No wonder Scott Tinker has been hard to track down lately. The professor at the University of Texas and director of that school’s Bureau of Economic Geology is always a busy guy. But for the last four years he has upped his game by traveling the globe to examine different types of energy, both fossil fuels and renewables, to determine just how easily the world can wean itself off of its favorite energy sources, coal and oil.

The result is the movie “Switch,” in which Tinker teamed up with documentary filmmaker Harry Lynch to make a feature-length film on global energy. The film has its major roll-out in 10 US cities and 40 college campuses in September, and it will hit theaters in November.

In the film, Tinker starts by examining the amount of energy it takes to power one person for one year – 20 million watt hours, as it turns out. Then he visits energy producing sites around the world – a hydroelectric plant in Norway, a coal mine in Wyoming, the Perdido platform in the Gulf of Mexico, the Richmond refinery in California, a hybrid sorghum farm in Louisiana, a switchgrass field in New York, a CNG bus terminal, an oil sands operation in Canada, a car dealership selling Teslas (an electric car with a shocking price tag of US $109,000), a geothermal plant in Iceland, a solar-powered parking structure, a solar-thermal plant in Spain, a wind farm in Denmark, the Barnett shale, an LNG facility in Qatar, and nuclear plants in Texas and France – to find out just how much energy each of these places can provide.

The verdict? Nothing’s perfect. But with growing production in natural gas, nuclear, and renewables, Tinker said the combination will replace oil and coal within 50 years. Of course, this will require three times as many nuclear reactors, a doubling of natural gas production, and a fivefold increase in renewables, he added.

To offset this, he recommends a change in human behavior to use our energy resources more efficiently. “This is the most important part of our energy future,” he said.

This can be brought about in a number of ways – better insulation in homes and buildings, high-efficiency water heaters, even the use of electric golf carts for short errands.

In the press kit for the film, Tinker noted, “Energy is in a crucial transition period. We’re beginning a shift not only to renewables but to unconventional oil and gas from shales and sands that require hydraulic fracturing, a politically controversial issue. “At the same time, global population is growing and modernizing, meaning ever-growing demand. How will we meet this?” For more information about the film, visit switchenergyproject.com? .

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