TED经典句子背诵

oil

For the next few minutes, we're going to talk about energy. And it's going to be a bit of a varied talk. I'll try to spin a story about energy, and oil's a convenient starting place. The talk will be broadly about energy, but oil's a good place to start. And one of the reasons is, this is remarkable stuff. You take about eight or so carbon atoms, about 20 hydrogen atoms, you put them together in exactly the right way and you get this marvelous liquid, very energy-dense and very easy to refine into a number of very useful products and fuels. It's great stuff. Now, as far as it goes, there's a lot of oil out there in the world.

Here's my little pocket map of where it's all located. A bigger one for you to look at. But this is it. This is the oil in the world. Geologists have a pretty good idea of where the oil is. This is about 100 trillion gallons of crude oil still to be developed and produced in the world today. Now, that's just one story about oil, and we could end it there and say, "Well, oil's going to last forever because, well, there's just a lot of it." But there's actually more to the story than that. Oh, by the way, if you think you're very far from some of this oil, 1000 meters below where you're all sitting is one of the largest producing oil fields in the world. Come talk to me about it. I'll fill in some of the details if you want. So that's one of the stories of oil. There's just a lot of it. But what about oil? Where is it in the energy system? Here's a little snapshot of 150 years of oil. And it's been a dominant part of our energy system for most of those 150 years. Now, here's another little secret I'm going to tell you about. For the last 25 years, oil has been playing less and less of a role in global energy systems. There was one kind of peak oil in 1985, when oil represented 50 percent of global energy supply. Now, it's about 35 percent. It's been declining, and I believe it will continue to decline. Gasoline consumption in the U.S. probably peaked in 2007 and is declining.

So oil is playing a less significant role every year. And so, 25 years ago, there was a peak oil just like, in the 1920s, there was a peak coal, and a hundred years before that, there was a peak wood. This is a very important picture of the evolution of energy systems. And what's been taking up the slack in the last few decades? Well, a lot of natural gas and a little bit of nuclear, for starters. And what goes on in the future? Well, I think out ahead of us a few decades is peak gas, and beyond that, peak renewables.

Now, I'll tell you another little very important story about this picture. Now, I'm not pretending that energy use in total isn't increasing, it is. That's another part of the story. Come talk to me about it. We'll fill in some of the details. But there's a very important message here. This is 200 years of history. And for 200 years, we've been systematically decarbonizing our energy system. Energy systems of the world becoming progressively, year on year, decade on decade, century on century, becoming less carbon intense. And that continues into the future with the renewables that we're developing today, reaching maybe 30 percent of primary energy by mid century. Now that might be