The Future of Energy
Rubbia, Carlo
The current worldwide energy supply is based mainly on the availability of fossil fuels and they will remain indispensable in the decades to come. The development of energies with lower emissions and a management of CO2, is one of the most important technological challenges of our times. Novel methods are the only practical way out of the risks of the Anthropogenic warming threat. In order to curb environmental changes, it is necessary to proceed simultaneously on two parallel lines: (1) the development and progressive utilization of renewable energy sources and (2) a more efficient and friendly utilization of fossils fuels, curbing the effects of their anthropogenic emissions. NG (methane) is the fossil fuel with the highest de-carbonization, whose full combustion produces ≈ 2 times less CO2 than coal for the same energy. One of the possible solutions lies in the ability to economically develop unconventional but large NG resources, initially coalbed methane and shale gas and in a foreseeable future methane hydrates. Methane hydrates, (burning ice) are expected to be the largest and unexploited reserve of hydrocarbons in the planetary crust. They are common constituents of the shallow marine geosphere both in deep sedimentary structures and as outcrops on the ocean floor. The presentation will describe novel methods in order to ensure (1) very long distance transport of electricity from renewable sources with MgB2 superconducting cables (2) a remarkable reduction in the GHG emissions from fossil NG combustion with the spontaneous thermal decomposition (TDM) at sufficient temperature of methane to hydrogen and black carbon: CH4 -> 2H2+C. Suggested readings: Abánades, A., Rathnam, R. K., Geißler, T., Heinzel, A., Mehravaran, K., Müller, G., Plevan, M., Rubbia, C., Salmieri, D., Stoppel, L., Stückrad, S., Weisenburger, A.,Wenninger, H., Wetzel, T.(2015 online): Development of methane decarbonisation based on liquid metal technology for CO2-free production of hydrogen. - International Journal of Hydrogen Energy. DOI: Geißler, T., Plevan, M., Abánades, A., Heinzel, A., Mehravaran, K., Rathnam, R. K., Rubbia, C., Salmieri, D., Stoppel, L., Stückrad, S., Weisenburger, A., Wenninger, H., Wetzel, T. (2015): Experimental investigation and thermo-chemical modeling of methane pyrolysis in a liquid metal bubble column reactor with a packed bed.- International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, 40, 41, p. 14134-14146. DOI:
 Music So we can see the clock started yet. It's on the 30th minute. From here at 29, 59, it's okay. You lost four seconds. Okay, now thank you very much. Now we are going to move ourselves to another subject, which is also very relevant to the future of mankind, which is the future of energy. And at the beginning I will start to discuss a little bit briefly the climate of the past, which is a clear premise for the future, for its future. Now the Earth was created about 4.56 billion years ago, much later than the Big Bang, and the complex multicellular organic life was almost entirely bored during the last 600 million years. And here you can show how the last temperature of the planet Earth over the last 600 million years, you see there have been many changes from low and high temperatures, some very warm temperatures have taken place down to glaciation to the equator, and in some instances we have been reaching almost ice at the level of the equator, and very at a period we were much higher and warmer than that. The last million years is represented by a large number of periods in which glaciation were reaching the equator and combined with climate optimal about today's temperature. And now the whole history of mankind is based on a remarkable uniform period, which you see in this graph, the last 10,000 years which have permitted to sustain the development of human civilization. So the little trace we have here at the end is being the one which has made us be where we are today. Now if you look at these things, so last period for instance using a Vostok ice core from Antarctica, you can see that the situation is characterized by very, very short interglacial periods, equal to present warm and presence, surrounded by very long glaciers periods over the last half a billion years. You can see that the beginning, probably the beginning of the Homo sapiens occurred something like 300,000 years ago, that the earliest Homo sapiens moving to Africa was about 100,000 years ago, and agriculture, which is the beginning of our present civilization, only occurs about 10,000 years ago. And notice the shortness of the warm period over very long glacial periods, and the question is, of course, the modern time, how long will it continue, how long will it last from this point of view? Now if you go on the shorter timescale, you look at the last 2,000 years, you can observe for instance in the northern hemisphere, the climate, the changes, the natural between cooler and warmer conditions on a period which is roughly over 1,000 years. At the Roman times, the temperature was warmer than today, then we had the dark ages in the middle of the century, and then around the year 1,000 the temperature came up again, we had a little ice age around in 1600, 1700, and now we are coming to today's situation. You can see the warmer and colder periods have been alternating. Extrotropical northern hemisphere, the current mean temperature variation relative to the variations, are indicated in this graph with something like two standard deviation bars. Now at the present moment we have a major new phenomenon of developing, the emergence of what is called anthropogenic era. The permanency you link long stable period after the interglacial period has been essential to create sustained life as civilization as they are today, and of course is an essential element for survival that we must preserve for our cost. But as well known, we are presently facing a new phenomenon which was coined by Eugene Sturmer and popularized by the Nobel laureate Paul Krutzsen, the emergence of a man made a anthropogenic era. For the first time human activities may strongly influence the future of the Earth climate. For instance, since 1750, about 1 million or million tons, 1,000 gigatons of CO2 has been injected into the atmosphere to which many other pollutants have to be added. The first sign of such an anthropogenic era may have been already detected. This effect should be curbed to avoid the irreversible effects of major climatic change. Now the amount of CO2 accumulation is of course enormous. You can see here the distribution of the planet. You can see that for instance in some of the countries we are using more than 100 kilograms of CO2 per day in each individual person. The second effect is that the CO2 production so far appears as uncurved. You see here the function of the time, the amount of emissions of CO2, the whole planet. You can see that there is a continuous line growing linearly exponentially. Now the CO2 production is enough to fill with superfluid CO2 at 100 bars, which are density like similar to the water, a volume like the Lake Geneva, which is 80 km³ every four years. You can see the Lake Geneva here and you can see how it is in fact being affected by these situations. Now the second question is of course how long does CO2 last in the biosphere? Now here is a graph which shows the variations of the lifetime of the CO2 in the atmosphere and appears to be about somewhere between 30 and 35 kilo years. You can see here what will happen over the time. You see here 600 years in this plot of a certain emissions of CO2, which I assume will occur for the first few hundred years and then they will stay steady for a long way to go. As a comparison for instance, the lifetime of plutonium 239 is 26 kilo years associated to the public, today's public negative perception of nuclear energy. So we are talking about really incredible durations. The mean atmospheric lifetime of the order 10 to the 4 years is in contrast with the popular perception many people think that in a few hundred years the CO2 will disappear. Now let's see what are the predictions about the next 25 years. Those are particularly gloomy. You can see the plot here from the EIA International Energy Agency from Paris. You can see that there is an observe here, a massive expansion of fossils burning with no scarcity of resources but very slow growth or renewable, highly included. You can see from this graph that in fact the renewable goes simply from 13% to some 18% of a quarter of a century. And the effect of this is coming from a situation which is very characteristic. You can see here that USA, Europe and other city countries essentially flat constant in insensitivity. China and India developing very rapidly together with the remaining developing countries and bringing the contribution of the CO2 by an increase of about 33% over this famous period of 25 years. Now the immediate consequence of that is of course some change over the temperature of the Earth. You can see here the plot of the temperature of the Earth in 2015 referred to the baseline situation before the development of between 1951 and 2000 in 1951 to 1980. And you can see that in fact there is a very substantial increase in the temperatures, mostly in the northern hemisphere right here and in our situation. And you can see that the overall effect over the period is substantial of the order of about 1 degree centigrade above what it was in 61 to 1990 average. And there is a small little effect up here and down to the bottom of the Antarctica but fundamentally most of the civilized world is now warming up very substantially. Now how do we go about this? That's the second question. Now of course to do this we need of course new technologies. And we believe that the statement is that new technologies are the only key to solve the sustainability of the future of energy. And transformation of energy with lower emissions and a quantity of significant management of CO2 are most important technological challenges of our time. Now of course the current worldwide energy supply is dependent mainly on fossil fuels which will remain in these tens of decades to come. But in order to curb environmental changes it is necessary to proceed vigorously on two lines. One is the development and progressive