History of Energy

This is the Introduction to R.W. Sandwell, ed., Powering Up Canada: Fuel, Power and  Energy Since 1600 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016) that provides an overview of the history of energy in Canada. The edited volume includes chapters of various forms of fuel and energy  the powered Canada, including horses and oxen, wood,  wind, non-turbine water power, hydro-electric power, coal, oil, natural and manufactured gas and nuclear power.

This article looks to give an overview throughout the geothermal energy technology. Analyzing the origin of its energy and talking about it history in the actual electrical applications. From the first time when geothermal energy was used to generate electricity and its path in The United States until today, where the use of geothermal power plants has been extended around the world. Also, it will be given a brief examination on the future technologies that are under developing in this moment and that will make this type of energy a better competitor against the other renewable energies, as wind and solar power that have taken advantage in the actual sustainable energy market.

The increase in global energy demand, environmental problems and geopolitical tensions due to the control of finite conventional energy resources; these are reasons that have currently focused the attention of scientists on the applications of solar energy. The objective of this contribution is to reflect the trends in research regarding applications of solar energy. The materials and methods used in this investigation consisted of a search and bibliometric analysis carried out in the academic directory Scopus. A group of publications was detected under specific search criteria. The information detected was processed with text mining elements in the visualization software and bibliometric map exploration of VOSviewer science. The article dead sections, records of the first applications of solar energy, the social environment of solar energy applications, the first scientific meetings of global connotation in this subject, and bibliometrics of scientific activity focused on the appli...

The story of deepwater Gulf of Mexico can be told through the story of Shell Oil's Mars Project.  Mars was one of the earliest prospects to be drilled and developed on some of the first federal deepwater leases offered in the early 1980s.  In the late 2010s, thirty-five years later, it remains one of the most productive basins in the Gulf at the cutting edge of technology.  More than any other project in the Gulf of Mexico, Mars documents the wide-ranging innovations that have propelled the industry into ever-deeper waters and new geological frontiers.  It provides a window into the evolution of geophysical technology and interpretation, drilling and well completion, platform and facilities design, workforce organization and culture, process engineering, subsea engineering, reservoir engineering, pipelining, project management, disaster management, and safety management.  Mars marks the transition from fixed to floating production platforms in deepwater, and from “conventional” deepwater to subsalt deepwater.  It also had a starring role in the industry’s recovery from two traumatic disasters, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo blowout and spill in 2010.  Finally, the 2014 installation of a second, state-of-the-art production facility in the same field once again placed Mars in the forefront of offshore development.

This essay is part of a multi-media website,  https://dsps.lib.uiowa.edu/mars-deepwater-gulf/, devoted to documenting, analyzing, and displaying the history of this American energy asset and others in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. 

The website features the following resources:

• Two historical essays:  “Shell Oil’s Deepwater Mission to Mars,” by Tyler Priest; and “The Shape of These Monsters: From Fixed to Floating Offshore Oil and Gas Production, 1976-2006,” by Joel Hewett.
• A 30-year timeline of significant moments in the history of Shell’s greater Mars development.
• A photo gallery of the Mars TLP and its people, equipment, and projects.
• A video collection featuring the Mars, Ursa, and Olympus tension-leg platforms, along with many others in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico (more than 80 total).
• A series of graphs that illustrate the evolution of deepwater projects and production in the Gulf of Mexico.
• A series of Gulf of Mexico maps, including:  an interactive ArcGIS Gulf of Mexico Map that displays Gulf of Mexico leases, platforms, pipelines, and boundaries; an interactive ArcGIS Deepwater Gulf of Mexico Story Map that highlights 17 major deepwater facilities; and an interactive ArcGIS Onshore Oil and Gas Infrastructure Map that displays onshore, lower-48 U.S. oil and gas infrastructure and its offshore connections.
• A “Martian Stories” site for oral histories and personal recollections.

