Faiq Nurzaman

Hello, everyone!

Whoever you are, I appreciate you for coming by here. My name is Faiq (1906422905), and I am a fourth-year student in Mechanical Engineering Universitas Indonesia.

This is my own page for Energy Conversion System 2 study with Mr. DAI and Prof. Adi. I will write and summarize anything I learned during the study.

I hope you enjoy it! Thank you

Oil Crisis, True or Not?

I was having my first Energy Conversion System class on Tuesday, 14 February 2023. The class was led by Mr. DAI and Prof. Adi.

I got some interesting sights from the class. During the class, Prof. Adi engages us to gain our consciousness on our daily life problems related with energy conversion. This time, one of the interesting problem was 'is it true that the world starts to run out of oil?'

Image 1.1 Illustration of Oil. Souce: Otosia.com

We might have heard the oil crisis propaganda in every corner since long time ago. The question is, when does the world will totally run out of oil? We always heard that the world starts to run out of oil, but we still have them today.

Greener Energy Plants for a Better Indonesia

It was Friday on February 17th when I was in the class at around 1 PM. I opened ChatGPT to kill my time and explore my curiousities regarding Thermal Energy Conversion.

ChatGPT told me that there are currently some sources of thermal energy used for conversions worldwide, based on the specific application and technologies; fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, geothermal, biomass, and waste heat recovery.

I was curious about the most-common thermal energy source used for conversion in Indonesia, since Indonesia seems to have a positive trend in using electrified vehicles in recent years.

It turns out that the most used energy source in Indonesia is from coal-fired power plants due to the country's abundant amount of coal reserves. As of 2021, around 60% of the country's electricity sources are still based on them.

I also found that coal-fired power plants are actually advantageous in some ways; high reliability, affordable cost, and increasing the energy security by making the country independent from imported fuel.

Nevertheless, as the future engineers, we must also learn that coal-fired power plants have some bad impacts for the sustainability; significant emissions, dangerous pollutants for respiratory health, and hardly-disposable ash. Coal is also a non-renewable source whose extraction could also make a bad impact for the environment.

I was quite concerned with those disadvantages of coal-fired power plants, so that I asked ChatGPT about the preventive way taken by those power plants in Indonesia. It turns out that some power plants have been retrofitted with advanced pollution control technologies such as; Flue Gas Desulfurization (FGD), Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR), Electrostatic Precipicators (ESP), Low NOx burners, and coal-washing. Though not every power plants have been retrofitted with those technologies, at least the major ones have been retrofitted.

However, Indonesia has targeted to have renewable energy sources to generate up to 23% of the country's electricity by 2025, and 31% by 2050. The renewable energies targeted includes; wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal sources. The country have also been having researches regarding some cleaner energies such as natural gas or nuclear energies.

Let's support the cleaner energy plants for a better Indonesia!