Abstract
The principal energy sources in antiquity were all derived directly from the sun: human and animal muscle power, wood, flowing water, and wind. About 300 years ago the industrial revolution began. It brought an exponential increase in the energy available to humans to do economic work. This revolution began with stationary wind-powered and water-powered technologies, which were subsequently supplemented and replaced by fossil hydrocarbons (fossil meaning old): coal in the nineteenth century, oil since the twentieth century, and now, increasingly, natural gas. The global use of hydrocarbons for fuel by humans has increased nearly 800-fold since 1750 and about 12-fold in the twentieth century. The enormous expansion of the human population and the economies of most nations in the past 100 years have been facilitated by a commensurate expansion in the use of fossil fuels.
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Hall, C.A.S. (2017). Fossil Fuels. In: Energy Return on Investment. Lecture Notes in Energy, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47821-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47821-0_9
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