With the climate change debate, discussions about energy provision have become ever more important. However, these discussions are much too often narrowly focused on CO2 footprints or production costs. But beyond ecological and economic aspects, energy production, energy distribution and energy use affect a society with its structures of (political and economic) power. This book explores such often neglected aspects of energy.

This article discusses the crisis of eotechnic, which began in the seventeenth century and the solutions to overcome it, that generated the call was paleotechnic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also discusses major changes in social organization and work with the industrial revolution and the transformation of the global economy during the nineteenth century, which paved neotechnic of the twentieth century. We
conclude with reflections on the complex interaction between society and the environment in the twenty-first century, emphasizing the most important issues in contemporary environmental crisis

Nuclear energy represents one of the most controversial issues in contemporary history and politics, and raises either vehement opposition or unconditional support. On the one hand, the use of nuclear technology in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War shaped postwar discussions about the use of nuclear power, while at the same time influencing the balance of power between the two superpowers and relations inside the Atlantic bloc and with Third World countries. On the other hand, the same technology that raised fears of a potential nuclear conflict -and therefore of a Third World War and of a total annihilation of mankind -also became the object of widespread beliefs in the possibility of producing an unlimited, clean and effi-cient source of energy. This apparent contradiction between the hopes and fears of nuclear power was declined differently in different national contexts, but characterized most countries in the post-World War II period. For many, including Italy, the «nuclear euforia» of the 1950s and 1960s was strongly linked to the lack of energy resources. For others, such as Third World countries, access to nuclear power became a way of overcoming the technological gap with the developed world, and establishing their place in the international arena. In all cases, debates about nuclear policies intersected in complex ways with wider discussions about modernization and international relations 1 . Over the last twenty years, scholars have devoted an increased attention to the study

How can we explain the formidable success of the car all over the world? It is suggested here that the historical origin is key to the root of this enthusiasm. From a climate change mitigation perspective car culture is a difficult problem, but why is that so? This paper presents a framework of interpretation based on the literature of the birth of the American car culture about one hundred years ago. Agency, not the least on the part of the user, technological choice, and industrial links are emphasized and put together in a framework called "forks and links". This framework is tested as a narrative in the second part of the paper. It is argued that the car belongs to a product category with which active users can change their lives, while fuel and propulsion is just an input. A desired capacity for touring was decisive in the choice between gasoline and electric cars.

Ce dossier d’ Afrique contemporaine est consacré à l’analyse de la situation actuelle en matière d’énergie en Afrique d’un point de vue historique, politique et économique. Il apporte une contribution au vaste domaine d’études de l’énergie en mettant l’accent sur un continent qui dans un proche avenir pourrait, d’après l’Agence internationale de l’énergie (AIE), devenir le plus dynamique dans le domaine énergétique1. En effet, l’énergie se trouve au coeur de deux aspects fondamentaux de l’avenir de l’Afrique : le développement économique et social, d’une part, et le changement climatique, d’autre part.

This paper provides a brief history of the origins and use of the first modern lighting in rural Canada. Of all the revolutions in lighting, none was taken up more quickly or embraced more widely than the coal-oil (also called kerosene) lamp. This paper argues that the lamp became so popular not only because it met the substantial demand for an inexpensive and bright artificial light, but because, from consumers’ vantage point, it closely resembled the familiar culture of lighting of the organic or pre-industrial energy regime. Familiar, bright, and inexpensive, it was also available in remote rural locations through the same transportation routes moving people and other goods. As a result, kerosene continued to be the main conveyor of artificial lighting in most rural households until the mid-twentieth century. The paper concludes with a discussion of the not-so-familiar toxic legacy associated with this first modern lighting.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Canadian homemakers were targets of a multi-faceted educational campaign in which a range of corporate and social reform groups sought to change the ways women cooked, cleaned and heated their homes. This article explores these highly gendered pedagogies of modernity and resituates them within the context of Canadian energy history, focusing on household electrification to highlight women’s resistance, in terms of their day-to-day household practices, to this educational campaign. It argues that women remained largely unimpressed by the promise of electrification into the 1940s, not only because of the problems inherent in the new, centralized supply of energy itself, but because of the deeply gendered cultural practices and preferences that continued to define women’s life and work within the older energy regime of the Ontario home.

