Even if you had the antimatter to do that, the energy released in such reactions usually ends up in gamma rays which are very difficult to capture.
Well... you can use those gamma rays to heat up a block of material that intercepts gamma rays well, and then basically get energy out of that in the same way you'd get it out of a hot nuclear reactor core.
That also limits you to the efficiency of a heat engine (or whatever thermoelectric gizmo you're using), so...
No not antimatter. Like just extracting the energy directly not through nuclear fusion/fission or antimatter or stuff like that. Not exactly sure how it would work but it should be possible with the right technology. As i said i think this will be in 100 years.
I'm gonna have to go with RisingFury and say that you can't "poof stuff into existence".
"We're gonna extract energy directly from matter in 100 years if we have the right technology" is about as plausible as me saying "I might build a flying car by Tuesday".
I really, really do not see one form of renewable energy predominating. Today no single source of energy predominates, and not even a single form of fossil fuel energy predominates... oil accounts for most energy production, but the numbers of oil coal and gas are rather similar.
Electricity production/heating and transportation are two different things. Transportation is mostly dependant on oil, electricity production is mostly dependant on coal, and heating is mostly dependant on gas.
The electricity production demand is easy to fill because electricity is generic and as long as you can generate it cheaply and effectively, things are fine. Heating can be achieved also by electric heaters, and the need for artificial heating can be reduced by using proper insulation and managing solar energy.
Vehicles however require specific fuels to work, and these fuels either have to be gathered and refined, or synthesised. One can talk about 'electric cars' all day long, but things like air and sea travel consume large amounts of energy and these are not exactly the sorts of vehicles that can run on batteries.
In this regard, I think it would be useful to look at several visually startling graphs:
Remaining oil reserves:
- The 11 ZJ mark for undiscovered reserves might be optimistic.
- One might assume that as technology and abilities progress at least some of the 'unrecoverable oil' reserves would become recoverable.
- Displays the breakdown of energy sources quite well.
- Photovoltaic power makes up only 0.04% of the total, wind power makes up only 0.3%.
- Visual display of renewable energy sources compared to current power production.
- Power production has since increased from 15 TW, and is set to increase in future (estimate of 22 TW by 2030).
- Care must be given when regarding the ecological impact of the use of renewable energy; just because something is sustainable does not mean it doesn't have a non-zero impact. All that energy is already going into the natural system of the planet and disrupting a good deal of it could change many ecosystems.
All in all, I think we will continue to use oil, coal and gas until they become prohibitively expensive, that nuclear power production will increase somewhat, and that renewable forms of energy such as solar, wind and hydropower will increase to fill the gap.
Nuclear fission power is perfectly safe (read: the potential for a catastrophic incident is low enough to be acceptable) when used correctly (in fact, I would not be surprised if the number of people who have died due to coal-based air pollution is far higher than those who have died due to nuclear accidents), and differing fuel use methods can allow a far more efficient use of nuclear fuel as well as lowered production of waste.
I think solar really depends on where you are. South Africa, Australia, and the US would be particularly good places for solar power, because they have high insolation and large tracts of arid or semi-arid land that would have little value for other projects such as farming.
Europe is at a really high latitude, it can be overcast often, and land is often taken up by farmland for example. I would not call places like it ideal for solar power.
However, if electricity can effectively be transmitted over thousands of kilometers, it might make sense to produce power in "solar rich" places and export it to "solar poor" places. There is already a nice large "solar collection area" just south of Europe.
Space based solar power is another option, but has its own problems (like, for example, being
in space). Nevertheless I have been interested for quite some time in an economic comparison between a ground-based and space-based solar powerplant.
Another idea, though one that is firmly in the mega-engineering category, is that of damming the Mediterranean, at least partially, to achieve a lower sea level by means of natural evaporation and thus using inflowing Atlantic water to generate hydroelectric power. Such a grandoise scheme would however have to have a minimal ecological and economical impact, which would naturally be quite hard to achieve.
Fusion power is currently something like a 'holy grail', but I don't think we should look to it as a saving grace... break-even fusion power will probably become a reality within the next 100 years, but the complexity of the generators and the rarity of the required fuels would be bad setbacks to its implementation as an economical power source.
As for transport, I think it will be necessary for humans to develop a means by which to synthesise various hydrocarbons within a currently existing (although augmented) carbon cycle... it is the way life has done things for billions of years, and if we can't learn to work though and with such a system, we have very, very big problems.
