Ocean energy and the law of the sea: The need for a protocol
Although fossil fuels are the overwhelming source of energy for the world, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, demographic, environmental, political, and economic factors indicat...
OTEC: electricity from the ocean
OTEC is an attractive candidate as a contributor to U.S. energy self-sufficiency. It is a renewable source of base-load electricity, though limited in its geographical availability to the Gulf Coast and to island territories (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Pacific dependencies). The grazing concept for producing energy intensive products has a much wider area of siting--there are some 20 million square miles of suitable tropical waters near the equator. Furthermore, for tropical third-world countries, OTEC offers a valuable resource, if capital funding can be made available by the more developed countries. OTEC is environmentally benign and does not consume fossil fuels which are needed for other purposes (such as petrochemicals). No technological problems have been uncovered which will kill the OTEC concept; the engineering challenges appear to be those of scale rather than of technological difficulty. The materials are available; the construction methods are known. A leading design for an OTEC plant is a vertical, semi-submerged spar-shaped structure--comparable in size to off-shore oil plants. Its configuration makes it insensitive to wind and wave turbulence. Held in place by a single mooring line and weight anchor in tropical oceans, its electrical power would be taken to shore by cable. Two crews ofmore » about 30 persons each would be required to operate an OTEC plant. Power from the first commercial OTEC plant is expected by 1986.« less
Energy: Natural limits and abundances
With the decline of ancient civilization—the successive incinerations of the great Library of Alexandria in the fourth century and the Moslem conquest of Egypt in the seventh—it remained for Persian and Arabian scholars to assemble, record, and continue to enlarge knowledge. The western world became aware of this heritage during the Crusades of the twelfth century when translations of Arabic records became available in Latin and various other tongues. These events provided the intellectual fuel for the Renaissance and eventually for the industrial revolution, which, according to so me, has about run its course. 
 
Today the Arabs are again influencing history. They are making us realize that industrialized society is critically dependent upon the natural abundance of fuels. Indeed, by their petroleum export policies, they have forced us to reexamine our patterns of living and our demands upon the resources of the earth.