In 1965 the oil company Occidental won concessions to prospect for oil across 5000 km² of desert in Libya (blocks 102 and 103). The company discovered approximately 3bn barrels of oil and, at one point, was extracting 800,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd). At this rate of extraction the Occidental field would last for just ten years. During those ten years the sun would radiate 2300 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy per year onto each square metre of the Libyan desert. The amount of solar energy that fell on blocks 102 and 103 was 31.5bn kWh per day – the equivalent energy provided by 16.5 million bpd or, during the lifetime of the oilfield, the total equivalent energy of 60bn barrels of oil.
This goes some way to show just what an inefficient oil producer nature is. It took hundreds of thousands of years for the many billions of kilowatt hours of the sun’s energy to be transformed into a few million barrels of oil. Unfortunately we are consuming that oil in the space of a few decades. At some point in this century the mismatch between production and consumption will become apparent to both the oil producers and energy consumers.
However, while nature struggled to turn solar energy into fuel in an efficient and timely manner, at present, man can do little better. Compared with extracting oil from a well, the cost of collecting solar energy over a wide area is prohibitively high. It costs as little as $3000 to activate (bring into production) a barrel of oil per day, while activating the solar energy equivalent of that barrel of oil can cost as much as $1m. Wind energy fares a little better, but it still can cost over $50,000 to activate the equivalent of a barrel per day of oil in wind energy. On this basis, oil reserves would have to shrink radically before we turned to the large-scale production of energy from renewable sources, and the cost of activating renewable energy would, at first sight, bankrupt the economies of most industrial countries.
Even so, wind energy is proving profitable – in some cases, producing electricity using a wind turbine can cost less than using coal or oil. As well, within a decade, alternatives to silicon crystal based photovoltaic solar collectors will bring down the cost of converting the sun’s energy into fuel. Energy farming using second generation solar cells could earn technology vendors over $60m for each pilot sized 1 km² energy farm. It is envisaged that there may be as many as ten such, subsidised, farms built around the world that exploit second generation, polymer based, photovoltaic technology. A third generation, nanostructured, photovoltaic technology that uses the sun’s energy to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, while currently in an early stage of development, could see commercially viable energy farms coming on stream within two decades.
As power generation using renewable resources involves the gathering of energy over a wide geographic area, rather than a concentrated point such as a wellhead, an agricultural rather than an industrial model should be employed. In this report we examine a new model for the generation of energy – one based on farming rather than extraction.
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