Energy Dilemmas – a topic learnt across the globe

Hi everyone, apologies for the delay in the posting of this next blog, I’ve been swamped with work lately – the third year work load is definitely a step up from second year!

On Tuesday I submitted my first assessed piece of coursework this year. It was an energy brief, which is basically a short document summarising the key news and theories of a topic in the energy sector, providing insights into what might happen in the near future. These are given to companies so that they can understand an overview of the whole topic, giving them insights into what they should do – i.e. should they or should they not invest in a particular country’s oil or gas reserves?

The coursework was for the module ‘Contemporary Environmental Challenges’, the first half of which is called ‘Energy Dilemmas’, where we’ve learnt about what the energy problems and outlook are for a variety of parts of the world. What’s interesting is that we had a seminar discussing hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of unconventional oil in America – how it works, what the environmental impacts are etc. Then speaking to my course mate who is studying a year abroad in Canada, I found out he has also recently had a lecture on fracking. The views of what we were taught were quite different though: at Leicester we had a broad overview of the pros and cons, whereas my friend studying in Canada said the lecturers made it seem like there were no environmental consequences, which is very biased (and not really true given accidents they have had in America…). I guess that a nation with extremely large unconventional oil reserves and an oil dependency would want to make it sound as if oil is definitely the way forward.

It was really interesting to find out that even though he’s half way across the world we’re learning some of the same things. This just goes to show how the topics we learn are global issues which are relevant in the modern world, and which are only going to become more important in the future!