utilizations of renewable energy sources. And the second is the more efficient utilizations of fossil fuels limiting the effect of anthropogenic CO2 and other emissions. Now I will briefly represent here the main guidelines of major rules which are being followed by Europe in one's hand for United States on the other and finally the very countries like China to show what are the differences in interest and behaviors about the future of energy. Now let me start with the first pillar of energy policy which is Europe. During as many as 20 years the energy policy in European Union has been determined by two main priorities. A first strategic priority for European Union has been one of present dangerous climatic changes. The second consideration is based on the assumption that energy prices will rise inexorably as global energy demand rises and resources become scarce and this will necessarily make renewable energy competitively the winners. By 2040 about 80% of European primary energy should be aggressively becoming renewable abating both nuclear and fossil. And while the development and progressive utilization of renewable energy is a positive action Europe has made substantially the consequence of technological progress and the US accesses of CO2 efficient, lower cost and abundant utilization or unconventional natural gas which we could also shale gas. So let me briefly show you the situation of our European future. You can see for instance the example here of Germany. You can see that from 1990 the amount of CO2 in 2050 will collapse by a factor of 20 and you can see the situation. You can also see that hydrogen, electric reproducing by PV, hydro, wind, geothermal and solar are the main energy sources or industry transport. So according to Europe which is specifically represented according to the German situation the amount of fossils will eventually disappear almost entirely. It will be replaced by renewables. Now let me show you here as an example wind energy which is a dominant element for Europe. You can see here that in fact most of the wind energy is really coming from the northern Europe with few little traces around here near to France. So therefore this is how it is distributed over Europe. Now let me show you here how it is realized in practice. Wind offshore is probably the very high solutions and you see enormous efforts have been performed in order to carry out such a situation. Here you can see for instance how the average power now has grown up to something like 6 megawatts per unit that some of these units go under the water up to 700 meters in depth that they are in fact distributed mostly in the operation offshore in the region which is goes between England, Scandinavia and Germany. Now the real problem of wind is variability. You can see here for instance the variability of wind in Germany and you can see that essentially there are moments in which there is too much wind and the moment there is not enough wind. Let me also point out that the power carried by wind goes like a cube of the speed of the wind square because of the 1 half m e squared and another v because of the speed at which wind travels. So therefore there are moments, the very large variability is a major problem as you can discuss. If you go more generally you can see that the renewable energy can be done with biomass, geothermal, wind and hydropower. The economic potentials of these various solutions are not very large when compared to the demand. Europe will foresee by 2050 to have 7500 terawatt hours per year of electric power and you can see that the best you can do of economic potentials of these various alternatives of renewable energy are maybe of the order of much smaller than this number. And therefore long-term renewable dominance requires resources outside Europe. The key resource about Europe is of course the sun which is an enormous amount of economic potential, 600,000 terawatt hour per year and which is of course dominating in the southern part of Europe and most importantly in the Sahara and desert and so forth and so on. And you can see how little of that can do an enormous change. A total energy worldwide could be accumulated by covering with solar windows a system of the order of this little graph you can see here around the Africa. However, the situation now is not so clear because although the requirements for solar energy, the desert are a necessity, you can see that the transporting energy from the Africa to Europe is not a simple one. In fact, the major disasters they can take recently because the desert deconitial industrial initiative has an abandoning strategy to export solar power generated from the Sahara to Europe, killing the hopes of boosting Africa's share of renewable energy. Therefore, the situation is that it's not very clear what will be the situation in the future. Here you can see for instance coastal large-scale electricity, how they go as a function of the various systems. Conventional energies are hydro, geothermal, nuclear and biomass. Wind offshore and offshore you can see them there. You can see the offshore wind is still reasonably acceptable but the offshore wind has a major cost increase. Then you have also carbon sequestration which is there, which is also again accumulating underground coal, the CO2 from the coal. This is also very high in terms of temperature and you also see the solar energies are there, very nice, but of course extremely expensive. So you see money-wise the situation is rather difficult to be understood in mechanical problems. In fact, the main problem, there are two main problems in Europe. One is a high cost as a function of a fraction of renewables. You see here a graph which shows for instance what is the cost of electricity with about 1,000 watts per capital, which is the situation of Denmark and Germany. You compare that with the situation in the United States, which is down here for instance, where you have in fact a much smaller renewable capacity, but the cost of electricity is almost a factor too lower. Therefore the second question is that there are not enough renewables within Europe to satisfy fully the domestic resources and therefore some things have to be done elsewhere, but there is a real difficult incurring of several thousand kilometers of the energy from Africa to Europe. So the key problems for renewable energy are of course the best energy, always the cheapest energy. Energy, however, must be available when it is needed. And the third important point that electricity is now becoming the dominant source of energy for renewable energies. And there is a, therefore, but renewable energies require much wider surface of collection, located in specific locations in which production is optimal, and therefore electricity at very high powers must be transported over much longer distances than today, which is not technically very easy, comparable to the one possible today for natural gas and oil. So this is the European situation. Now what about the American situation? Now the second main pillar is coming from the US. And this is essentially based on the question of this graph coming from here from Time magazine, which says this rock could power the world. Commercial extraction for oil shale is now something which has already started over the last 10 years, and in fact the development is quite remarkably growing nowadays. In fact you can see that there are possibilities to do natural gas from shales. This is how it is being organized, or coal-bed methane, again another possibility, which can be absorbed to produce unconventional natural gas. And the worldwide shale resources are global and massive. You can see that both America, Latin America, China and Europe have large amounts of these resources. This coal-bed methane, again, is very rich of different countries, so there are plenty of resources there. Now in Europe we also have plenty of resources for this, but as I said, resources are vast, but strong, popular opposition forbids the use of these applications. Europe is totally absent at the present moment in a practical sense to this solution, which is very strongly developed in the United States. Now this has produced a very fundamental difference between the prices of natural gas in the US, respect to Europe and Japan. As you've seen from this graph, while in 2006 to 2008 the situation where in fact we're similar, now in 2012-13 you can see that while the amount of prices in the US has been going down, the situation in Europe and Japan are much higher, so there is a big difference between the predictions of the two systems. This has also introduced another important fact, that electricity production from coal is going down in the US thanks to the development of shale gas, and increasing the gas has increased, and so the results, it is that the US has introduced a very substantial reduction of CO2 emissions, and then the primary energy production in North America is in fact rising rapidly while in Europe is decreasing, and the petroleum production in various countries shows here that now the United States is producing as much petroleum as Saudi Arabia, which is remarkable results. And you can see for instance the case of Texas, which shows clearly that over the developed shale gas has created really a revolution in the amount of oil which is being used. The third question I'd like to mention very briefly in the few minutes I've got left is the question of China. China is the world's largest producer of electricity, surpassing the United States in 2001. Electricity generation in China has increased 9.6% annually, reaching something very large in the amount of terawatts. Now, the real problem is that coal-fired plants currently make up two-thirds of the power generation, which is of course the result of an abundance of coal in China. That demands respect to be continuing to increase the very rapid pace, however the growth of electricity from coal-fired plants has resulted in increasing air pollution and general lack of efficiency. China is now moving aggressively to curb pollution and increase supply of renewable power. China is the world's largest wind energy producer, with 90 gigawatts of installed power by the end of 2013, and 15% is the near-term renewable target for China. Now, here you can see how the renewable present themselves in China. Wind, solar