Why Fossil Fuels Are So Important to Our Society
Coal is the most abundant of the three fossil fuels and is now used (burnt) mostly for electricity generation. In fact, the US has more coal that can be mined than the rest of the world has oil that can be pumped out of the ground. For millennia, fire from wood burning allowed humans to have light and heat without the sun. Then in the 17th century, coal was fully discovered and found to burn hotter and cleaner than wood charcoal. It was not until the industrial revolution of the 1800s that its potential was realized. Coal was then burnt in steam engines, powering trains and ships, and replaced the fuel used in steel plants.
Natural gas is color-less, shapeless and odorless, and is the cleanest of the fossil fuels. Gas companies add a chemical to it that makes it smell like rotten eggs so that it is easy to detect leaks. Natural gas is burnt in domestic gas hobs to provide heat for cooking and in boilers to warm buildings. If the current natural gas pipeline network of the US was laid end-to-end, it would stretch to the moon and back, twice.
Oil is mainly used in transport; cars, planes, ships and trains all require oil as fuel. Oil and natural gas were only discovered in the 20th century, and are therefore seen as recent fossil fuels when compared to coal.
Whether heating our homes, cooking our food, watching our televisions or driving our cars, we are consuming resources that took hundreds of millions of years to form, and we are consuming them to depletion within hundreds of years. Fossil fuels have, without doubt, released us from the burdens of much manual labor, enabled long-distance travel in a matter of days and advanced civilization as we know it today, but they will run out, maybe in the next generation, maybe in the one after – not to mention the effects of their emissions when burnt. Either way, we will need a lot of changes in our energy mix to sustain our way of life, let alone sustain the improvements in the standard of living of billions of people in the developing world.
For more information and insight into climate change, carbon offsets and energy – or to read more about the world’s diverse energy resources visit our no nonsense climate site here: http://hotclimate.wikidot.com
By Ben Beiny