For my final blog post of the year, I wanted to look into the various energy sources that are used. With all of the talk of climate change in the news, there is often a lot of terms that are thrown out and can honestly be confusing sometimes. I think that laying out the popular energy sources that we use will help clear up some of the confusion (mostly for myself!).
Fossil Fuels: The phrase fossil fuels is an umbrella term that covers a variety of non-renewable source gathered from the Earth. It includes oil, coal and natural gas, all of which make up a total of 81% of the United States’ energy. These sources are all created from the remains of once living organisms, hence the term fossil fuels. Although the United States currently has an abundance of many fossil fuels, these sources cannot be reused and are very horrible for the environment due to their emission of greenhouse gases. To put it into perspective, the United States mines 900 million tons of coal every year, almost all of which was used to generate electricity. This coal is then burned to run power plants.
Natural gas is another type of fossil fuel and can even be found in college laboratories. Usually composing of majority methane gas, the gas is burned similar to coal to produce the energy. It is used to heat about half of the homes in the United States and is typically the better of the evils as it produces less undesirable byproducts than oil or coal.
Nuclear Energy: Nuclear power plants generate energy by a process called fission, in which heavy metal atoms are split into smaller parts generating lots of energy. Nuclear energy provides 20% of the electricity generation. Research is currently being done on the process of fusion, which is the opposite of fission and if completed successfully could save the world’s energy crisis!
Renewable Sources: Although they are the best the best source of energy as they can they are renewable, renewable sources sadly only make up around 11% of the electricity generation in the United States. Some of these sources include wind and solar energy, but also include biomass energy. Biomass is biological matter than is used for fuel. This includes things like wood; broken pieces of wood can be used to generate energy!
I have also written about a similar topic in my civic issues blog this semester. I think that many people have decided to attack nuclear energy when it is actually a very good step in the right direction. It may have some issues, but we should focus much more on the damage that fossil fuels have caused. Along with this, we do not have the technology to switch to renewable energy sources right now. We need to use nuclear energy as a stepping stone in order to reach our net 0 carbon emissions in the future while upkeeping our current energy needs. Great post!
I have been focusing my civic issue posts on renewable energy. I thought I’d be tired of reading about it, but your blog gave me a fresh new look at the issue. I really like how you touched on biomass. Biomass is super interesting since it’s kind of a “kill two birds with one stone” solution. You also did an amazing job of briefly touching on all the different energy sources. you made a well-constructed blog!
Fossil fuels definitely needs to have a smaller market share in our energy consumption. Hopefully non-renewable resources will be incorporated into our consumption, but until that becomes cost efficient, it could be a while. There has been more importance in companies having great ESG scores, so this would incentivize companies to have more green methods of production.
I honestly though renewable energy would make up even less than 11% of total energy used. I have not heard too much about research regarding nuclear fusion, but I feel like we should at least work with what we have and continue to try to increase that 11% of renewable energy. Sadly, it is probably too much money for most companies to logically want to attempt to implement it.