In the last century, the Western society has undertaken an ever-growing energy consumption, which doubles the needs essential for its continuity.
The generalised use of fossil fuels, initially with very low supply and transformation costs, has led to a total dependence on them, the consumption rate growing so much that sooner or later this non-renewable energy source will be used up. The products' prices are undergoing an alarming increase in the current initial stage of unbalance between a growing demand and a concrete offer, and an unstable and finite future.
Humanity does not count on immediate substitution energy alternatives.
Its own nature as a source of the atmosphere's fixed carbon for millions of years, thanks to photosynthesis, makes it so, that the combination with oxygen to obtain energy, return all that fixed carbon back to the atmosphere in the form of CO2, no doubt a clear cause for the climatic changes that have been taking place on earth in the last decades, and which unbalance the “order” that had governed in the Biosphere in the last few centuries.
Agriculture has been focused on cultivating vegetable species for many centuries, its main objective providing humanity with food, either directly or transformed by the livestock species. Obtaining fibres to achieve tissue was another target.
Many years have been dedicated to seeking species that could provide energy sources through their cultivation, it being possible to convert them into electricity, bio-fuels, and solid fuels to supply heat or hot water to homes.
It is no longer a matter of exploiting agriculture's sub-products, or adapting current cultivation to other uses, it is something more important and radical: seeking and selecting vegetable species that may, with the necessary cultural techniques, be converted into renewable energy sources for distributed production and which may relevantly guarantee the energy supply.
Any territory should evaluate its possibilities for this objective. It may be possible to find species that, removed from their soil and climate, may be sources of “Cultivated Energy”.
