Natural Gas And Coal example essay topic

After food, fossil fuel is human's most important source of energy. There are three major fuels: oil, natural gas and coal. Oil gives us our mobility, our cars, planes, trains, trucks and boats. Natural gas is used primarily to produce heat, like gas for cooking, and industrial processes. Coal is used primarily to produce electricity. It provides us with light, and power for electronic devices. web The reason they are called fossil fuels is because they are all made from decayed plants and animals that have been preserved in the earth's crust by pressure, bacteria and heat.

It takes millions of years for these organisms to chemically change into fossil fuels. We believe that the fossil fuels we use today may have formed back in Mesozoic period, around 250 million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, or even before. web Liquid fossil fuel - Petroleum is a mixture of liquid hydrocarbons (chemical compounds containing only hydrogen and carbon) plus various impurities such as sulfur. Unprocessed petroleum is usually called crude oil, although it has been called mineral oil and Seneca oil (named for the Seneca Indians of Western Pennsylvania). The name petroleum is from a combination of Latin words meaning "rock oil". We refer to it here simply as oil. The oldest petroleum was formed 500 million years ago which is back in the Ordovician Period, a time before the dinosaurs.

Most commercially exploited deposits of petroleum are less than 250 million years old and were formed during the Mesozoic Period. They are found in areas that geologists believe were once covered by oceans. These fuels were formed when dead plants and animals sank to the bottom of the ocean and were covered by sediments. Over long periods of time (millions of years), pressure, bacteria, and heat changed the sediments into sedimentary rocks and the plant and animal remains into oil.

Eventually underground pools of oil moved into the pores and cracks of these rocks. Specifically, oil pools are usually found in sandstone or shale which are types of sedimentary rocks. As found in the earth, oil may have a variety of properties. Some forms are black, others dark green, and some light like kerosene. The liquid ranges from very viscous to easy-flowing. Crude oil usually consists of a mixture of hydrocarbons having varying molecular weights and differing from one another in structure and properties.

These various species are separated into groups, or fractions, by a process of distillation called refining. Oil fuel, in all of its usable forms, is a refined product, unlike coal and natural gas which can often be burned in their natural condition. web Gas Fossil Fuel - Natural gas was formed by the same processes that formed oil and these products are usually found together. Natural gas is a highly flammable hydrocarbon gas consisting chiefly of methane (85% mixture of methane (CH 4) and 15% ethane (C 2 H 6) ). Although methane is always the chief component, it may also include other gases such as oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, ethane, ethylene, propane, and even some helium. Natural gas is a clean burning fuel: CH 4 + 2 oO 2 -- CO 2 + 2 oH 2 O + 1000 Btu / cf. The gas is found entrapped in the earth's crust at varying depths beneath impervious strata, such as limestone, and may or may not be in association with oil.

If oil is present it is called wet gas, else dry gas. Deposits are fairly widely distributed, however, in the contiguous US only Texas and Louisiana are net exporters. All of the other states use more gas than they produce. The gas is drawn from wells, similar to oil wells, and is usually transported by pipelines, sometimes a thousand miles or more. As a fuel, natural gas is convenient and efficient.

It is used primarily for heat, in industrial, commercial and residential settings. In many homes the house and water are heated by gas, the food is cooked with it and clothes dried. It is also used to produce electricity, in many cases using gas fired turbines that are similar to jet engines. Gas has the great advantage of producing no smoke or ash on burning, although it is usually much more expensive than coal as a fuel. web Solid Fossil Fuel - Coal is our most abundant fossil fuel resource. Coal is a complex mixture of organic chemical substances containing carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in chemical combination, together with smaller amounts of nitrogen and sulfur. This organic part of coal has associated with it various amounts of moisture and minerals.

Coalification is the name given to the development of the series of substances known as peat, lignite or brown coal, sub-bituminous coal, bituminous coal, and anthracite. The degree of coalification, also called the rank of the coal, increases progressively from lignite to low rank coal, to high rank coal, to anthracite. The carbon content increases, while the oxygen and hydrogen contents decrease throughout the series. The hardness increases, while the reactivity decreases. Different amounts of heat and pressure during the geochemical stage of coal development cause these differences in rank. It is not due to the kind of plants the coal is formed from.

Coal represents 98% of the remaining conventional fossil fuel energy resource of the US. It is an important resource for the future. Anthracite, the hardest and cleanest burning coal was formed from plants which thrived in the forests and swamps of the Carboniferous age, 345 million years ago. Bituminous, a softer coal with a lower carbon content, was formed about 300 million years ago. Lignite, a low grade soft coal, was formed more recently, 150 million years ago.

Because coal deposits are usually close to the surface (average depth approximately 300 feet), they can usually be easily mined. There are huge sub-bituminous low sulfur coal deposits in Wyoming, North and South Dakota, and Montana. web Global Resources - The proven oil reserves worldwide is approximately 1000 billion bbl. This is a vast amount of oil; however, the US has to share this finite resource with the other 95% of the world's inhabitants. 22 billion bbl of oil are currently produced worldwide each year. The former USSR seems to be rapidly consuming its oil resource as is the US. The major resources appear to be located in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela and Mexico.

The cost of a barrel of oil imported from the Middle East seems to vary in a complex cycle. When oil demand is high, OPEC raises the price and slows production. These increases causes the US to practice conservation and to increase domestic production. These practices lower demand and force OPEC to decrease prices to increases sales and increase production to keep revenue constant. We may be headed for a period of high oil prices and oil shortages.

The number of exploratory oil rigs and the need for geophysicists and petroleum geologists has followed this cycle. The number of exploratory oil wells dropped from a 1982 high as oil prices dropped. When oil prices rise, we may be enter a period of renewed oil exploration activity. web U.S. Resources - We estimate that the original recoverable oil resource in the US was 214 billion barrels (bbl) and we have already consumed 142 billion bbl of this resource. The proven reserves equal 26 billion bbl. The estimate of the yet undiscovered reserves equals 46 billion bbl. So, there are only 72 billion bbl of recoverable petroleum left in the US.

The US currently consumes 6.5 billion bbl of oil annually. US has 20% of the estimated global coal reserves; the Former Soviet Union has 56%. The current estimate of US minable coal is 1,500 billion metric tons. Our current coal consumption is about 1 billion metric tons.

If current coal consumption were to grow by a constant 5%, then the current US minable coal would be depleted in 86 years. If coal use grew even faster to take the place of depleted oil resources, then it would be depleted even more rapidly. The consumption of US coal resources has climbed steadily since the 1960's. Currently we consume about 21 Quads of coal energy. Natural gas is a finite resource which we are rapidly depleted and the US will have depleted 80% of its total resource within 10 years. At present, only 7% of US consumption of natural gas is imported.

US population growth has return total US oil consumption to the level it was at before the "Arab" Oil Embargo of 1973. Current US consumption is 23 Quads.