The Risk Our Society Takes By Depending On The Use Of Fossil Fuels

What most people in our society lack to notice is how our country's continuous use of fossil fuels is endangering to nature and the wildlife it inhabits as well as the environment that we live in. Our society seems to think that fossil fuels we use in excess today will last forever but actuality will one day be depleted to unrepairable measures, which is why we need a cleaner more environmentally friendly substitute. With that said my paper is going to underline how our society would be able to transfer from fossil fuels to cleaner energies which are beneficial to our earth and existence.

There is a great understandable hunger for energy in the world. Increases uses of energy are strongly correlated with the gross domestic product (fossil fuels); though if the principal sources of energy are fossil fuels. Then we are faced with a dilemma; burning the fuels contributes to the greenhouse effect and thus to the warming of the Earth, causing some serious environmental consequences.

While there are many forms of energy we are familiar with: mechanical, chemical, nuclear, light, thermal energy, heat, just to name a few and there are many sources for all forms of energy but people found it more convenient to exploit a relative few which would be fossil fuels. The burning of fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas) provides the United States with about 90 percent of the energy we use.

Before the use of fossil fuels, population created an increase in uses for wood as there main source of energy. This caused the rate of wood's use to out strip its rate of growth, with the consequent of forests. A larger part of Europe and the United States have been deforested as a result of this.

The most serious indictment of fossil fuels is the harm they do to the environment. Carbon Dioxide along the sulfur, nitrogen, compounds, and other hydrocarbons, some of which are carcinogenic (cancer causing) are incorporated into these fuels. When the fuels are burned these substances are released into the atmosphere. The sulfur and nitrogen compounds have been known to precipitate in rain and spoil many of the streams and lakes in the United States and Europe.

Now I want to move into a close comparison between fossil fuels and clean energies, and determine if either of the sides has any benefits or disadvantages. It is easy to understand the popularity of fossil fuels. These are energy sources which are compact, making them relatively ease to transport. Nature has already taken the giant step in creating the products. There is little manufacturing cost for oil, only the cost of pumping it from the ground, transporting it to its ultimate destination and separating it into kerosene, gasoline, as so forth. Consumer cost has been so low that there has been a tendency to overlook the disadvantage so f these fuels, to regard them as cheap, clean, or safe.

Recently, questions have been raised about these fossil fuels. The first consideration is that these are a limited resource. While it is probably true that the processes that created these fuels are still occurring the consumption far, far outpaces the production as it did with the wood generation. After all, it took hundreds of millions of years to create the stockpile that we enjoy today. As the fuels disappear the prices will rise inevitably and the competition for them will become bitter.

For instance, No matter how good non-OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) was at finding new oil, the world oil map remains fundamentally unchanged. They find reserves in Africa, in Siberia, and elsewhere. Sooner or later, though, we must come back to the fact that the majority share of the worlds oil supply lies in the Middle East, controlled by OPEC, a gaggle of unfriendly, unstable regimes that already exercise too much control over the world oil prices and will gain even more sway once oil fields outside the OPEC countries have begun running out. This is why it is prudent to use this window of opportunity we now have when the sources are plentiful to pursue strenuously the research and development of alternatives.

Cleaner energies would be the target goal for the source of society's energy. They also have their share of benefits and disadvantages. Aside from the fact that cleaner energies would do a world of help to the environment by reducing the amount of harmful gases that get trapped in the atmosphere which can reduce the greenhouse effect as well as the amount of forests being destroyed by acid rain. The most likely substitute for the fossil fuels would be hydrogen. When burned in air, its end products are water and some nitrogen oxides. These oxides, which are potentially pollutants, can be reduced to negligible levels with catalytic (speeds up reaction rate) heaters. So hydrogen would be the least polluting of all energy sources. The disadvantage we find with using hydrogen is that the storage would be a problem. It can be stored in several ways, none completely safe. With care hydrogen can be at least as safe as many other hazardous substances we use. It can be compressed and stored in tanks. It can be liquefied. It can be combined with some metal to form a chemical compound called hydride and then have the hydrogen release slightly by increasing the temperature. Portable tanks tend to be very heavy and awkward to handle but large community tanks can be used as they have been in the past for storing "town gas." Liquefying hydrogen and storing it requires expensive additional sophisticated cryogenic equipment: hydrogen liquefies at the lowest temperature of any element. Making metallic hydrides adds to the expense of using hydrogen.

Hydrogen distribution, if it were to become a much used source of energy, has to be considered. The pipelines currently used to distribute natural gas possibly could be modified to transport the hydrogen. The transmission costs would be about fifty percent higher. One principal concern about using hydrogen is its safety although in many was y hydrogen is safer then gasoline. Hydrogen is flammable at a four percent concentration but gasoline bursts into flames when the concentration is on percent. Unlike gasoline, hydrogen is lighter than air and disperses quickly. Thus a flammable or explosive concentration is harder to reach. Nevertheless a harbor full of ships carrying liquefied hydrogen looks to many like a catastrophe about to happen. Should something set them off the damage would certainly be enormous. Strictly enforced safety measures would ease this concern.

At present the cost of employing hydrogen as an energy source makes it unlikely we will see a hydrogen economy any time soon. Things will improve as renewable energy sources become cheaper and as the costs of fossil fuels rise. It is possible hydrogen costs will continue to be a problem should such costs be perceived