Our Energy Future

By Ranil Senanayake –June 28, 2015

Ranil Senanayake

Any development process that relies on fossil fuels cannot be justified as sustainable, worse; it compromises the responsibilities of that nation towards the rest of the world. Any discussion on energy that fails to take in the opportunity cost and real cost of the respective energy-generating device, must be seen as lopsided and partisan. As in politics, there are various lobbies for all energy generating technologies. Each lobby will sing the praises of and down play the weaknesses of, their industry. The process of lawmaking and enforcement of public accountability will tilt in favor of the successful lobby.

For many years Sri Lanka has kept increasing its reliance on fossil generated energy. Oil, Coal or Gas, it does not make much of a difference; they are all based on fossil carbon. It must be borne in mind that all talk on the relative merits or demerits of each, still has to recognize that fact that the origin of their carbon compounds are fossil. The identification of fossil carbon is very important because there is a fundamental difference in fossil carbon and biotic carbon (the carbon of the living world) and policymakers have either ignorantly or deliberately chosen to ignore this reality. First it is important to understand Carbon.

Carbon (C), the fourth most abundant element in the Universe, after hydrogen (H), helium (He), and oxygen (O), is the building block of life. It’s the element that anchors all organic substances, from fossil fuels to DNA. On Earth, carbon cycles through the land, ocean, atmosphere, and the Earth’s interior in a major biogeochemical cycle (the circulation of chemical components through the biosphere from or to the lithosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere).

The global carbon cycle can be divided into two categories: the geological, which operates over large time scales (millions of years), and the biological/physical, which operates at shorter time scales (days to thousands of years).

The Global Carbon Stock

The Global Carbon Stock began Billions of years ago, as planetesimals (small bodies that formed from the solar nebula) and carbon-containing meteorites bombarded our planet’s surface, steadily increasing the planets Carbon content. Today such increments to the planets Carbon stock have ceased, but the stock has become more compartmentalized.

Since those times, carbonic acid (a weak acid derived from the reaction between atmospheric carbon dioxide [CO2] and water) has slowly but continuously combined with calcium and magnesium in the Earth’s crust to form insoluble carbonates (carbon-containing chemical compounds) through a process called weathering. Then, through the process of erosion, the carbonates are washed into the ocean and eventually settle to the bottom. The cycle continues as these materials are drawn into Earth’s mantle by subduction (a process in which one lithospheric plate descends beneath another, often as a result of folding or faulting) at the edges of continental plates. The carbon is then returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide during volcanic eruptions.

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