and hydro are there, and the electric amounts are shown in this graph. You can see that the wider wind and the solar and hydro are optimal in some regions. The electric amounts are dominated, of course, where the people are, and there's a big business between the two distances. You can see here the power transmission requires a long transmission of power. As I mentioned already, you can see the several thousand kilometers of distance are required between the best production of hydro power, wind power, solar power, and the presence of the main people occupations. You can see the situation in China. Now, shale gas is strongly developed by China. You can see here the various companies exploring shale gas. Most of them are American companies, which are going into China to get this system productive. And you can see how quickly the shale gas has been developed in China to reduce the cold dependency. You can see here a graph showing that the estimated annual production rising very rapidly with a very impressive aiming eye level of the situation. Now, let me then continue asking ourselves in the eight minutes I got left about the future of energy production. Now, in the unconventional natural gas resources seem to be a major news effect, which we have to take into account. The process of progressive decarbonization falls, it goes necessary through an increased use of end consumption natural gas. Now, it's quite clear that natural gas could represent the practical alternative to presently growing exploitation of coal as the main source of energy. In addition, many other new developments have to be developed, introduced in order to ensure that the future can become a remarkable era of a cheap production of fossils. And the key to animating this is novel methods. Now, let me also point out to another new fact, the presence of a new source, the largest untapped reserve of natural gas on the crust, and I think called the clathrates. Maybe some of you people only know what the clathrate is. The clathrate is a combination between some, you can see here, some water and some natural gas, which combine in a situation which is stable at temperature around zero degrees. And it's called a clathrate, and it's very rich of methane, for instance one liter of methane clathrate, so-called burning ice, would produce something like 168 liters of methane gas at the normal pressures. And you can see here the picture of a small amount of this clathrate, which is now burning, producing natural gas, and you can see the molecule and the structure of the system like that. Now, the project appears purely academic. Now, still, the people realize that the very large amount of methane hydrate could be present in any environment with suitable pressures and temperatures. And therefore, the potential amount of methane in natural gas hydrates is enormous, with current estimates converging around the conservative value of about 10,000 gigahertz on the methane carbon, as a comparison of the total estimate of conventional natural gas and oil of the order of a few hundred gigatons. So, therefore, you can see here the location where clathrates were observed in the oceans. You can see almost everywhere around the world there are places in which recovered gas hydrate samples or inferred gas hydrates occurrences have been observed. The procedure is extremely simple. You go underground, you extract these materials, clathrates out of the ocean, and you can bring them either or eventually from the permafrost, and you can recuperate those amount in the system, either by having depressurizations or having a thermal change, which eliminates the natural gas from the water. Now, of course, the question is how do we solve the questions of future global warming? It's quite clear that natural gas is inevitably emitting CO2, although at the small fraction, which is half compared to coal, so the new project and new question is how can we reduce even further the CO2 productions? And the project on which, by the way, also myself involved is voided with the help of spontaneous thermal decompositions at the sufficient temperature of methane into hydrogen and black carbon. You can see here the CH4, which transforms itself into liquid, into hydrogen and solid black carbon. And this method is quite valuable because it does not use more energy than the existing reforming process, and which, however, can produce a lot of CO2, four tons of CO2 for each hydrogen, and the black carbon can be recovered as a field level construction method. And this is process under investigation. You can see here the initial attempts, which we did many years ago, in which we just took a tube, we put in the tube at the suitable temperature some kind of a natural gas, which becomes just naturally transforming itself into black carbon and hydrogen very quickly, and so forth and so on. And now the way the methane cracking is more or less represented here, you can see the methane input coming in, and through the methane cracking process hydrogen and carbon are separately produced. The efficiency is high, and in fact the numbers that you can see can be explained, comparing a standard method of producing CH4 with the emission of CO2, or without emission of CO2, you can see that in both cases, Scotty, oh my God. Excuse me. Anyway, the situation is that in fact, this is very similar. You can see here that 40% energy is lost by conventional method, and about 42% is recovered and stored with a normal method in here. The technology, I cannot spend much time describing it, is represented by this picture here. It's very efficient. We have reached, in this case, a thousand degrees something like a major fraction of methane conversion today. It works, and the cost is also very valuable. So let me use the two minutes I got left by mentioning a few more questions. Now, the question of the fuel for transportations. A lot of people have claimed that you should use hydrogen for transportation, but however, really what you really need in order to run the liquid for future transportation has to be a liquid. Now, you can build a liquid by combining the amount of hydrogen produced by the previous method with remaining CO2, which is spent already, whereas plenty of CO2 is being produced. In other words, the idea is to produce methanol through a process in which hydrogen plus CO2 transform themselves into methanol plus water. And this is the example. Very briefly how you do it. You take this graph here, essentially, the natural gas from the methane producing hydrogen with the emission of carbon storage, and you take CO2 from or use CO2 and you combine them together in the methanol synthesis reactor, which then becomes a liquid and is transformed and used as a future replacement for oil. Now, let me therefore conclude. Are we talking about, what are we talking about energy for the future? In my view, a new age of abundance is now being developed, and it is based on unconventional gas resources, initially coal, bed, and shell gas in a foreseeable future, and methane hydrates later on after the coal, bed, and methane shell gas has been more or less distributed. North America, India, China, and Africa, Latin America, will all have access to cheap and abundant shell gas and oil. Europe, of course, is still, for political reasons, still on hold. With both environmental sensitivity and gas consumption on the rise, the main question is how to recover this huge novel natural gas resources available for millennia to come and economically harvest the immense energy wealth in the most efficient and effective manner with minimal environmental footprint. I believe the natural gas sources with zero CO2 emissions are the winners. Shell gas, the ultimate class rate, with the ability of becoming the nominal primary energy source for tenth century to come. Thank you very much.
 Music  So we can see the clock started yet.  It's on the 30th minute.  From here at 29, 59, it's okay.  You lost four seconds.  Okay, now thank you very much.  Now we are going to move ourselves to another subject,  which is also very relevant to the future of mankind,  which is the future of energy.  And at the beginning I will start to discuss a little bit briefly  the climate of the past,  which is a clear premise for the future, for its future.  Now the Earth was created about 4.56 billion years ago,  much later than the Big Bang,  and the complex multicellular organic life  was almost entirely bored during the last 600 million years.  And here you can show how the last temperature of the planet Earth  over the last 600 million years,  you see there have been many changes from low and high temperatures,  some very warm temperatures have taken place  down to glaciation to the equator,  and in some instances we have been reaching almost ice  at the level of the equator,  and very at a period we were much higher and warmer than that.  The last million years is represented by a large number of periods  in which glaciation were reaching the equator  and combined with climate optimal about today's temperature.  And now the whole history of mankind is based on a remarkable uniform period,  which you see in this graph,  the last 10,000 years which have permitted to sustain the development  of human civilization.  So the little trace we have here at the end is being the one  which has made us be where we are today.  Now if you look at these things,  so last period for instance using a Vostok ice core from Antarctica,  you can see that the situation is characterized by very, very short interglacial periods,  equal to present warm and presence,  surrounded by very long glaciers periods over the last half a billion years.  You can see that the beginning,  probably the beginning of the Homo sapiens occurred something like 300,000 years ago,  that the earliest Homo sapiens moving to Africa was about 100,000 years ago,  and agriculture, which is the beginning of our present civilization,  only occurs about 10,000 years ago.  And notice the shortness of the warm period over very long glacial periods,  and the question is, of course, the modern time,  how long will it continue, how long will it last from this point of view?  Now if you go on the shorter timescale, you look at the last 2,000 years,  you can observe for instance in the northern hemisphere,  the climate, the changes,  the natural between cooler and warmer conditions on a period which is roughly over 1,000 years.  