A world without energy would be a cold, dark place.
Luckily, early humans discovered that fire could light up their lives.
We still use fire, or combustion, but, wood doesn't have enough energy to power today's coolest inventions.
Fossil fuels which contain much more energy than wood, got everyone fired up with new possibilities.
The enormous energy of fossil fuels comes from tiny hydrocarbon molecules that contain only hydrogen and
carbon atoms.
Fossil fuels are currently the world's primary energy source.
But finding them, and obtaining them, can be quite difficult.
[Beepity beepity beep!]
[Techno music]
Two fossil fuels, coal and oil, provide most of the daily energy that heats our homes, powers our cars,
and generates our electricity.
Since the late 18th century we have increased our consumption of fossil fuels.
With the invention of steam engines, the demand for coal skyrocketed.
Our fuel needs for transportation and heat, drive oil exploration in the harshest corners of the planet.
[Rock music]
This is the most extreme drilling rig in the world, the Erik Raude.
With the latest generation of off-shore rigs, few oil and gas reserves are beyond reach.
The Erik Raude can drill for oil in deeper water and rougher weather, than any drilling rig in history.
Exploration for oil and gas has moved from land...
to sea.
The oil industry has devised oil rigs or massive drilling platforms that stand on the ocean floor and drill deep
beneath the sea bed.
Until recently, offshore rigs have been restricted to shallow water,
limited by the length of their legs.
But a new generation of rigs...
floats.
The Erik Raude drills in extremely deep water.
--We are just blowing everything up to a higher scale and we are doing the same thing.
In deeper water, with more high-tech equipment, with a bigger drill, with everything it's blowing up.
It can't be fixed to the ocean floor at great depths, so it floats on two massive, submerged pontoons.
It began its first voyage off the coast of Canada in 2002.
Its mission?
To drill for oil where no one had dared to drill before!
The Erik Raude is a self-contained floating city, connected to the outside world by boat and helicopter.
She's so strongly built, and she's equipped with so much power so much high-tech DP equipment and thrusters
and generators, that we are powered to run a whole little city.
Everything on board is designed around the massive drill at the center.
And it's all turning around that drill in the middle here, to go down and make a hole and find oil.
That's the main goal.
And everything around it is built for that reason.
The Erik Raude will search for oil in rough seas of up to 10,000 feet deep.
Where reserves have been previously out of reach.
Its semi-submersible design is more stable than anchored rigs in rough weather.
A system of 6 giant thrusters holds the rig in position while drilling.
This makes the Erik Raude the most versatile oil drilling exploration system in the world.
[Funky music]
Not to be outdone, the coal industry has invested billions to invent and build the most technologically advanced
excavating machines in the world.
In the US, coal produces more than half of our electrical power,
and accounts for 22% of our overall energy consumption.
Coal is the most abundant fossil fuel on Earth,
and fueled much of the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries.
[Rock music]
The early steam shovels have since been replaced in coal mining by more mechanized means of production.
[Grinding gears and rubble falling]
Some areas of the world such as Germany, have abundant reserves of coal.
[Polka music]
--We would need more than 40,000 people with shovels to replace excavation
and to make the same mount of material each day, as they excavate.
The bucket wheel excavator was built to extract it from the ground.
Bucket wheel excavators mine coal at high rates of speed.
But are also more environmentally responsible machines.
As they remove large deposits of coal from the mine pits, they redistribute top soil and other materials for reuse.
Coal mining is vital to the economy of the United States and many other countries such as Germany.
It provides a home-grown energy source for electrical power plants.
Coal continues to supply most of the energy in the United States.
The use of coal and oil has added billions of tons of carbon dioxide and other pollutants to our atmosphere.
Yet they remain the most economically efficient sources of energy.
Until alternate energy sources become widely available,
the world will continue to rely on fossil fuels to heat our homes,
and get us where we need to go.
