The following link by Loren Cobb from the Quaker Economist titled “The History and Future of World Energy”, provides what I regard as one of the best graphical overviews I have seen on past present and future power generation and where it will come from. It excludes any notion of nuclear fusion but this is understandable given that it is not yet feasible! On page two of the article there is a graphical interface where you can alter the parameters changing some of the assumptions for yourself to get a different picture of the future.
One of the clear observations is that far from reducing our future dependence on fossil fuels over the nest 50 years we will in fact increase our demand. There are also sufficient reserves to continue to do this and there is a good profit for the mining companies to continue to supply this raw material to the power industry. The conclusion of the article by Loren Cobb and another one on this site is that with an increasing population and worldwide technological capability there will be an increased demand for energy over the next 50 years. And much of this will be provided by burning fossil fuels. So far from reducing carbon emissions we as a planet will be increasing them. This is inevitable.
As an alternative suggestion to reducing energy consumption and “green power generation technology” why don’t the policy makers in the world get behind carbon capture technology and pull out CO2 from the flue gasses of the power stations? Apparently 80 to 90% could be removed (wikipedia).; The main reason is probably economic since the cost of power generation would increase.
US and Chinese policy makers could force so much change here, and we are all rather at the mercy of it.
Apparently it should be possible in the best case to produce 20,000 barrels of oil from crops per year on a square kilometer of land. Taking an extremely unlikely scenario to illustarte what this means, the numbers in the table show what would be required of the land in 2010 and in 2035 assuming that all oil is produced from the land. Many of the numbers used have come from the CIA website, an excellent source of data, an example of which is shown below. The key number is the use of oil each day, the number is 80,000,000 bbl per day (barrels per day) today and this is likely to double by 2035.