This article is drawn from the author’s Canada-wide study, Heat Light and Work in Canadian Homes, 1850-1960.  Contextualized in both a very recent literature documenting the pivotal role played by fossil fuels and electrical energy in the changes associated with urban industrialization, and in the rich scholarly literature focused on the consumption practices within the home, this article examines the ways that rural Canadians experienced the shift from the organic energy regime (characterized by relatively low energy use and reliance on local rural environments), to the mineral energy regime of fossil fuels and electricity (characterized by high energy use, dense population clusters, and complex networks that distribute energy). Modern grid-supplied energy came very late to rural Canada; the great majority of rural Canadians were still relying on kerosene (paraffin) for lighting and wood for heating and cooking as late as 1941. This article focuses on  rural Canadians’ long reliance on the wood stove to explore the distinctively slow and late transition that characterized the Canadian transition to the modern energy regime. Although the cast iron wood-burning stove eventually became as emblematic of the ‘backwardness’ of rural life as the coal-oil lamp, the author argues that the wood stove, like the coal oil lamp, was in fact a product of the modern energy regime, and was entangled in networks of extraction, processing and transportation of fossil fuels along modern coal-and steam networks.

[From the Introduction]
Humans, the Anthropocene term implies, have broken onto new spatiotemporal scales. Whereas for millennia humans scampered across
the surface of planet Earth barely making a scratch, today, Anthropocene scholars agree, humans leave traces, often irreversible traces, on a global scale. But how did this shift in perspective – counterintuitive at least from a Western modernist worldview – come about? Though there are no doubt many intellectual avenues4 this conceptual history has taken, I intend to shed light on its historical entanglement with the discourse of energy and entropy.
[…] Taking into account the specific historico-epistemological contexts, I ask how the concept of energy shaped the knowledges, epistemological attitudes, and worldviews that are integrated in the Anthropocene concept today. From this an image emerges in which the concept of energy generated both the justification of the large-scale extortion of nature but also the very worldview that purports to subvert it: the Anthropocene.

The chapter aims to trace major trends and tendencies in urban energy provision in the 19th and 20th centuries, starting with wood provision as the dominant mode of urban energy system before the Industrial Revolution. The paper identifies several types of wood provision as they can be observed in German cities, based on a typology suggested by Joachim Radkau. After a brief discussion of the notion of a 'wood crisis' in the early 19th century it continues to highlight the urban transition to a fossil fuel economy, using coal, which took places in most parts of Europe after 1850. For modern energy systems technicals networks, as they were formed for gas supply and electrity became foundational by the end of the 19th century and still structure urban energy systems today. The paper presents the spectrum of applications of energy and how these transformed urban everyday life and the functioning of cities. It also discusses, to which degree cities were empowered or dis-empowered by new roles and functions they played within energy systems during the 20th centuries. It observes a tendency towards relocalization and re-municipalization of energy over the last years, reacting to new demands within the policy of energy transition.

C es dernières années ont vu paraître de nombreux ouvrages portant sur l'histoire de l'énergie. On peut se réjouir de ce renouveau d'intérêt, on peut aussi regretter que ces ouvrages se soient placés sous la bannière de la « transition ». Avec l'urgence climatique, ce mot a acquis un tel prestige, une telle centralité, que les historiens en sont venus à l'employer pour décrire toutes sortes de processus, y compris ceux qui furent, à rigoureusement parler, des additions énergétiques

