"APES in a Box" on Fossil Fuels
NATURAL GAS
What is Natural Gas?
Types of Coal
What is Shale Oil?
What is Oil?
What is Charcoal?
What is Natural Gas?
- Mixtures of gases
- Mostly methane
- Found above conventional crude oil deposits
- When oil deposits are too remote for a pipeline to collect natural gas, then the gas is simply burned off on site as a waste product of oil production.
- SNG is created from coal by a process called coal gasification
- Creating synthetic fuels has a low net energy as it requires the use of approximately 50% more coal than simply burning the coal
- Russia possesses over 25% of world reserves
- The middle east contains a large amount
- The US has less than 4% of the world's reserves, but uses almost 1/4 of the world's natural gas production
- Large reserves remain
- Less air pollutants are emitted than when burning other fossil fuels
- High net energy compared to other fossil fuels
- Low net energy when converted to LNG
- Release carbon dioxide when burned
- Difficult and costly to transport
- Pipeline infrastructure is underdeveloped
Types of Coal
- Four categories of coal that vary in carbon, moisture, and sulfur content
- The older the coal, the higher the carbon content
- The higher the carbon content, the more energy we burned
- The higher the carbon content, the less air pollution from sulfur impurities
- Peat is a precursor to coal
- Composed of partially decayed plant material
- Formed in wetland bogs
- Surface mined by cutting into oblong peat bricks
- When dried peat can be burned for cooking heat fuel
- Used by some Scotch whiskey distillers
- Used on industrial scale in Ireland and Finland
- Low carbon content
- High moisture content
- 25-30% carbon
- Lowest quality
- Crumbly texture
- Gulf coast and Northern Plains
- Higher carbon content then lignite
- Lower moisture than lignite
- 35-45% carbon
- Slightly harder than lignite
- Slightly higher quality as a fuel source
- Most common in US
- High carbon content
- Low moisture content
- 35-86% content
- High carbon content
- Very low moisture
- 86-97% carbon
- Most valuable
- Least pollution
What is Shale Oil?
- Deposits of rock that contain kerogen
- Kerogen is solid mixture of hydrocarbons
- Extracted from the rock by crushing the rock and heated to separate the shale oil from the rock
- Over 70% of the world's shale oil is in the US
- Large domestic reserves
- Existing oil infrastructure can be used
- Easy to transport as a solid or as shale oil
- Low net energy because of energy and water required to separate oil from rock
- Very high disturbance of land similar to coal
- A viscous mixture of sand, clay, water, and Bitumen
- Tar sand is obtained by strip mining
- Tar sand is mixed with water and heated to separate bitumen
- Canada has over 75% of the world's tar sand reserves
- Very large potential reserves
- Current oil infrastructure can be utilized
- Tar sand and its synthetic oil is easy to transport
- Very low net energy due to energy required to extract bitumen
- Large volumes of water are used in the process of extracting bitumen from tar sand
- High land disruption and therefore habitat loss from surface mining of tar sand
What is Oil?
- A fossil fuel produced when heat and pressure act on decayed organic matter over millions of years
- Oil consists predominantly of hydrocarbons with small amounts of sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen
- High het energy
- Although supply is declining, there is still and ample supply for the immediate future
- Oil infrastructure already in place
- Domestically available
- Little land disruption in mining process
- US is dependent on oil imports
- Potential for oil spills
- Net energy is decreasing as more energy must be invested in oil production
- Oil reserves are predicted to be 80% depleted sometime between 2050 and 20100
What is Charcoal?
- A biomass fuel that is created by partially burning wood to remove moisture and increase the energy content per unit of mass when compared to the wood alone
- Widely used for cooking and heating in developing countries throughout the world
- Relatively inexpensive
- Higher energy content/unit of mass than wood or dung
- Easy to transport
- Widely available
- Less smoke than wood or dung
- Renewable if managed appropriately
- Deforestation
- Charcoal production is hazardous to workers
- Using char