SOURCES OF ENERGY

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 59, 3 December 1920, Page 7

SOURCES OF ENERGY

THE -WORLD'S MINERAL RESOURCES. Vor over a century tho world has been dissipating its capital of stored energy more rapidly year by year. Mechanical power has, writes tho "Times," supplanted wind-power, water-power, and tho labour of men and animals. Windmills and sailing vessels have yielded to steam engines, waterwhcels have disappeared, motors serve for road transport, and we tnko tho lift instead of climbing tho stairs. The total consumption of energy has been doubled, quadrupled, multiplied indefinitely. The capital consists of energy captured from sunlight by living plants, and stored chemically as coal, oil or pent. It took countless centuries to accuniuiato; its amount is limited..Already many coalfields are exhausted, and the production of oil in the United States will probably cease within tho lifetime of men now aged. The mineral resources of the world havo not yet been completely mapped out, but those most conveniently placed have been measured, their duration estimated. Before the war prices showed that domantl was overtaking supply; but tho fear of reaching the limits of supply is now reinforced by a cost-raising _ factor even more powerful—the increasing demands of labour. These, will have at least' one good effect if they compel a more economical use of existing resources and a more active pursuit of untapped fields. Like all spendthrifts, we have been careless in method and in principle. Economy has been measured in terms of money rather than of thermal efficiency.. When the use of coal is weighed against the nsb of oil, the standard has been monetary. A ton of oil consumed in an engine produces as much heat as three tons of coal; oil, then, is to bo used it its cost is less than three times that of coal. We shall be driven to ask whether wo waste more thermal units m burning oil or in toning coal, and an international scientific authority for conserving the natural resources of the world may have to be given power ntrjnst price to tlierni«l efficiency. ..e shall have also to use our water-power and wind-power more and more, not because they may be cheaper than coal and oil, but 'because they are part of the income of energy and do not dissipate capital. For the same reason the production of alcohol from crops and the utilisation of plant fuel will have to be the forms in which we have handled'energy have been super-atomic. The tmnrforinatieii of heat into mechanical power has been a harnessing of tho various dances of ihc molecules in gases, liquids, and solids. The «f heat has depended on the chemical affinities of the unchanging atoms, .liven electricity, as wo use it, leaves the atoms integral. Tire doctrine of conservation of energy has been a doctrine of superatomic energy. Caloiilaiions of the enoi-gy in stars and the sun and of the duration of conditions suitable for life on tho earth, have reckoned only with superatomic energy; and now the new knowledge of the constitution of matter has revealed tho existence of a capital ot cub-atomic energy so vast as to «e illimitable. Sir Oliver, LooVe estimated that the piece of chalk with which ho. was making a diagram on the WnckbMKl contained 300 million foot-tons of Professor Eddington. lecturing to the British Association, put the subatomic enomv in tho sun as sufficient to maintain its'output of heat for fifteen billions of years. Thaw is a probability that tins sub-atomic energy is new set tree in the it-ars. There the hydrogen atoms are being combined to form moTe complex elements, and in the process electrical energy is set free. This m the famous phrase of Herbert Spencer, made long before the evolution of the elements was mere than an ignorant dream, is an "integration of matter with « concomitant dissipation of energy." What happens in the distant stars might be accomplished in the laboratories which ha-ra learned to interpret stellar chemistry. Investigations with no more than a.profound intellectual interest may ynt come to expand the limits which at present hedge the future of terrestrial life.