At the Roman times, the temperature was warmer than today,  then we had the dark ages in the middle of the century,  and then around the year 1,000 the temperature came up again,  we had a little ice age around in 1600, 1700,  and now we are coming to today's situation.  You can see the warmer and colder periods have been alternating.  Extrotropical northern hemisphere, the current mean temperature variation relative to the variations,  are indicated in this graph with something like two standard deviation bars.  Now at the present moment we have a major new phenomenon of developing,  the emergence of what is called anthropogenic era.  The permanency you link long stable period after the interglacial period has been essential  to create sustained life as civilization as they are today,  and of course is an essential element for survival that we must preserve for our cost.  But as well known, we are presently facing a new phenomenon which was coined by Eugene Sturmer  and popularized by the Nobel laureate Paul Krutzsen,  the emergence of a man made a anthropogenic era.  For the first time human activities may strongly influence the future of the Earth climate.  For instance, since 1750, about 1 million or million tons,  1,000 gigatons of CO2 has been injected into the atmosphere to which many other pollutants have to be added.  The first sign of such an anthropogenic era may have been already detected.  This effect should be curbed to avoid the irreversible effects of major climatic change.  Now the amount of CO2 accumulation is of course enormous.  You can see here the distribution of the planet.  You can see that for instance in some of the countries we are using more than 100 kilograms of CO2 per day in each individual person.  The second effect is that the CO2 production so far appears as uncurved.  You see here the function of the time, the amount of emissions of CO2, the whole planet.  You can see that there is a continuous line growing linearly exponentially.  Now the CO2 production is enough to fill with superfluid CO2 at 100 bars,  which are density like similar to the water, a volume like the Lake Geneva, which is 80 km³ every four years.  You can see the Lake Geneva here and you can see how it is in fact being affected by these situations.  Now the second question is of course how long does CO2 last in the biosphere?  Now here is a graph which shows the variations of the lifetime of the CO2 in the atmosphere  and appears to be about somewhere between 30 and 35 kilo years.  You can see here what will happen over the time.  You see here 600 years in this plot of a certain emissions of CO2, which I assume will occur for the first few hundred years  and then they will stay steady for a long way to go.  As a comparison for instance, the lifetime of plutonium 239 is 26 kilo years associated to the public,  today's public negative perception of nuclear energy.  So we are talking about really incredible durations.  The mean atmospheric lifetime of the order 10 to the 4 years is in contrast with the popular perception  many people think that in a few hundred years the CO2 will disappear.  Now let's see what are the predictions about the next 25 years.  Those are particularly gloomy.  You can see the plot here from the EIA International Energy Agency from Paris.  You can see that there is an observe here, a massive expansion of fossils burning with no scarcity of resources  but very slow growth or renewable, highly included.  You can see from this graph that in fact the renewable goes simply from 13% to some 18% of a quarter of a century.  And the effect of this is coming from a situation which is very characteristic.  You can see here that USA, Europe and other city countries essentially flat constant in insensitivity.  China and India developing very rapidly together with the remaining developing countries  and bringing the contribution of the CO2 by an increase of about 33% over this famous period of 25 years.  Now the immediate consequence of that is of course some change over the temperature of the Earth.  You can see here the plot of the temperature of the Earth in 2015  referred to the baseline situation before the development of between 1951 and 2000 in 1951 to 1980.  And you can see that in fact there is a very substantial increase in the temperatures, mostly in the northern hemisphere right here  and in our situation.  And you can see that the overall effect over the period is substantial of the order of about 1 degree centigrade above what it was in 61 to 1990 average.  And there is a small little effect up here and down to the bottom of the Antarctica  but fundamentally most of the civilized world is now warming up very substantially.  Now how do we go about this? That's the second question.  Now of course to do this we need of course new technologies.  And we believe that the statement is that new technologies are the only key to solve the sustainability of the future of energy.  And transformation of energy with lower emissions and a quantity of significant management of CO2  are most important technological challenges of our time.  Now of course the current worldwide energy supply is dependent mainly on fossil fuels  which will remain in these tens of decades to come.  But in order to curb environmental changes it is necessary to proceed vigorously on two lines.  One is the development and progressive utilizations of renewable energy sources.  And the second is the more efficient utilizations of fossil fuels  limiting the effect of anthropogenic CO2 and other emissions.  Now I will briefly represent here the main guidelines of major rules which are being followed by Europe  in one's hand for United States on the other and finally the very countries like China  to show what are the differences in interest and behaviors about the future of energy.  Now let me start with the first pillar of energy policy which is Europe.  During as many as 20 years the energy policy in European Union has been determined by two main priorities.  A first strategic priority for European Union has been one of present dangerous climatic changes.  The second consideration is based on the assumption that energy prices will rise inexorably  as global energy demand rises and resources become scarce  and this will necessarily make renewable energy competitively the winners.  By 2040 about 80% of European primary energy should be aggressively becoming renewable  abating both nuclear and fossil.  And while the development and progressive utilization of renewable energy is a positive action  Europe has made substantially the consequence of technological progress  and the US accesses of CO2 efficient, lower cost and abundant utilization  or unconventional natural gas which we could also shale gas.  So let me briefly show you the situation of our European future.  You can see for instance the example here of Germany. You can see that from 1990  the amount of CO2 in 2050 will collapse by a factor of 20 and you can see the situation.  You can also see that hydrogen, electric reproducing by PV, hydro, wind, geothermal and solar  are the main energy sources or industry transport.  So according to Europe which is specifically represented according to the German situation  the amount of fossils will eventually disappear almost entirely.  It will be replaced by renewables.  Now let me show you here as an example wind energy which is a dominant element for Europe.  You can see here that in fact most of the wind energy is really coming from the northern Europe  with few little traces around here near to France.  So therefore this is how it is distributed over Europe.  Now let me show you here how it is realized in practice.  Wind offshore is probably the very high solutions and you see enormous efforts have been performed  in order to carry out such a situation.  Here you can see for instance how the average power now has grown up to something like 6 megawatts per unit  that some of these units go under the water up to 700 meters in depth  that they are in fact distributed mostly in the operation offshore in the region which is goes between England,  Scandinavia and Germany.  Now the real problem of wind is variability.  You can see here for instance the variability of wind in Germany  and you can see that essentially there are moments in which there is too much wind  and the moment there is not enough wind.  Let me also point out that the power carried by wind goes like a cube of the speed of the wind  square because of the 1 half m e squared and another v because of the speed at which wind travels.  So therefore there are moments, the very large variability is a major problem as you can discuss.  If you go more generally you can see that the renewable energy can be done with biomass, geothermal, wind and hydropower.  The economic potentials of these various solutions are not very large when compared to the demand.  Europe will foresee by 2050 to have 7500 terawatt hours per year of electric power  and you can see that the best you can do of economic potentials of these various alternatives of renewable energy  are maybe of the order of much smaller than this number.  And therefore long-term renewable dominance requires resources outside Europe.  The key resource about Europe is of course the sun which is an enormous amount of economic potential,  600,000 terawatt hour per year and which is of course dominating in the southern part of Europe  and most importantly in the Sahara and desert and so forth and so on.  And you can see how little of that can do an enormous change.  A total energy worldwide could be accumulated by covering with solar windows a system of the order of this little graph  you can see here around the Africa.  However, the situation now is not so clear because although the requirements for solar energy, the desert are a necessity,  you can see that the transporting energy from the Africa to Europe is not a simple one.  In fact, the major disasters they can take recently because the desert deconitial industrial initiative  has an abandoning strategy to export solar power generated from the Sahara to Europe,  killing the hopes of boosting Africa's share of renewable energy.  Therefore, the situation is that it's not very clear what will be the situation in the future.  