Greeny News

When these three decades are over, as with the Treaty of Westphalia, the planet is likely to have in place the foundations of a new system for organising itself – this time around energy needs. In the meantime, the struggle for energy resources is guaranteed to grow ever more intense for a simple reason: there is no way the existing energy system can satisfy the world's future requirements. It must be replaced or supplemented in a major way by a renewable alternative system or, forget Westphalia, the planet will be subject to environmental disaster of a sort hard to imagine today.

Also try to maintain this level of energy performance in 30 years 'time, with the same amount of fuel, would be an almost hopeless feat. Achieving a 40% increase are needed in energy efficiency, as most analysts believe, to the existing requirements of the older industrial powers and rising demand in China and other rapidly developing nations meet is simply impossible.

Two barriers stand in the way of preserving the existing energy profile: eventual oil scarcity and global climate change. Most energy analysts expect conventional oil output – that is, liquid oil derived from fields on land and in shallow coastal waters – to reach a production peak in the next few years and then begin an irreversible decline. Some additional fuel will be provided in the form of "unconventional" oil – that is, liquids derived from the costly, hazardous, and ecologically unsafe extraction processes involved in producing tar sands, shale oil, and deep offshore oil – but this will only postpone the contraction in petroleum availability, not avert it. By 2041, oil will be far less abundant than it is today, and so incapable of meeting anywhere near 33.6% of the world's (much-expanded) energy needs.

In the meantime, the acceleration of climate change will produce more and more damage - more intense storm activity, rising sea levels, droughts, killer heat waves, massive forest fires, and so on - eventually forcing politicians hesitate to take corrective measures. This is undoubtedly an imposing curbs on the release of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases, whether present or not in the form of carbon taxes, cap-and-trade plans, limits or other restrictive systems. By 2041 these increasingly restrictive curbs will help ensure that fossil fuels do not care to be anywhere near 87% of global energy consumption.

The leading contenders

Hydrogen: A decade ago, many experts were talking about hydrogen's immense promise as a source of energy. Hydrogen is abundant in many natural substances (including water and natural gas) and produces no carbon emissions when consumed. However, it does not exist by itself in the natural world and so must be extracted from other substances – a process that requires significant amounts of energy in its own right, and so is not, as yet, particularly efficient. Methods for transporting, storing, and consuming hydrogen on a large scale have also proved harder to develop than once imagined. Considerable research is being devoted to each of these problems, and breakthroughs certainly could occur in the decades to come. At present, however, it appears unlikely that hydrogen will prove a major source of energy in 2041.