- Today, let's talk about energy resources.
You've probably already done something today
that used energy resources.
Even beginning from the moment you woke up.
For me, the beginning of my day,
always starts with making tea.
I use energy and every step of this process,
my car uses oil.
When I drive to the grocery store to get the tea,
my stove uses natural gas when I boil the water
and my water heater uses coal sourced electricity.
When I wash my mug in hot water afterwards,
we use energy constantly in our daily lives.
Since the first law of thermodynamics states that
"energy cannot be created nor destroyed."
Where does it all come from?
And will we have enough?
When we talk about energy resources,
we could split it up into two groups,
renewable energy and non renewable energy.
I can always remember what renewable resources are
because the prefix re means again,
and the root new refers to the origin of the energy source.
So renewable energy sources,
are the sources that we can use again and again,
and are quickly restored by natural processes.
Renewable fuel sources include
sunlight, wind, moving water,
biomass from fast growing plants
and geothermal heat from the earth.
The lifespan of renewable resources looks like a circle.
We can use them and then we can use them again
without worrying about them running out.
Non-renewable energy sources on the other hand,
are sources that exist in a fixed amount
and cannot be easily replaced.
These energy sources must be extracted from the earth
and they include things like nuclear fuel and fossil fuels,
which are things like coal oil and natural gas.
Fossil fuels performed in the geologic past
from the remains of ancient organisms,
plants and animals that died millions of years ago,
became buried in the soil,
partially decomposed,
and were exposed to a lot of heat and pressure.
This heat and pressure chemically rearranged
the energy contained within their bodies
into the fossil fuels we use today.
Because they take so long to form,
we have a finite amount of non-renewable resources
in the earth right now.
The lifespan for fossil fuels is a broken loop,
a one-way ticket.
First, the fossil fuel is found,
then it has to be extracted.
Extracting fossil fuels can involve
destructive mining processes
that can pollute surrounding habitats.
It then has to be transported to wherever it will be used.
And using fossil fuels means burning them,
which releases greenhouse gases
and other pollutants into that atmosphere.
Also, it can take energy to refine
and process some types of fossil fuels,
so that they're more helpful to us
like turning crude oil into petroleum gas, diesel,
and jet fuel.
And burning the fossil fuels transforms that energy
into a less organized form of energy,
like heat and ash.
Not all fossil fuels are the same.
And this is because
different kinds of organic material
were heated and compressed in different ways.
Creating different kinds of fossil fuels.
One of these kinds of fossil fuels is petroleum.
The word petroleum comes from the Latin word for rock Petra
and the Latin word for oil Oleum.
This makes sense because it's an oily substance
that's found in reservoirs, trapped in rock.
Humans have been using oil for a very long time.
Early civilizations found it bubbling up from the ground
at natural Wells,
the oil they saw coming straight out of the earth
is called crude oil or crude petroleum,
which means that it is unrefined and unprocessed.
Crude oil was probably one of the ingredients in Greek fire,
which was a flame throwing up in the Byzantines
with fling at their enemies.
Today we were fine crude oil into many products
like gasoline and diesel for vehicles,
kerosene for heating and asphalts for road construction.
It's also used to make plastics and synthetic fabrics.
Another type of fossil fuel is coal,
which we mostly burned to make electricity,
but it can also be used for heating and cooking.
It's a solid, shiny black flammable rock,
which is mostly formed from the carpenter remains
of fossilized plants like MOS.
Over thousands of years,
plant material transforms
into a carbon rich compound called peat.
And then with some pressure, it becomes soft coal,
which is called lignite.
And then with more pressure, it becomes bituminous coal.
And then finally it becomes a hard coal called anthracite.
The longer the plant remains are put under pressure,
the more energy dense it becomes.
So if you burned anthracite,
you would get a lot more energy than if you burned peat,
burning coal releases carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide,
nitrogen oxides, and other gases into the air.
So coal is one of the dirtiest fossil fuels.
The cleanest burning fossil fuel is natural gas,
meaning that it admits the least amount of carbon dioxide
or other air prints.
This is not the same type of gas
as we put into our vehicles.
That type comes from petroleum.
Instead, natural gas is mostly used
for generating electricity,
heating homes and cooking food.
Your oven, furnace, water heater, dryer,
or grill all might run on natural gas.
Natural gas is a naturally occurring mixture of gases.
And it's mostly made up of methane, ethane,
propane and butane.
The gas is colorless and odorless.
So natural gas companies often add a rotten egg smell
to the fuel to make leaks easier to detect.
But even though we can't see or smell natural gas,
humans have been detecting it and using it for centuries.
There is evidence that more than 2000 years ago,
people in China created bamboo pipelines
to transport the gas,
so that they could use it to boil saltwater
and separate out the salt.
And today we still use pipelines
to transport gas across land.
Although they're no longer made out of bamboo.
Another kind of non-renewable resource is nuclear fuel.
Nuclear power plants don't burn fossil fuels.
Instead they split uranium
through something called nuclear fission,
just one kilogram of uranium,
can produce 24 million kilowatt hours of energy.
Compare that with one kilogram of coal,
which can produce eight kilowatt hours of energy.
In other words, nuclear fusion produces a lot of energy.
It also produces a lot of heat,
which we mostly use to make electricity.
Also nuclear energy is known as a clean energy
because the only greenhouse gas emission is water vapor,
which tends to cycle out of the atmosphere faster
than other greenhouse gases.
But the downside is the spent fuel
is a dangerous radioactive waste
and recycling the nuclear waste is dangerous and expensive.
Petroleum, coal, natural gas and nuclear fuel
make up 85% of the world's energy consumption.
But as our populations and our energy needs grow,
it's becoming more important
to integrate renewable resources.
The sources that could be restored by natural processes
into our energy mix.
I'm gonna go make some tea now, but before I do,
here's something to think about.
What's something that you do in your day that uses energy?
Does that energy come from fossil fuels?
And if so, which one?
Understanding how you get your energy
is part of understanding what powers your community,
your country, and the world.