About

This section represents the work of the ICE Energy Panel and provides an insight into ICE’s research on delivering clean, reliable, and modern energy infrastructure.

Energy engineers are central to the challenges of improving energy efficiency and delivering a secure, low carbon energy supply from a diverse range of sources. Developing new renewable sources of energy, deriving energy from waste and carbon capture and storage are some of the approaches used to ensure energy demand is met in a sustainable way.

The Energy Engineer

Energy Engineering professionals are involved in diverse fields across the globe. Prospecting for and extraction of fossil fuels is a worldwide activity being pushed to increasingly challenging locations and requiring engineering innovation. Closer to home, a new low carbon infrastructure of offshore wind power and smart grids is being installed alongside the next generation of nuclear power and methods of generating electricity more cleanly.

Specialist energy engineering courses to BEng / MEng and BSc / MSc exist in various fields leading to professional membership. A full list of accredited courses is available from the Energy Institute:

http://www.energyzone.net/towardsacareer/accredited_courses.asp

Energy Infrastructure

Energy Engineers are critical in the creation of:

  • Offshore oil and gas extraction
  • Sub-sea pipelines
  • Onshore and offshore wind power
  • Gas-fired power stations
  • Nuclear power stations and waste repositories
  • Coal-fired power stations
  • Carbon capture and storage technology
  • Hydroelectric generation
  • Energy from waste
  • Tidal and wave power
  • High voltage transmission networks
  • Gas and LNG distribution networks
  • Combined heat and power and district heating

Technical Issues, Challenges and Solutions

The energy challenge

The energy situation in the UK has undergone a marked change in the past decades.

In the late 1970s, the development of North Sea oil and gas, coupled with investment in nuclear generation, meant that energy in the UK was cheap during a period of stability in the international market.  The UK benefited from an energy supply that was steady and affordably priced.

In the 1980s, government and industry inherited not only North Sea oil and gas, but also an extensive generation and distribution infrastructure, developed when electricity and gas were nationalised industries.  De-industrialisation and improved energy efficiency gave the UK spare capacity.  This allowed the sector to focus on 'sweating' existing assets harder to drive down prices for consumers.

Now our situation is not so secure:

  • the price of oil and gas has seen extreme fluctuations
  • UK North Sea reserves are rapidly declining
  • the UK has little storage capacity for oil and gas
  • the UK is exposed to unstable international energy markets
  • no new nuclear power stations are expected before 2018

In addition we face a new challenge - climate change.  Scientists claim that unless we make deep inroads into our carbon emissions, we are likely to see adverse climate change with severe impacts on coastal communities, food supplies and the number of species in the world. The Stern Review in 2006 identified that failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would lead to a reduction in global ouput.  The UK government set an ambitious target of cutting CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050.

This means the UK energy sector has to deliver a more complex set of outcomes:

  • reducing CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions
  • creating sustainable energy that improves quality of life
  • ensuring energy supply is secure and affordable

History of Energy Engineering

Until the 16th century the UK was a traditional agrarian society reliant on the (limited) productivity of the land for (renewable) energy and fuel. From 1600 onwards, the increasing exploitation of coal as an energy source led to an explosion in economic growth and living standards. This explosion was accelerated by the innovation of early energy engineers through the development of the steam engine – an efficient means of converting heat to mechanical energy.

The UK annual consumption of coal peaked at around 1200TWh in 1920s and declined steadily to below 100TWh by 2000. In the early 20th century energy engineers had developed the technology to turn coal (and its gaseous by-products) into electricity on a large scale. From around 1900, petroleum, gas and electricity began to supplant coal and allow total energy consumption to grow to 1800TWh by 2000.

The innovations of Charles Merz at Neptune Bank Power Station in Newcastle from 1900 onwards led to the largest power generating capacity in Europe and pioneered the technology required to establish the National Grid, which was supplying electrical power to the nation by 1938.

Energy engineering today focuses on the generation and delivery of electricity, now accounting for around 360TWh / year and the extraction, distribution and conversion of the various fuels required to generate it. The vast majority of electricity is still produced from the heat resulting from combustion (or radioactive deterioration in the case of nuclear power) of a fuel source and a steam generator. A small proportion is produced directly through photovoltaics or wind generators.

Energy engineers are also responsible for the extraction, processing and distribution of domestic fuels such as gas and transport fuels such as petrol and diesel.