Preface

Academically and industrially there is increasing awareness that energy and

the environment present society with issues that are pressing and need to be
approached globally. Many of the global effects are driven by two factors: the
continuing increase in population as shown in Figure 1 from the IEAWorld
Energy Outlook report for 2009 and the increasing demand for energy, both
from the new developingand from the developed countries, as shown in
Figure 2, which comes from the BP Energy Outlook 2030 Report page 8,
published in January 2011,which summarizes global energy use over 60 years.

This growing global energy demand alone, independent of environmental

concerns, is such a problem globally that innovative and creative solutions
must be found to meet this demand. This is probably more challenging in the
developing countries, where resource limitations may limit the number of
options available, than in the developed ones. We note this, because as this
text will emphasize, there is no obvious way to achieve this. In fact, it is clear
that the demand will have to be met by a mosaic of current, as well as new,
sources. Overall, the fact that a diversity of new energy sources is needed, will
create new, large-scale industries, a development that may lead to significant
changes in, or even the end of, some of our current established industries. If
we now include the various environmental concerns that accompany modern
society's functioning, this leads to the drive to achieve new energy-generating
and -storage capacity via sustainable and clean technologies. At the same
time, both these concerns, and the increasing energy demand, re-emphasize
the need to accelerate the adoption of more efficient technologies worldwide.