ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the contested and political character of energy resources – i.e. how the energy resource landscape can simultaneously be landscapes of loss, violence, and dispossession. The availability of energy has increased far faster than population growth, enabled primarily by the shift to fossil resources with higher energy densities and, subsequently, by the rapid and sustained expansion of output of coal, oil and gas. Energy density describes the quantity of energy in a given volume or mass: it is a measure of energy concentration that can be applied to stock resources and energy carriers like wood, charcoal, peat, coal, oil and gas. The chapter introduces the concept of resource quality, and discusses how variations in energy density, energy return on investment, power density and carbon intensity shape energy resource landscapes. The notion of resource quality is a useful way of thinking about variations among energy resources that affect their utility and acceptability to society.