Son iki yıldır yoğun bir biçimde gündelik hayatımızı dönüştüren Covid-19 salgını ve beraberinde getirdiği sorular ve sorunlar sadece tükettiğimiz kömür, su, elektrik gibi enerji kaynakları ve bu kaynaklar aracılığıyla ulaştığımız altyapı hizmetlerinin teknik kapasitelerini yeniden düşünmemizi sağlamakla kalmadı, bu kaynaklara ve hizmetlere erişimdeki
eşitsizlikleri de artırarak daha da görünür kıldı. Özellikle uzaktan erişim ile gerçekleştirilmek zorunda kalan eğitim süreci, Türkiye’nin farklı coğrafyalarındaki dijital uçurumun da derinliğini bize gösterdi.
Bu sunum, bugün gündelik hayatımızda ulaşım, iletişim, sağlık ve ev içi teknolojileri gibi birçok alanda bağımlı hale geldiğimiz elektrik enerjisinin, henüz yeni bir enerji kaynağı olarak tartışılmaya başlandığı erken Cumhuriyet dönemindeki siyasi, toplumsal ve kültürel izdüşümlerine odaklanarak, siyasi iktidar, çokuluslu şirketler ve toplum arasındaki uzlaşma ve gerilimleri ele almayı amaçlıyor. Küresel kapitalizm, ulus-devlet inşası ve vatandaşlık tartışmaları ekseninde elektrik teknolojisinin gündelik hayattaki tezahürlerinden örnekler
sunarak, elektrik enerjisi üretim, dağıtım ve tüketim pratiklerinde ne tür siyasi ve ekonomik kararların ve toplumsal taleplerin belirleyici olduğunu sorguluyor. Bu çalışma Türkiye Osmanlı ve Cumhuriyet Arşivleri, günümüzde Belçika’da bulunan ve geç Osmanlı ve erken Cumhuriyet
döneminde İstanbul’da elektrikli aydınlatma ve ulaşım altyapı hizmetlerinde aktif olan SOFİNA şirket arşivi ve dönemin gazete ve anılarında yer alan kayıtlara dayanmaktadır.

Energy history is a newly emerging field in Canada, and one where recent preliminary research makes it possible to venture into the area of comparative energy studies. This paper provides a preliminary reconnaissance of the emergence of modern lighting in Canada, situating its history within the country’s larger idiosyncratic (in international terms) transition from the organic to the mineral energy regime. Canadians have always been among the world’s highest energy consumers per capita, and made a relatively late transition to the industrial regime. The country’s cold environment, its dispersed settlement patterns, the persistence of a distinct rural political economy supported by an abundance of energy from the organic regime, as well as the absence of cheap coal in Central Canada, help to explain the country’s distinctive characteristics. The history of lighting, however, is an exception within Canadian energy history: locally available, petroleum-based illuminating oil and state-owned hydroelectricity were adopted relatively early, comprising an exception within Canada’s late-modernizing trend:  lighting, and not heat or power, led the country’s transition to the modern energy regime.

maintain the thesis that throughout history culture and energy have been reciprocal entities: technological change determines cultural achievements and vice versa. Their artists' book is based on the appendix of the six-volume Encyclopedia of Energy. Entitled «A Chronology of Energy-Related Developments», the 64-page appendix sums up historical events of relevance to energy since the existence of the planet earth. In collaboration with 32 art historians and cultural theorists, the two artists have supplemented the appendix with «art-related» entries in words and pictures. «Accounts and reflections regarding hand axes, fire, horsepower, an electric dress from 1950s Japan, a channelled flashlight and much more: all of these coalesce into a metaphor that highlights what culture in a narrow sense and artists in particular have to offer. Colour is added

Cet exposé sur les politiques gazières se concentre notamment sur la période 1959-1986, et traite de l'aménagement du marché, puis de la politique des réserves stratégiques à la suite du choc pétrolier. This article focuses on the gas policy in the Netherlands in the period 1959-1986. It includes the organisation of the market as well as the policy for strategic reserves, which was implemented after the first oil shock.

