Methanization of Fossil Fuel: A Possible Sustainable Future Energy Source for Mankind?

Abstract

Copyright: © 2012 Oger PM. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. One of the main human challenges over the ages has been to find and exploit the best and most efficient source of energy. Mastering of wood, coal, petroleum and nuclear powers have marked out the path to progress. Today, petroleum and coal represent the most extensively used energy source worldwide and the resources tend to be depleted. The large scale burning of fossil fuels also comes at a high environmental cost and we are still trying to imagine the next generation energy source. It is not expected that renewable energies based on the harvest of solar or wind energy will supplant fossil fuels in the near future. Thus, we are stranded with fossil fuels for at least the next few decades and need to find ways to make our use of fossil fuels cause the least environmental impact. One approach to reducing the environmental impact of fossil fuel usage is to lower CO2 emission per Kj of energy, a claimed advantage of biogenic methane. Thus, in time of declining discovery of conventional fossil fuel reserves and the ongoing issues relating to security of energy supply and global warming methane may represent the future for fossil fuels.