Energy Resources: from Science to Society

Book excerpt: The global energy system and its future are central to understanding many of the key challenges faced by society today. From climate change to rising prices for commodities to Western interest in instability in the Middle East, energy resources touch our lives in many ways. Unfortunately,today's students are not well prepared to address these issues at their source: our continued use of dirty, inefficient, and destabilizing resources. Universities continue to prepare engineers to design and build power plants, and prepare geologists and geophysicists to search for and extractresources. However, there are few texts offered that provide a broad overview of the science and policy challenges associated with the extensive array of energy resources that make up the current global energy system.This textbook addresses this with a holistic approach to energy that covers both the science and social science issues of today's energy system in one text. It provides a simplified approach to the science of each energy resource, describing each step in the resource's history (formation,extraction/harvest, transport, energy generation, and transmission) in a manner that is accessible to students outside specialized fields such as engineering and physics, as their needs are more specialized and cannot be met in a text that is accessible for a broader range of students. Each resourcewould be discussed in both the U.S. and global context, in order to best illustrate the use of the resource on different scales. The global context is especially important to understand energy challenges that may differ from region to region, i.e. the difficulties associated with coal use in Chinaversus the United States. Following the scientific overview, each section of the text would then analyze the impacts of this energy resource on the environment, society, and politics.