GRM 3402 Energy Resources

Instructor: Professor XU Yuan

Email:

Office: WongFooYuanBuilding 247; Telephone: 2609-6647

Office hours: 2:30-4:30pm, Tuesdays or by appointment

Tutor: Feng Xiaofei

Email:

Office: WongFooYuanBuilding 219; Telephone: 2609-6233

Office hour: 2:00-3:00pm, Mondays and Thursdays or by appointment

Course Description:

Energy consumption greatly enhances our welfare but also creates many problems. On the one hand, energy is the foundation of our modern society. Electricity illuminates and operates the world. Modern transportation systems are energy intensive. The consumption of natural gas for cooking avoids indoor air pollution that is causing over one million premature deaths in poor countries. On the other hand, energy also creates many problems, such as contaminated ocean in the Gulf of Mexico, air pollution that makes Hong Kong dizzier, climate change that could have intensified those originally less-frequent natural disasters, etc. A critical goal on energy is to maximize the positive impacts on people’s lives and minimize the negative side. The balance of the two sides is to a great extent the choice of the society. This course aims to guide students through a wide and interconnected array of real-world topics covering both fossil fuels and renewables.

Students are not required to have prior exposure to the field. The course will be taught from an interdisciplinary approach according to the nature of topics in energy and the environment.

Students should have an open mind and be creative. Active participation in class discussion is highly encouraged. Never hesitate to interrupt the instructor in the classroom. The instructor welcomes questions and appreciates challenges. The hope is that students will have fun in taking the course and get more interested in the topics after one semester.

Learning outcome:

After taking this course, students are expected to be equipped with comprehensive knowledge on energy and the environment. Intensive data will be employed in the lectures. Students should learn the skills to present and analyze quantitative data. The course will train the students to approach problems with critical and creative thinking. All continents and major countries will be covered and compared on energy and environmental issues. Students will leave with a global view.

Assignments and course evaluation:

Characterize your own energy consumption: (1) collect and present data on your energy consumption from a specific aspect (week-4), (2) calculate the associated emissions, (3) discuss your options to cut the emissions by half (week-13) (30%)

Two policy memos: One by November and one by December, four pages each (no more, no less) with everything included (35% each)

Weekly topics (course syllabus):

  1. Introduction to the topic and course overview

Concentration 1: Energy consumption

  1. Energy consumption: how much and how
  2. Energy consumption: the deciding factors

Concentration 2: Energy resources and supply

  1. Coal
  2. Oil & natural gas
  3. Nuclear
  4. Renewables
  5. Electricity and electrification

Concentration 3: Energy and the environment

  1. Energy and conventional air pollutants
  2. Energy and climate change
  3. The decarbonization of electricity generation
  4. The decarbonization of transportation
  5. Energy conservation

Academic honesty:

As you already know, academic dishonesty will not be tolerated.

Tutorial:

  1. Find a energy-related news in the past week and come to discuss it in the class (week-4)
  2. Pick up a career/research field that may interest you and discuss the potential overlap with energy and the environment (week-10)
  3. Analyze data from the first assignment and discussion on carbon mitigation in daily lives (week-13)

Useful websites for data and readings:

You are encouraged to play with the data and get to know energy and the environmental impacts.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA): providing energy-related data for the U.S. and other countries.

OECD online library: www.sourceoecd.org, containing especially publications from International Energy Agency (IEA)

Earthtrends database from World Resources Institute:

Hong Kong energy statistics annual report:

China Energy Group in the Lawrence Berkeley Lab: . The China Energy Databook is very useful. A free copy could be requested free of charge on the website:

China Statistical Yearbook:

China Energy Web: It has energy-related news in both Chinese and English.

Course readings by week (required readings in bold):

  1. Introduction to the topic and course overview

UNDP, World Energy Assessment: Energy and the Challenge of sustainability, 2000.

J. Goldemberg and T. B. Johansson, World Energy Assessment: Overview 2004 Update, 2004.

  1. Energy consumption: how much and how

Lam, J. C.; Li, D. H. W.; Cheung, S. O., An analysis of electricity end-use in air-conditioned office buildings in Hong Kong. Build Environ 2003,38 (3), 493-498.

IEA, World Energy Outlook 2007 -- China and India Insights. 2007.

  1. Energy consumption: the deciding factors

Yu, E.; Liu, J., Environmental impacts of divorce. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences 2007,104 (51), 20629-20634.

Ma, C.; Stern, D. I., China's changing energy intensity trend: A decomposition analysis. Energ Econ 2008,30 (3), 1037-1053.

O'Neill, B. C.; Chen, B. S., Demographic Determinants of Household Energy Use in the United States. Population and Development Review 2002,28 (Supplement: Population and Environment: Methods of Analysis), 53-88.

Liu, J. G.; Daily, G. C.; Ehrlich, P. R.; Luck, G. W., Effects of household dynamics on resource consumption and biodiversity. Nature 2003,421 (6922), 530-533.

