The Energy challenge

One day waiting in line at the entrance of the St Louis Arch monument a person next to me asked me about my profession. I responded I am a petroleum engineer, and he asked me an interesting question Are we able to meet the growing global demand of energy?. Really make me think like 30 seconds before I can elaborate a simple and straight forward answer. Certainly this is a challenge for us as engineers I responded in order to bring enough resources to match energy supply and demand we evaluate constantly our present energy supply in order to assess sustainability. Since the first well was drilled in Pennsylvania by Coronel Drake in 1859 and hit oil, our lives changed. Several products that are part of our daily life are derivatives of fosil fuels, live expectancy grew as well and population exponentially increased.

It is expected that the population will increase one and a half times from 2011 to 2050 and the energy demand required will be 3 times the actual. Are we planning for this supply increase? . Certainly we hear everyday governments pushing for development of renewable resources such as Wind and Solar Energy we cannot depend alone on this resources because they cannot cope with the capacity required since wind and sun are intermittent  power sources. Biofuels is another option but in order to produce enough to fill up an SUV is equal to the corn consumed by one person for a month thus we have to balance food vs fuel.
So is there a solution to solve the energy supply challenges?.

See ya soon!

Driller