Here you can see for instance coastal large-scale electricity, how they go as a function of the various systems.  Conventional energies are hydro, geothermal, nuclear and biomass.  Wind offshore and offshore you can see them there.  You can see the offshore wind is still reasonably acceptable but the offshore wind has a major cost increase.  Then you have also carbon sequestration which is there, which is also again accumulating underground coal, the CO2 from the coal.  This is also very high in terms of temperature and you also see the solar energies are there, very nice, but of course extremely expensive.  So you see money-wise the situation is rather difficult to be understood in mechanical problems.  In fact, the main problem, there are two main problems in Europe.  One is a high cost as a function of a fraction of renewables.  You see here a graph which shows for instance what is the cost of electricity with about 1,000 watts per capital,  which is the situation of Denmark and Germany.  You compare that with the situation in the United States, which is down here for instance, where you have in fact a much smaller renewable capacity,  but the cost of electricity is almost a factor too lower.  Therefore the second question is that there are not enough renewables within Europe to satisfy fully the domestic resources  and therefore some things have to be done elsewhere, but there is a real difficult incurring of several thousand kilometers of the energy from Africa to Europe.  So the key problems for renewable energy are of course the best energy, always the cheapest energy.  Energy, however, must be available when it is needed.  And the third important point that electricity is now becoming the dominant source of energy for renewable energies.  And there is a, therefore, but renewable energies require much wider surface of collection,  located in specific locations in which production is optimal, and therefore electricity at very high powers  must be transported over much longer distances than today, which is not technically very easy, comparable to the one possible today for natural gas and oil.  So this is the European situation.  Now what about the American situation?  Now the second main pillar is coming from the US.  And this is essentially based on the question of this graph coming from here from Time magazine, which says this rock could power the world.  Commercial extraction for oil shale is now something which has already started over the last 10 years, and in fact the development is quite remarkably growing nowadays.  In fact you can see that there are possibilities to do natural gas from shales.  This is how it is being organized, or coal-bed methane, again another possibility, which can be absorbed to produce unconventional natural gas.  And the worldwide shale resources are global and massive.  You can see that both America, Latin America, China and Europe have large amounts of these resources.  This coal-bed methane, again, is very rich of different countries, so there are plenty of resources there.  Now in Europe we also have plenty of resources for this, but as I said, resources are vast, but strong, popular opposition forbids the use of these applications.  Europe is totally absent at the present moment in a practical sense to this solution, which is very strongly developed in the United States.  Now this has produced a very fundamental difference between the prices of natural gas in the US, respect to Europe and Japan.  As you've seen from this graph, while in 2006 to 2008 the situation where in fact we're similar, now in 2012-13 you can see that while the amount of prices in the US has been going down,  the situation in Europe and Japan are much higher, so there is a big difference between the predictions of the two systems.  This has also introduced another important fact, that electricity production from coal is going down in the US thanks to the development of shale gas,  and increasing the gas has increased, and so the results, it is that the US has introduced a very substantial reduction of CO2 emissions,  and then the primary energy production in North America is in fact rising rapidly while in Europe is decreasing,  and the petroleum production in various countries shows here that now the United States is producing as much petroleum as Saudi Arabia, which is remarkable results.  And you can see for instance the case of Texas, which shows clearly that over the developed shale gas has created really a revolution in the amount of oil which is being used.  The third question I'd like to mention very briefly in the few minutes I've got left is the question of China.  China is the world's largest producer of electricity, surpassing the United States in 2001.  Electricity generation in China has increased 9.6% annually, reaching something very large in the amount of terawatts.  Now, the real problem is that coal-fired plants currently make up two-thirds of the power generation, which is of course the result of an abundance of coal in China.  That demands respect to be continuing to increase the very rapid pace, however the growth of electricity from coal-fired plants has resulted in increasing air pollution and general lack of efficiency.  China is now moving aggressively to curb pollution and increase supply of renewable power.  China is the world's largest wind energy producer, with 90 gigawatts of installed power by the end of 2013, and 15% is the near-term renewable target for China.  Now, here you can see how the renewable present themselves in China.  Wind, solar and hydro are there, and the electric amounts are shown in this graph.  You can see that the wider wind and the solar and hydro are optimal in some regions.  The electric amounts are dominated, of course, where the people are, and there's a big business between the two distances.  You can see here the power transmission requires a long transmission of power.  As I mentioned already, you can see the several thousand kilometers of distance are required between the best production of hydro power, wind power, solar power, and the presence of the main people occupations.  You can see the situation in China.  Now, shale gas is strongly developed by China.  You can see here the various companies exploring shale gas.  Most of them are American companies, which are going into China to get this system productive.  And you can see how quickly the shale gas has been developed in China to reduce the cold dependency.  You can see here a graph showing that the estimated annual production rising very rapidly with a very impressive aiming eye level of the situation.  Now, let me then continue asking ourselves in the eight minutes I got left about the future of energy production.  Now, in the unconventional natural gas resources seem to be a major news effect, which we have to take into account.  The process of progressive decarbonization falls, it goes necessary through an increased use of end consumption natural gas.  Now, it's quite clear that natural gas could represent the practical alternative to presently growing exploitation of coal as the main source of energy.  In addition, many other new developments have to be developed, introduced in order to ensure that the future can become a remarkable era of a cheap production of fossils.  And the key to animating this is novel methods.  Now, let me also point out to another new fact, the presence of a new source, the largest untapped reserve of natural gas on the crust, and I think called the clathrates.  Maybe some of you people only know what the clathrate is.  The clathrate is a combination between some, you can see here, some water and some natural gas, which combine in a situation which is stable at temperature around zero degrees.  And it's called a clathrate, and it's very rich of methane, for instance one liter of methane clathrate, so-called burning ice, would produce something like 168 liters of methane gas at the normal pressures.  And you can see here the picture of a small amount of this clathrate, which is now burning, producing natural gas, and you can see the molecule and the structure of the system like that.  Now, the project appears purely academic.  Now, still, the people realize that the very large amount of methane hydrate could be present in any environment with suitable pressures and temperatures.  And therefore, the potential amount of methane in natural gas hydrates is enormous, with current estimates converging around the conservative value of about 10,000 gigahertz on the methane carbon,  as a comparison of the total estimate of conventional natural gas and oil of the order of a few hundred gigatons.  So, therefore, you can see here the location where clathrates were observed in the oceans.  You can see almost everywhere around the world there are places in which recovered gas hydrate samples or inferred gas hydrates occurrences have been observed.  The procedure is extremely simple.  You go underground, you extract these materials, clathrates out of the ocean, and you can bring them either or eventually from the permafrost,  and you can recuperate those amount in the system, either by having depressurizations or having a thermal change, which eliminates the natural gas from the water.  Now, of course, the question is how do we solve the questions of future global warming?  It's quite clear that natural gas is inevitably emitting CO2, although at the small fraction, which is half compared to coal,  so the new project and new question is how can we reduce even further the CO2 productions?  And the project on which, by the way, also myself involved is voided with the help of spontaneous thermal decompositions at the sufficient temperature of methane into hydrogen and black carbon.  You can see here the CH4, which transforms itself into liquid, into hydrogen and solid black carbon.  And this method is quite valuable because it does not use more energy than the existing reforming process,  and which, however, can produce a lot of CO2, four tons of CO2 for each hydrogen, and the black carbon can be recovered as a field level construction method.  And this is process under investigation. You can see here the initial attempts, which we did many years ago, in which we just took a tube,  we put in the tube at the suitable temperature some kind of a natural gas, which becomes just naturally transforming itself into black carbon and hydrogen very quickly, and so forth and so on.  