New and Emerging Energy Supply Technologies Essay

New and Emerging Energy Supply Technologies - Essay Example According to Michael Pollan, we have to act now to arrest the present rate of our carbon emission before we face another kind of planet . The documentary of Nick Miller entitled â€Å"An Inconvenient Truth† articulated that global warming precipitated the climate change that have disastrous consequences have been proven to be right with series of climate disturbances that flooded cities and region beyond regions which never happened before . The growing need of energy also compels us to develop new supply energies that would lessen, if not totally depart our dependency towards fossil fuels whose stability of supply and price is subjected to a myriad of factors that ranges from the political factors to deliberate contraction of supply by the OPEC . These factors that caused disturbance in terms of supply and price are often beyond the control of dependent economies to fossil fuels yet they are affected by it due to the heavy dependency of its economy to oil. Exporting countries of oil may have nothing to do with the conflict in the Middle East yet they are still severely affected when the political instability in the region contracts the supply that would precipitate the spike on the price of oil that fuels our energy source. The spike in price of oil in turn reflects in every goods and services that we purchase due to our dependency to energy that make such goods and services to become available. Such, the development and creation of new energy supply source is not just a matter of technological musing but an imperative of conserving our already degraded environment and to ensure that there is a stable and sufficient supply of energy that is clean, cheap that could meet our energy demands. There are emerging technologies which are directed at producing energy source that intends to make energy supply cleaner and hopefully, cheaper with the ultimate objective of weaning away from the dependency to carbon based energy sources that cause excessive CO2 emiss ion. These emerging technologies ranges from making the existing energy source more efficient that would significantly reduce its CO2 emission to the point that it is already negligible such as carbon capturing sequestering4 to technologies that virtually emits no CO2 such as hydrogen fuel whose byproduct is only a vapor. The harnessing of nature to produce electricity such as the usage of Dinorwig's reversible pump/turbines also proves to a reliable source of energy5. The obstacles in making these emerging energy technologies viable on a mass scale will also be tackled including the ones that are already in used right now either as a pilot study or in experimental phase. One of the most popular emerging technology in supplying energy is the use of hydrogen fuels because of its clean emission. The technology is made possible by combining hydrogen and oxygen to form water where the chemical reaction during the process creates electrical energy. The technology that controls the combin ation of these two gases to produce the electrical energy are the fuel cells. This is envisioned to be used in fuel cell powered vehicles that will be virtually CO2 emission free because the only byproduct of the technology is water vapor6. While this technology can virtually wean our dependence on oil, the cost of the technology is just too prohibitive (its very expensive) and unreliable to make it available on a mass scale. Storing and transporting hydrogen can also be a challenge because it needs to be compressed to thousands of pounds per square inch (psi). At present, automative producers are using storages in