Global Energy Consumption On Fossil Fuels - 1857 Words

Abstract Today, global energy consumption heavily relies on fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and natural gas, in 2015, Australia relied 86% of the electricity generation on traditional non-renewable energy sources (73% coal, 13% natural gas).1 The burning of these fossil fuels has been very closely associated with carbon and greenhouse gas emission, resulting changes in the climate such as global warming and extreme weathers. The CO2 emissions had increased from estimated 198 megatons in 1850 to an astonishing 32274 megatons in 2011. The CO2 emission increased 160 times in just the last 160 years.2 As such, the exploration of new, clean renewable energy sources becomes increasing important. To meet the ever increasing demand for energy,†¦show more content†¦Furthermore, osmotic power plants can be installed at any place where rivers meet the seas, this makes it less restricted by the physical location, it also has a minimum influence to the environment since it is only mixing the fres h water and the sea water that are going to meet eventually even if we did not build the power plant. †¢ Method Pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO) is a type of SGE that could potentially relieve the energy stress. In PRO, water is transported through a semi-permeable membrane from the feed to pressurise the water on the draw side, then the pressurised water flow pushes the turbine to generate electricity. Even though the theory of harnessing power by mixing high-saline water and low-saline water was first brought up in the 1950s, and the mechanism was first proposed by Leob in 1970s. PRO was not widely accepted due its low performance. And the use of reverse osmosis (RO) membranes was found to reduce the performance due to severe concentration polarisation. However, with the technological advancement in membrane technologies, PRO seems