And now the way the methane cracking is more or less represented here, you can see the methane input coming in,  and through the methane cracking process hydrogen and carbon are separately produced.  The efficiency is high, and in fact the numbers that you can see can be explained, comparing a standard method of producing CH4 with the emission of CO2,  or without emission of CO2, you can see that in both cases, Scotty, oh my God.  Excuse me. Anyway, the situation is that in fact, this is very similar.  You can see here that 40% energy is lost by conventional method, and about 42% is recovered and stored with a normal method in here.  The technology, I cannot spend much time describing it, is represented by this picture here.  It's very efficient. We have reached, in this case, a thousand degrees something like a major fraction of methane conversion today.  It works, and the cost is also very valuable.  So let me use the two minutes I got left by mentioning a few more questions.  Now, the question of the fuel for transportations.  A lot of people have claimed that you should use hydrogen for transportation,  but however, really what you really need in order to run the liquid for future transportation has to be a liquid.  Now, you can build a liquid by combining the amount of hydrogen produced by the previous method with remaining CO2,  which is spent already, whereas plenty of CO2 is being produced.  In other words, the idea is to produce methanol through a process in which hydrogen plus CO2  transform themselves into methanol plus water.  And this is the example. Very briefly how you do it.  You take this graph here, essentially, the natural gas from the methane producing hydrogen with the emission of carbon storage,  and you take CO2 from or use CO2 and you combine them together in the methanol synthesis reactor,  which then becomes a liquid and is transformed and used as a future replacement for oil.  Now, let me therefore conclude.  Are we talking about, what are we talking about energy for the future?  In my view, a new age of abundance is now being developed,  and it is based on unconventional gas resources, initially coal, bed, and shell gas in a foreseeable future,  and methane hydrates later on after the coal, bed, and methane shell gas has been more or less distributed.  North America, India, China, and Africa, Latin America, will all have access to cheap and abundant shell gas and oil.  Europe, of course, is still, for political reasons, still on hold.  With both environmental sensitivity and gas consumption on the rise,  the main question is how to recover this huge novel natural gas resources available for millennia to come  and economically harvest the immense energy wealth in the most efficient and effective manner with minimal environmental footprint.  I believe the natural gas sources with zero CO2 emissions are the winners.  Shell gas, the ultimate class rate, with the ability of becoming the nominal primary energy source for tenth century to come.  Thank you very much.
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Music So we can see the clock started yet. It's on the 30th minute. From here at 29, 59, it's okay. You lost four seconds. Okay, now thank you very much. Now we are going to move ourselves to another subject, which is also very relevant to the future of mankind, which is the future of energy. And at the beginning I will start to discuss a little bit briefly the climate of the past, which is a clear premise for the future, for its future. Now the Earth was created about 4.56 billion years ago, much later than the Big Bang, and the complex multicellular organic life was almost entirely bored during the last 600 million years. And here you can show how the last temperature of the planet Earth over the last 600 million years, you see there have been many changes from low and high temperatures, some very warm temperatures have taken place down to glaciation to the equator, and in some instances we have been reaching almost ice at the level of the equator, and very at a period we were much higher and warmer than that. The last million years is represented by a large number of periods in which glaciation were reaching the equator and combined with climate optimal about today's temperature. And now the whole history of mankind is based on a remarkable uniform period, which you see in this graph, the last 10,000 years which have permitted to sustain the development of human civilization. So the little trace we have here at the end is being the one which has made us be where we are today. Now if you look at these things, so last period for instance using a Vostok ice core from Antarctica, you can see that the situation is characterized by very, very short interglacial periods, equal to present warm and presence, surrounded by very long glaciers periods over the last half a billion years. You can see that the beginning, probably the beginning of the Homo sapiens occurred something like 300,000 years ago, that the earliest Homo sapiens moving to Africa was about 100,000 years ago, and agriculture, which is the beginning of our present civilization, only occurs about 10,000 years ago. And notice the shortness of the warm period over very long glacial periods, and the question is, of course, the modern time, how long will it continue, how long will it last from this point of view? Now if you go on the shorter timescale, you look at the last 2,000 years, you can observe for instance in the northern hemisphere, the climate, the changes, the natural between cooler and warmer conditions on a period which is roughly over 1,000 years. At the Roman times, the temperature was warmer than today, then we had the dark ages in the middle of the century, and then around the year 1,000 the temperature came up again, we had a little ice age around in 1600, 1700, and now we are coming to today's situation. You can see the warmer and colder periods have been alternating. Extrotropical northern hemisphere, the current mean temperature variation relative to the variations, are indicated in this graph with something like two standard deviation bars. Now at the present moment we have a major new phenomenon of developing, the emergence of what is called anthropogenic era. The permanency you link long stable period after the interglacial period has been essential to create sustained life as civilization as they are today, and of course is an essential element for survival that we must preserve for our cost. But as well known, we are presently facing a new phenomenon which was coined by Eugene Sturmer and popularized by the Nobel laureate Paul Krutzsen, the emergence of a man made a anthropogenic era. For the first time human activities may strongly influence the future of the Earth climate. For instance, since 1750, about 1 million or million tons, 1,000 gigatons of CO2 has been injected into the atmosphere to which many other pollutants have to be added. The first sign of such an anthropogenic era may have been already detected. This effect should be curbed to avoid the irreversible effects of major climatic change. Now the amount of CO2 accumulation is of course enormous. You can see here the distribution of the planet. You can see that for instance in some of the countries we are using more than 100 kilograms of CO2 per day in each individual person. The second effect is that the CO2 production so far appears as uncurved. You see here the function of the time, the amount of emissions of CO2, the whole planet. You can see that there is a continuous line growing linearly exponentially. Now the CO2 production is enough to fill with superfluid CO2 at 100 bars, which are density like similar to the water, a volume like the Lake Geneva, which is 80 km³ every four years. You can see the Lake Geneva here and you can see how it is in fact being affected by these situations. Now the second question is of course how long does CO2 last in the biosphere? Now here is a graph which shows the variations of the lifetime of the CO2 in the atmosphere and appears to be about somewhere between 30 and 35 kilo years. You can see here what will happen over the time. You see here 600 years in this plot of a certain emissions of CO2, which I assume will occur for the first few hundred years and then they will stay steady for a long way to go. As a comparison for instance, the lifetime of plutonium 239 is 26 kilo years associated to the public, today's public negative perception of nuclear energy. So we are talking about really incredible durations. The mean atmospheric lifetime of the order 10 to the 4 years is in contrast with the popular perception many people think that in a few hundred years the CO2 will disappear. Now let's see what are the predictions about the next 25 years. Those are particularly gloomy. You can see the plot here from the EIA International Energy Agency from Paris. You can see that there is an observe here, a massive expansion of fossils burning with no scarcity of resources but very slow growth or renewable, highly included. You can see from this graph that in fact the renewable goes simply from 13% to some 18% of a quarter of a century. And the effect of this is coming from a situation which is very characteristic. You can see here that USA, Europe and other city countries essentially flat constant in insensitivity. China and India developing very rapidly together with the remaining developing countries and bringing the contribution of the CO2 by an increase of about 33% over this famous period of 25 years. Now the immediate consequence of that is of course some change over the temperature of the Earth. You can see here the plot of the temperature of the Earth in 2015 referred to the baseline situation before the development of between 1951 and 2000 in 1951 to 1980. And you can see that in fact there is a very substantial increase in the temperatures, mostly in the northern hemisphere right here and in our situation. And you can see that the overall effect over the period is substantial of the order of about 1 degree centigrade above what it was in 61 to 1990 average. And there is a small little effect up here and down to the bottom of the Antarctica but fundamentally most of the civilized world is now warming up very