So we're down, from 1 to China's number 1,
US is number 2 and, India is number 3 and Russia is number 4.
So, and here is the black circle here shows the region of Eurasia.
Europe is dominated by Germany right here. They're number 6.
And then, I believe Italy is, is next in Europe.
They are number 17 in the world and UK, the UK may be higher than that, number 10.
Uk is number high, is number 10 in front of Italy.
But you can see the rankings right here, and this is 2010 data.
By the way, it's, it's, it's a little bit complicated, since 2010, in getting a
little more difficult getting this data and that's due to the fact that the
responsibility is transition for getting this data and compiling it and putting it
on the website, is transition from the international, from the Energy Information
Agency, a part of DOE in the US to EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency.
And that transition has caused a little bit of slowdown and gaps in the, the
latest data being available. And it's shown in a little different
format so it's a you have to be careful about what data you're looking at and, and
one to one comparison. You got Africa down here as a region, and
you got the Middle East. In the Middle East, you can see it's
dominated by Saudi Arabia which I believe is number 11 in the world, and you have
Iran that's over, over here, and Iran is above Saudi Arabia.
Iran is number 9 in the world and Saudi Arabia is number 11.
And you have other Middle Eastern countries.
What haven't we looked at here? We haven't looked at south, south of
Central America that's dominated by Brazil.
And for South America, Venezuala is a significant and Argentina is also
significant. But if we're going to solve the world
climate change problem, which it is a world problem.
One country cannot solve it. If the, countries that can have the
biggest impact are, of course, China and the US.
And it seems that, that, the China and the US are unfortunately among the countries
that are the slowest to make changes. And China is growing so fast economically,
bringing their people up the standard of living scale that is going to be difficult
for them to keep their CO2 emissions down or even slow the trend down to a large
degree. So, this is the world situation regarding
global warming gases, and dominantly, that means CO2 that comes from burning carbon
hydrocarbons. Carbon and hydrogen, hydrogen fossil
fuels. The more carbon you have the, in the fuel,
the more CO2 you produce. The methane produces less CO2 than coal,
because coal is just made up of carbon, whereas in, in your reacting carbon to
CO2, whereas CH4 is also using hydrogen reaction with oxygen that's producing
energy and doesn't produce any CO2. So that's, those are the two fossil fuel
gasses so, at the two ends of the spectrum regarding the hydrogen carbon ratios.
But down here just as before we move off of it is the world and this, this the
percentage down here by the way shows the latest, latest trend which I believe is
2010. You can look at this site.
It's a great site for information, looks like it's very credible.
They get their data, as I mentioned, from, in this case, from the EIA and that is
reputable data. But they're no longer putting that data on
their website. The new data, anyway, has been
transitioned to the EPA. So that's the world picture and it's a
difficult thing to change it, but that's where we are regarding who's producing the
gases that are creating all the controversy about global warming and
climate change that is argued about and debated and causing major concern around
the world actually. So if we look now more home, closely,
closer at home, back at home and look at the emissions by sector that, where the
CO2 is being produced. Again, this is 2010 data coming from the
EPA. You can see that the electricity sector
dominates in the amount of sales too that is produced in this country, electricity
production from all types of fuel, including renewables, which of course, do
not produce any CO2 to speak of is 40%. So, the electric power industry is
unfortunately the one that we need to work on, have the biggest impact.
Transportation needs oil consumption in our vehicles, trucks, airplanes dominated
by automobiles. Automobiles, automobiles that burn oil.
So we got oil and the fuel that dominates electricity, of course, at least the, got,
is the largest chunk of it is coal. So we got coal and, and oil is burning
that's causing the biggest CO2 emissions and causes the biggest problem.
Industry is 14% of our CO2 emissions in the US.
One of the, the big ones, there is cement production and that is just in the cement
manufacturing process and it's a very large productive user of CO2.
Residential commercial, commercial is about 10%, and other non-fossil fuel
combustion is about 5%, that means things like refrigerant emissions.
So that's the big picture for CO2 emissions worldwide and narrowed down to
the U.S. And we'll get down to, now that we have
that background, we can look at what's the impact of different technologies on
reducing CO2 emissions in the U.S. Thank you.
See you next time.