GLOBAL FUTURE ANALYSIS


DIRECTIONS | ENERGY TECHNOLOGY


As carbon energy gets more and more expensive, it's logical that energy technology will become a booming sector of the economy. Development of technology that harvests (taps) other forms of energy will explode. Driven by the greatest changing force on earth in everybody's live and in every economy: capital drain reduction. The expensive carbon energy will drain each and every life, household, business, government and economy. Energy technology will be more diverse as any other technology ever, which is explainable by the fact that everything we do/use demands energy. Maintaining the huge energy demands of the interstate highway traffic and interstate/international airplane traffic will not be possible on post carbon energy harvesting: these two are too energy consuming and are designed on an oil price of $ 10 per barrel and will thereby abandoned by oil (and thereby related: energy) prices of $250-$500. Activities that are to energy intensive will be lowered in times of expensive energy. As earlier the availability of cheap and abundant energy fuelled our prosperity, we will enter a phase where we will learn the art of low energy prosperity. We face a boom of energy technology that or conserve, economize and recycle energy, or harvest energy out of other sources. Almost all these technologies will be local focused: facilitating the its installation environment. Maybe we will find ways to 'tap' new abundant energy sources a low price. Than energy will become cheap and abundant again, see Sources part of this Global Future Analysis for descriptions of these technology. But for now: energy will be scare and thereby expensive and energy technology booming. And yes mankind will find a way to tap earth's energy pools, and energy will become cheap again and the hydrogen economy will come some times. But for now: we face very expensive energy and therefore major energy use reductions in households and by companies, other economic/societal models and a wide variety of energy technology.


Author: Gijs Graafland


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