The text discusses the astute involvement of Jean Monnet and his Comité d'action pour les Etats-Unis d'Europe (Action Committee for the United States of Europe) in the shaping of Europe's transnational energy policy after the disappointing creation of EurAtom, the European Atomic Energy Community. 1955-1974.
The presentation was followed by a debate with Pascal Fontaine, former collaborator of Jean Monnet, lecturer at the Paris Institut d’Études Politiques and at the École Polytechnique.

This article takes London in 1873 century as a case study of power vulnerability. Its dependance on coal makes it vulnerable to two kinds of risks : a social one, when coal prices go up and bring « famines » ; an environmental one, with the great smogs created by coal smoke.

The increase in global energy demand, environmental problems and geopolitical tensions due to the control of finite conventional energy resources; these are reasons that have currently focused the attention of scientists on the applications of solar energy. The objective of this contribution is to reflect the trends in research regarding applications of solar energy. The materials and methods used in this investigation consisted of a search and bibliometric analysis carried out in the academic directory Scopus. A group of publications was detected under specific search criteria. The information detected was processed with text mining elements in the visualization software and bibliometric map exploration of VOSviewer science. The article dead sections, records of the first applications of solar energy, the social environment of solar energy applications, the first scientific meetings of global connotation in this subject, and bibliometrics of scientific activity focused on the appli...

A history of energy from the Middle Ages to present days, with an introduction by Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud surveying the historiography of energy from its beginning, 22 papers dealing with most energies through time and space, a conclusion by Charles-François Mathis presenting the main issues of energy in past and present societies, and a postface by Mathieu Arnoux.

À l'heure du réchauffement climatique, des catastrophes nucléaires et de la recherche des moyens de « décarboner » nos économies, personne ne doute plus que les questions énergétiques soient cruciales pour nos sociétés. L'idée que leur étude puisse concerner les sciences humaines et sociales est en revanche beaucoup moins consensuelle. L'énergie est pourtant une question éminemment sociale. Ce qui pose problème, en effet, n'est pas tant la quantité d'énergie à notre disposition (le soleil nous en procure bien plus que nous n'en utilisons) que la façon de la mobiliser et de la partager, questions sociales par excellence. L'évolution du rapport de l'humanité à l'énergie ne saurait se réduire à un récit linéaire des innovations techniques qui ont permis d'exploiter telle ou telle ressource ou de mettre en oeuvre tel ou tel convertisseur plus efficace que ceux dont on disposait auparavant. Un système énergétique est toujours sous-tendu par des structures et des choix politiques, économiques, sociaux. Pour comprendre la façon dont les sociétés industrialisées sont arrivées au régime énergétique dont elles prétendent-dans le meilleur des cas-vouloir sortir, il nous faut comprendre comment elles y sont entrées et, pour cela, étudier l'histoire du rapport des sociétés à l'énergie dans le temps. C'est cette histoire qu'explorent les vingt-trois contributions réunies ici. Elles s'efforcent de montrer les enjeux de la mobilisation et de la dépense énergétiques, les intérêts qui les sous-tendent, les acteurs qui ont bénéficié des choix effectués et ceux qui en ont pâti, l'influence de ces choix sur la santé, l'environnement, les modes de vie. La complexité des systèmes et des transitions énergétiques se révèle au fil de ces analyses, de l'Écosse médiévale au Cameroun contemporain en passant par l'Espagne du premier xx e siècle.

The points of view of Joule and Mayer that led to the Energy Conservation Principle is considered. Their points of view are contrasted with the related to equilibriumnonequilibrium squeme in dealing with the relation between thermical and other phenomena.

This article analyses the way scientists, politicians and writers of anticipation novels have imagined, between 1860 and 1914, the energy future of Great-Britain, and more precisely what kind of transitions out of coal have they figured out.

