Ancient Sunlight, Burnivore, and Oil Companies

People are addicted to burning things, including Ancient Sunlight, to meet their unreasonable energy demand that we've changed from Omnivores in to Burnivores. It's about time we step forward to supply our energy needs in a better way for a better future. But what about all those oil companies that has invested sooooo much in explorations and drilling wells to get oil?

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Sun worshipers (not the ones who makes strange rituals) said that fosil fuels are "ancient sunlight" captured by plants in photosynthesis process, then buried in a certain way and sloooooooooowly changed form in to fosil fuels. Coals, Oil and Gas are like batteries that stored energy from ancient sun.

With a little research, it's easy to see that the process above is highly inefficient. From all of the sun's radiation that get's to the earth's surface, only some are caught by leaves, and the average photosynthesis only manage to process 2% of the energy received by these leafs. And from all of the plants only a small part are buried in the right way, and then only few of these burials gets the right condition (pressure and temperature) to be able to turn them in to Coals or Oil or Gas. And even the process of digging them up has plenty of inefficiency. Then also the combustion engine's has inefficiencies.. and so on, you get the point..
Some gives a rough estimation of 0.0000000000001% (or worse) total efficiency in the whole process of turning ancient sunlight in to usable energy today such as electricity or movement of cars.

Solar power-minded people says let's skip that complicated, long (millions of years), highly inefficient process, and transfer sunlight directly in to electricity!

The average performance of basic Photo-voltaic Solar Panels that are mass produced today has efficiency higher than 10%, that's like way better than burning "ancient sunlight".

Source:

http://www.bodhitree.com/lectures/hartmann.html - The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

http://www.scienceminusdetails.com/2011/02/why-fire-is-cool-entry-4-ancient-energy.html 

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Another great and informative organisation is Kajul "Energy Guru" (http://www.kajul.org/). They classify two types of energy form, based on their origin:

 - Solar Radiation derived (solar, wind, hydro, bio, all fosil fuels) 

 - non solar radiation derived (nuclear & geothermal) 

In the same website you'll also find an updated classification of living organism: burnivore.

After vegetation, herbivore, carnivore, and omnivore, comes a new type: burnivore.

<quote>

Burnivore: Same as Omnivores; with the difference that the burnivore uses 10 up to 1 million times more energy than its own body is able to use. The Burnivore accesses an energy flow through a process of burning all kinds of Chemical Energy (Wood, Coal, Oil, Gas) to release Heat Energy and sometimes a tiny bit of Light. Heat is used to cook food to make it easier to digest; and to expand air or gas to create kinetic energy to propel a bike, car, truck, boat, airplane or rocket forward to transport either itself or goods which it thinks are needed to improve its quality of life. <unquote>

Since their knowledge of burning things is very advanced and they're kind of addicted to burning things, (also due to the fact that they've invested so much in burning technology), they tend to chose alternatives to fossil fuels that are not much of a solution but even making more problems such as bio-fuels. It doesn't reduce any emissions, they make it worse by opening forests for plantations, not even to mention the food supply problem because farmers want to make biofuels.

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So does it means that the Oil Companies should close their offices and stop drilling wells now? 

The answer is "NO"!

There's still a lot of need for oil and gas.

First of all, the energy change (if it ever happens) will take quite some transitional time. Imagine all of that combustion engine cars will slowly be changed in to electric cars. 

Then, even if all the power plants and cars are not using fossil fuels anymore, we will still need oil and gas: in limited amount as fuel for some specific tools, and limitless in the petrochemical industry as the base material needed to make many kinds of compounds such as polycarbons, plastics, paraffin, asphalt, wax, etc, that makes important parts of most of modern product we need today like tools, vehicles, cosmetics etc.

(look it up in google: "Oil is too Valuable to Burn" )

Cheers,
WHY