Historical perspective on the transition to alternative fuels to meet the greenhouse gas challenge
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.redin.20240834Keywords:
renewable fuels, sustainability, transportation, greenhouse gases, climate changeAbstract
The worldwide consensus is that global climate change is being driven by humanity’s release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Acting on the challenge of reducing fossil fuel and, particularly, petroleum consumption is our collective task. The need to act can seem daunting, given the enormous amount of petroleum that is consumed on a daily basis around the world, which has reached nearly 100 million barrels per day. However, humanity has seen major changes in our reliance on energy resources, in transportation and other sectors, over the last two centuries. Those changes have gotten us into this situation, but they provide more hope for our next transition as well. We can and must expand the adoption of low-carbon intensity renewable fuels, and we must do so in less than three decades, if we hope to limit the global temperature increase to less than 2°C. This paper provides a brief historical perspective on the use of transportation fuels and the transition that humanity must achieve and reports on a recent demonstration to support that transition.
Downloads
References
I. P. on Climate Change, Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C Above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways. Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations Environmental Program, October 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
U. S. D. of Energy, “U.s. national blueprint for transportation decarbonization: A joint strategy to transform transportation,” January 2023. [Online]. Available: https://tinyurl.com/4x2awfhk
U. S. E. P. Agency, “Routes to lower greenhouse gas emissions transportation future,” April 2024. [Online]. Available: https://tinyurl.com/42jxy5da
A. L. Boehman, Reciprocating Engines. Cambridge, UK; New York, USA: Cambridge University Press, May 2023.
U. E. I. Administration, “Annual energy outlook 2021,” Washington, D.C., February 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/
J. J. Eberhardt, “Fuels of the future for cars and trucks,” in Proceedings of the 2002 Diesel Engine Emissions Reduction (DEER) Workshop, San Diego, California, August 2002. [Online]. Available: https://tinyurl.com/37kdpnj9
D. Clerk and G. A. Burls, The Gas, Petrol and Oil Engine: A Complete Treatise on the Internal Combustion Engine. New York: John Wiley and Sons, September 1913.
H. H. Schobert, Energy and Society: An Introduction, 2nd ed. New York: Taylor and Francis, June 2014.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Revista Facultad de Ingeniería Universidad de Antioquia
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Revista Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de Antioquia is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en
You are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
Under the following terms:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
The material published in the journal can be distributed, copied and exhibited by third parties if the respective credits are given to the journal. No commercial benefit can be obtained and derivative works must be under the same license terms as the original work.
Twitter