Bureau of Transportation Statistics, "National Transportation Statistics," U.S. Department of Transportation, Washington, D.C., 2010.

  1. Coal

MIT The future of coal -- options for a carbon-constrained world; Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 2007. Read chapter 2.

Schweinfurth, Stanley P., An introduction to coal quality, in Pierce, B. S.; Dennen, K. O., eds, The National Coal Resource Assessment Overview, 2009,

  1. Oil & natural gas

IEA, Resources to Reserves: Oil and Gas Technologies for the Energy Markets of the Future. Paris, France, 2005. (read chapter 1, 5, and 6)

Erickson, A. S.; Collins, G. B., China's Oil Security Pipe Dream - The reality, and Strategic Consequences, of Seaborne Imports. Naval War College Review Spring 2010,63 (2), 89-111.

  1. Nuclear

MIT, "The future of nuclear power," Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2003. (read chapter 1)

IEA, Nuclear Energy Outlook 2008. Paris, France, 2008.

  1. Renewables

IEA, Energy Technology Perspectives: Scenarios and Strategies to 2050 Paris, France: OECD Publishing, 2008. (read chapters 10, 11 and 12)

Fargione, J.; Hill, J.; Tilman, D.; Polasky, S.; Hawthorne, P., Land clearing and the biofuel carbon debt. Science 2008,319 (5867), 1235-1238.

McElroy, M. B.; Lu, X.; Nielsen, C. P.; Wang, Y. X., Potential for Wind-Generated Electricity in China. Science 2009,325 (5946), 1378-1380.

Lu, X.; McElroy, M. B.; Kiviluoma, J., Global potential for wind-generated electricity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 2009,106 (27), 10933-10938.

  1. Electricity and electrification

Casazza, J.; Delea, F., Understanding electric power systems : an overview of the technology and the marketplace. 2nd ed.; Wiley: Hoboken, N.J., 2004. (Chapter 1 required, and the others optional)

  1. Energy and conventional air pollutants

Coase, R. H., The Problem of Social Cost. Journal of Law & Economics 1960,3 (Oct), 1-44.

World Health Organiation Global Health Risks: Mortality and burden of disease attributable to selected major risks; Geneva, Switzerland, 2009.

Cao, G. L.; Zhang, X. Y.; Zheng, F. C., Inventory of black carbon and organic carbon emissions from China. Atmospheric Environment 2006,40 (34), 6516-6527.

Cohen, A. J.; Anderson, H. R.; Ostro, B.; Pandey, K. D.; Krzyzanowski, M.; Kunzli, N.; Gutschmidt, K.; Pope, A.; Romieu, I.; Samet, J. M.; Smith, K., The global burden of disease due to outdoor air pollution. Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health-Part a-Current Issues 2005,68 (13-14), 1301-1307.

IEA, "Cleaner coal in China," Paris, France, 2009.

  1. Energy and climate change

Pacala, S. W.; Socolow, R. H., Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies. Science 2004,305 (5686), 968 - 972.

Socolow, R. H.; Pacala, S. W., A plan to keep carbon in check. Sci Am 2006,295 (3), 50-57.

Xu, M.; Chang, C. P.; Fu, C. B.; Qi, Y.; Robock, A.; Robinson, D.; Zhang, H. M., Steady decline of east Asian monsoon winds, 1969-2000: Evidence from direct ground measurements of wind speed. J Geophys Res-Atmos 2006,111 (D24)

  1. The decarbonization of electricity generation

Socolow, R. H., Can we bury global warming? Sci Am 2005,293 (1), 49-55.

Lindley, D., The Energy Storage Problem. Nature 2010,463 (7277), 18-20.

IPCC, Special Report on Carbon dioxide Capture and Storage; 2005.

IEA and NEA, Projected Costs of Generating Electricity 2010. Paris, France: OECD, 2010.

  1. The decarbonization of transportation

Huo, H.; Zhang, Q. A.; Wang, M. Q.; Streets, D. G.; He, K. B., Environmental Implication of Electric Vehicles in China. Environmental Science & Technology 2010,44 (13), 4856-4861.

Kahn Ribeiro, S., S. Kobayashi, M. Beuthe, J. Gasca, D. Greene, D. S. Lee, Y. Muromachi, P. J. Newton, S. Plotkin, D. Sperling, R. Wit, P. J. Zhou, 2007: Transport and its infrastructure. In Climate Change 2007: Mitigation. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [B. Metz, O.R. Davidson, P.R. Bosch, R. Dave, L.A. Meyer (eds)], Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

  1. Energy conservation

Dietz, T.; Gardner, G. T.; Gilligan, J.; Stern, P. C.; Vandenbergh, M. P., Household actions can provide a behavioral wedge to rapidly reduce US carbon emissions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 2009,106 (44), 18452-18456.

Allcott, H.; Mullainathan, S., Behavior and Energy Policy. Science 2010,327 (5970), 1204-1205.

IEA; AFD, Promoting Energy Efficiency Investments: Case Studies in the Residential Sector. Paris, France, 2008.

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