substantially. Now how do we go about this? That's the second question. Now of course to do this we need of course new technologies. And we believe that the statement is that new technologies are the only key to solve the sustainability of the future of energy. And transformation of energy with lower emissions and a quantity of significant management of CO2 are most important technological challenges of our time. Now of course the current worldwide energy supply is dependent mainly on fossil fuels which will remain in these tens of decades to come. But in order to curb environmental changes it is necessary to proceed vigorously on two lines. One is the development and progressive utilizations of renewable energy sources. And the second is the more efficient utilizations of fossil fuels limiting the effect of anthropogenic CO2 and other emissions. Now I will briefly represent here the main guidelines of major rules which are being followed by Europe in one's hand for United States on the other and finally the very countries like China to show what are the differences in interest and behaviors about the future of energy. Now let me start with the first pillar of energy policy which is Europe. During as many as 20 years the energy policy in European Union has been determined by two main priorities. A first strategic priority for European Union has been one of present dangerous climatic changes. The second consideration is based on the assumption that energy prices will rise inexorably as global energy demand rises and resources become scarce and this will necessarily make renewable energy competitively the winners. By 2040 about 80% of European primary energy should be aggressively becoming renewable abating both nuclear and fossil. And while the development and progressive utilization of renewable energy is a positive action Europe has made substantially the consequence of technological progress and the US accesses of CO2 efficient, lower cost and abundant utilization or unconventional natural gas which we could also shale gas. So let me briefly show you the situation of our European future. You can see for instance the example here of Germany. You can see that from 1990 the amount of CO2 in 2050 will collapse by a factor of 20 and you can see the situation. You can also see that hydrogen, electric reproducing by PV, hydro, wind, geothermal and solar are the main energy sources or industry transport. So according to Europe which is specifically represented according to the German situation the amount of fossils will eventually disappear almost entirely. It will be replaced by renewables. Now let me show you here as an example wind energy which is a dominant element for Europe. You can see here that in fact most of the wind energy is really coming from the northern Europe with few little traces around here near to France. So therefore this is how it is distributed over Europe. Now let me show you here how it is realized in practice. Wind offshore is probably the very high solutions and you see enormous efforts have been performed in order to carry out such a situation. Here you can see for instance how the average power now has grown up to something like 6 megawatts per unit that some of these units go under the water up to 700 meters in depth that they are in fact distributed mostly in the operation offshore in the region which is goes between England, Scandinavia and Germany. Now the real problem of wind is variability. You can see here for instance the variability of wind in Germany and you can see that essentially there are moments in which there is too much wind and the moment there is not enough wind. Let me also point out that the power carried by wind goes like a cube of the speed of the wind square because of the 1 half m e squared and another v because of the speed at which wind travels. So therefore there are moments, the very large variability is a major problem as you can discuss. If you go more generally you can see that the renewable energy can be done with biomass, geothermal, wind and hydropower. The economic potentials of these various solutions are not very large when compared to the demand. Europe will foresee by 2050 to have 7500 terawatt hours per year of electric power and you can see that the best you can do of economic potentials of these various alternatives of renewable energy are maybe of the order of much smaller than this number. And therefore long-term renewable dominance requires resources outside Europe. The key resource about Europe is of course the sun which is an enormous amount of economic potential, 600,000 terawatt hour per year and which is of course dominating in the southern part of Europe and most importantly in the Sahara and desert and so forth and so on. And you can see how little of that can do an enormous change. A total energy worldwide could be accumulated by covering with solar windows a system of the order of this little graph you can see here around the Africa. However, the situation now is not so clear because although the requirements for solar energy, the desert are a necessity, you can see that the transporting energy from the Africa to Europe is not a simple one. In fact, the major disasters they can take recently because the desert deconitial industrial initiative has an abandoning strategy to export solar power generated from the Sahara to Europe, killing the hopes of boosting Africa's share of renewable energy. Therefore, the situation is that it's not very clear what will be the situation in the future. Here you can see for instance coastal large-scale electricity, how they go as a function of the various systems. Conventional energies are hydro, geothermal, nuclear and biomass. Wind offshore and offshore you can see them there. You can see the offshore wind is still reasonably acceptable but the offshore wind has a major cost increase. Then you have also carbon sequestration which is there, which is also again accumulating underground coal, the CO2 from the coal. This is also very high in terms of temperature and you also see the solar energies are there, very nice, but of course extremely expensive. So you see money-wise the situation is rather difficult to be understood in mechanical problems. In fact, the main problem, there are two main problems in Europe. One is a high cost as a function of a fraction of renewables. You see here a graph which shows for instance what is the cost of electricity with about 1,000 watts per capital, which is the situation of Denmark and Germany. You compare that with the situation in the United States, which is down here for instance, where you have in fact a much smaller renewable capacity, but the cost of electricity is almost a factor too lower. Therefore the second question is that there are not enough renewables within Europe to satisfy fully the domestic resources and therefore some things have to be done elsewhere, but there is a real difficult incurring of several thousand kilometers of the energy from Africa to Europe. So the key problems for renewable energy are of course the best energy, always the cheapest energy. Energy, however, must be available when it is needed. And the third important point that electricity is now becoming the dominant source of energy for renewable energies. And there is a, therefore, but renewable energies require much wider surface of collection, located in specific locations in which production is optimal, and therefore electricity at very high powers must be transported over much longer distances than today, which is not technically very easy, comparable to the one possible today for natural gas and oil. So this is the European situation. Now what about the American situation? Now the second main pillar is coming from the US. And this is essentially based on the question of this graph coming from here from Time magazine, which says this rock could power the world. Commercial extraction for oil shale is now something which has already started over the last 10 years, and in fact the development is quite remarkably growing nowadays. In fact you can see that there are possibilities to do natural gas from shales. This is how it is being organized, or coal-bed methane, again another possibility, which can be absorbed to produce unconventional natural gas. And the worldwide shale resources are global and massive. You can see that both America, Latin America, China and Europe have large amounts of these resources. This coal-bed methane, again, is very rich of different countries, so there are plenty of resources there. Now in Europe we also have plenty of resources for this, but as I said, resources are vast, but strong, popular opposition forbids the use of these applications. Europe is totally absent at the present moment in a practical sense to this solution, which is very strongly developed in the United States. Now this has produced a very fundamental difference between the prices of natural gas in the US, respect to Europe and Japan. As you've seen from this graph, while in 2006 to 2008 the situation where in fact we're similar, now in 2012-13 you can see that while the amount of prices in the US has been going down, the situation in Europe and Japan are much higher, so there is a big difference between the predictions of the two systems. This has also introduced another important fact, that electricity production from coal is going down in the US thanks to the development of shale gas, and increasing the gas has increased, and so the results, it is that the US has introduced a very substantial reduction of CO2 emissions, and then the primary energy production in North America is in fact rising rapidly while in Europe is decreasing, and the petroleum production in various countries shows here that now the United States is producing as much petroleum as Saudi Arabia, which is remarkable results. And you can see for instance the case of Texas, which shows clearly that over the developed shale gas has created really a revolution in the amount of oil which is being used. The third question I'd like to mention very briefly in the few minutes I've got left is the question of China. China is the world's largest producer of electricity, surpassing the United States in 2001. Electricity generation in China has increased 9.6% annually, reaching something very large in the amount of terawatts. Now, the