En termes de l’énergie, l’année 1973 fait rapidement penser au choc pétrolier qui entame le 16 octobre. Toutefois déjà en janvier, les tensions au marché pétrolier se reflètent dans les délibérations européennes au niveau de l’énergie. Les questions des relations communautaires avec les États consommateurs et les États producteurs de pétrole ainsi que l’organisation d’un marché commun en énergie sont au centre du débat européen. Les Neuf ne réussissent pas à s’y accorder. Si important que les relations internationales sont considérées par tous, un développement de ces relations communautaires se bute aux divergences sur les compétences de la Commission européenne et l’organisation du marché commun.
En été 1973, la Commission nourrit les délibérations des Neuf  avec plusieurs communications et propositions de règlements, notamment en matière d’un marché commun éventuel. Mais les Neuf ne réussissent toujours pas à se mettre en ligne en matière d’un régime commun ou le rôle du pouvoir public. En même temps, la Commission traite la question des relations avec les États consommateurs de pétrole dans le contexte des réflexions dans le cadre de  l’OCDE. Au sein de cette organisation, les thèmes sont abordés tels qu’un système de répartition de pétrole en temps de crise ou des relations avec les États producteurs de pétrole. Si la Commission évite habilement un nouveau débat au niveau communautaire en cette matière, elle touche au fond le thème sensible des relations communautaires avec les États producteurs de pétrole. Les Neuf ne réussissent pas à s’accorder sur le rôle de la Commission européenne dans ces relations extérieures. Le nœud gordien sera finalement tranché lors du choc pétrolier quand les décisions en cette matière se déplacent de l’arène communautaire au cadre de la coopération politique. Le dialogue euro-arabe en suivrait l’année suivante.

Francia, junto con Gran Bretaña, fue el país líder en el nacimiento y consolidación de la industria del gas. Desde mediados del siglo XIX este país desempeñó un papel clave en la difusión de la tecnología de producción de gas de hulla, especialmente en el área mediterránea, en donde concentró un gran volumen de inversión en el exterior. Entre los factores responsables de este proceso debe destacarse la presencia de ingenieros y diversas asociaciones profesionales. Entre estas últimas sobresale la Société Technique de l`Industrie du Gaz en France, una de las principales asociaciones gasistas a nivel internacional. Este organismo, constituido en el año 1874, aglutinaba a profesionales del sector, que actuaron como agentes que pilotaron la transferencia tecnológica internacional. El objetivo del trabajo es analizar la relevancia de la asociación en dicho proceso de difusión técnica, tanto en Francia como en el resto de la Europa latina (España, Italia y Portugal) desde finales del sigl...

Este artículo estudia las crisis del alumbrado público y del suministro de gas en Madrid, como resultado del desabastecimiento de carbón que sufrió toda España durante la Primera Guerra Mundial. Se explican los problemas que dichas crisis ocasionaron a la ciudad, sus industrias y sus habitantes, cuando estos se vieron privados de iluminación en las vías públicas, de cocina y calefacción en los hogares, y de fluido para el funcionamiento de las fábricas. El objetivo principal de la investigación es ofrecer un análisis de las repercusiones sociales y políticas de un episodio bastante desconocido de la historia de la capital española.

This article is intended to illustrate the crisis of public lighting and gas supply in Madrid, as a result of the lack of coal in Spain during the years of the First World War. The research focuses mainly on the problems caused to the city, its industries and its inhabitants as a result of these crises, when they were deprived of public lighting, cooking and heating within the households, and gas for running the factories. Ultimately, the research is an attempt to explain the social and political repercussions of a rather unknown episode of the history of the Spanish capital.

This paper will investigate the financial and technological relations between Greece and the United Kingdom during the Interwar period, focusing on a British consortium who was responsible for the electrification of Athens and Piraeus, the Power and Traction Finance Company Ltd (PTFC).

The points of view of Joule and Mayer that led to the Energy Conservation Principle is considered. Their points of view are contrasted with the related to equilibrium-nonequilibrium squeme in dealing with the relation between thermical and other phenomena.
Se analizan los puntos de vista de Joule y Mayer que dan origen al principio de conservación de la energía. Se contraponen estas perspectivas con el planteamiento derivado del esquema equilibración-desequilibración para el análisis de las relaciones entre los fenómenos térmicos y otros fenómenos.