real problem is that coal-fired plants currently make up two-thirds of the power generation, which is of course the result of an abundance of coal in China. That demands respect to be continuing to increase the very rapid pace, however the growth of electricity from coal-fired plants has resulted in increasing air pollution and general lack of efficiency. China is now moving aggressively to curb pollution and increase supply of renewable power. China is the world's largest wind energy producer, with 90 gigawatts of installed power by the end of 2013, and 15% is the near-term renewable target for China. Now, here you can see how the renewable present themselves in China. Wind, solar and hydro are there, and the electric amounts are shown in this graph. You can see that the wider wind and the solar and hydro are optimal in some regions. The electric amounts are dominated, of course, where the people are, and there's a big business between the two distances. You can see here the power transmission requires a long transmission of power. As I mentioned already, you can see the several thousand kilometers of distance are required between the best production of hydro power, wind power, solar power, and the presence of the main people occupations. You can see the situation in China. Now, shale gas is strongly developed by China. You can see here the various companies exploring shale gas. Most of them are American companies, which are going into China to get this system productive. And you can see how quickly the shale gas has been developed in China to reduce the cold dependency. You can see here a graph showing that the estimated annual production rising very rapidly with a very impressive aiming eye level of the situation. Now, let me then continue asking ourselves in the eight minutes I got left about the future of energy production. Now, in the unconventional natural gas resources seem to be a major news effect, which we have to take into account. The process of progressive decarbonization falls, it goes necessary through an increased use of end consumption natural gas. Now, it's quite clear that natural gas could represent the practical alternative to presently growing exploitation of coal as the main source of energy. In addition, many other new developments have to be developed, introduced in order to ensure that the future can become a remarkable era of a cheap production of fossils. And the key to animating this is novel methods. Now, let me also point out to another new fact, the presence of a new source, the largest untapped reserve of natural gas on the crust, and I think called the clathrates. Maybe some of you people only know what the clathrate is. The clathrate is a combination between some, you can see here, some water and some natural gas, which combine in a situation which is stable at temperature around zero degrees. And it's called a clathrate, and it's very rich of methane, for instance one liter of methane clathrate, so-called burning ice, would produce something like 168 liters of methane gas at the normal pressures. And you can see here the picture of a small amount of this clathrate, which is now burning, producing natural gas, and you can see the molecule and the structure of the system like that. Now, the project appears purely academic. Now, still, the people realize that the very large amount of methane hydrate could be present in any environment with suitable pressures and temperatures. And therefore, the potential amount of methane in natural gas hydrates is enormous, with current estimates converging around the conservative value of about 10,000 gigahertz on the methane carbon, as a comparison of the total estimate of conventional natural gas and oil of the order of a few hundred gigatons. So, therefore, you can see here the location where clathrates were observed in the oceans. You can see almost everywhere around the world there are places in which recovered gas hydrate samples or inferred gas hydrates occurrences have been observed. The procedure is extremely simple. You go underground, you extract these materials, clathrates out of the ocean, and you can bring them either or eventually from the permafrost, and you can recuperate those amount in the system, either by having depressurizations or having a thermal change, which eliminates the natural gas from the water. Now, of course, the question is how do we solve the questions of future global warming? It's quite clear that natural gas is inevitably emitting CO2, although at the small fraction, which is half compared to coal, so the new project and new question is how can we reduce even further the CO2 productions? And the project on which, by the way, also myself involved is voided with the help of spontaneous thermal decompositions at the sufficient temperature of methane into hydrogen and black carbon. You can see here the CH4, which transforms itself into liquid, into hydrogen and solid black carbon. And this method is quite valuable because it does not use more energy than the existing reforming process, and which, however, can produce a lot of CO2, four tons of CO2 for each hydrogen, and the black carbon can be recovered as a field level construction method. And this is process under investigation. You can see here the initial attempts, which we did many years ago, in which we just took a tube, we put in the tube at the suitable temperature some kind of a natural gas, which becomes just naturally transforming itself into black carbon and hydrogen very quickly, and so forth and so on. And now the way the methane cracking is more or less represented here, you can see the methane input coming in, and through the methane cracking process hydrogen and carbon are separately produced. The efficiency is high, and in fact the numbers that you can see can be explained, comparing a standard method of producing CH4 with the emission of CO2, or without emission of CO2, you can see that in both cases, Scotty, oh my God. Excuse me. Anyway, the situation is that in fact, this is very similar. You can see here that 40% energy is lost by conventional method, and about 42% is recovered and stored with a normal method in here. The technology, I cannot spend much time describing it, is represented by this picture here. It's very efficient. We have reached, in this case, a thousand degrees something like a major fraction of methane conversion today. It works, and the cost is also very valuable. So let me use the two minutes I got left by mentioning a few more questions. Now, the question of the fuel for transportations. A lot of people have claimed that you should use hydrogen for transportation, but however, really what you really need in order to run the liquid for future transportation has to be a liquid. Now, you can build a liquid by combining the amount of hydrogen produced by the previous method with remaining CO2, which is spent already, whereas plenty of CO2 is being produced. In other words, the idea is to produce methanol through a process in which hydrogen plus CO2 transform themselves into methanol plus water. And this is the example. Very briefly how you do it. You take this graph here, essentially, the natural gas from the methane producing hydrogen with the emission of carbon storage, and you take CO2 from or use CO2 and you combine them together in the methanol synthesis reactor, which then becomes a liquid and is transformed and used as a future replacement for oil. Now, let me therefore conclude. Are we talking about, what are we talking about energy for the future? In my view, a new age of abundance is now being developed, and it is based on unconventional gas resources, initially coal, bed, and shell gas in a foreseeable future, and methane hydrates later on after the coal, bed, and methane shell gas has been more or less distributed. North America, India, China, and Africa, Latin America, will all have access to cheap and abundant shell gas and oil. Europe, of course, is still, for political reasons, still on hold. With both environmental sensitivity and gas consumption on the rise, the main question is how to recover this huge novel natural gas resources available for millennia to come and economically harvest the immense energy wealth in the most efficient and effective manner with minimal environmental footprint. I believe the natural gas sources with zero CO2 emissions are the winners. Shell gas, the ultimate class rate, with the ability of becoming the nominal primary energy source for tenth century to come. Thank you very much.
times, the temperature was warmer than today, life as civilization as they are today, and of the plot here from the EIA International Energy technologies are the only key to solve the transformation of energy with lower emissions and a quantity of significant management of CO2 are most important technological challenges of our time. Now of course the current worldwide energy supply is dependent mainly on fossil fuels which will remain in these tens of decades to come. But in order to curb environmental changes it is necessary to proceed vigorously on two lines. One is the development and progressive utilizations of renewable energy sources. And the second is the more efficient utilizations of fossil fuels The second consideration is based on the development and progressive utilization of various solutions are not very large when therefore, but renewable energies require much comparable to the one possible today for natural these resources. This coal-bed methane, again, is development of shale gas, and increasing the gas growth of electricity from coal-fired plants has introduced in order to ensure that the future can become a remarkable era of a cheap production of fossils. And the key to animating this is novel largest untapped reserve of natural gas on the clathrate, so-called burning ice, would produce these materials, clathrates out of the ocean, and thermal decompositions at the sufficient temperature of methane into hydrogen and black CO2 for each hydrogen, and the black carbon can the question of the fuel for transportations. A for future transportation has to be a liquid. and it is based on unconventional gas resources, initially coal, bed, and shell gas in a foreseeable future, and methane hydrates later on wealth in the most efficient and effective manner rate, with the ability of becoming the nominal