It’s very silly i know, but I have no idea why petroleum (or other substances) is so important for our industries to work. Why/how can it give us “energy” ?
And why coudn’t “flowers” or “sounds” or “colors” (or anything else) give us energy instead ? I don’t understand how “energy” works at all…
Edit: i don’t even know what flair to put… ( Chemistry ? Ingeeniring ? Biology ?)
In: Technology
In school you learned about something called potential energy. If you have a ball resting on the ground, it’s at equilibrium and can’t do any work. If you lift the ball up on a table though, then it has potential energy because the ball is not at equilibrium and it wants to fall onto the ground. The little push you give it to roll off the table could be called an activation energy.
Potential energy can be stored chemically. Carbon and Oxygen REALLY want to be together in order to fill their outer valence electron shells. Carbon Dioxide is a stable element just like a ball on the ground is stable. Carbon without oxygen, and oxygen without carbon, are like the ball being on a table.
The carbon and oxygen want to combine with each other the same way that ball wants to fall on the ground, but like the ball they need an initial push in the form of a flame. When you mix carbon and oxygen together, nothing much happens. But heat it up, and you give it the push it needs to begin reacting.
Carbon bonding to oxygen to create carbon dioxide is an exothermic reaction, it gives heat and carbon dioxide gas. We can use this heat, and the sudden gas expansion, to perform work.
In an automobile we combine the carbon and hydrogen in gasoline with oxygen in the air to get carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and H20 and in the process we get heat and expanding gasses which push against the cylinders of the engine and performing work.
In a coal fired power plant we take the carbon in coal and coke, and combine it with oxygen in the air to get carbon dioxide and heat, and we use the heat to boil water into steam which spins a turbine.
so that’s how you use the potential energy of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, but how do you store that energy in the first place? Well plants use sunlight to take that carbon dioxide and split it back into carbon and oxygen and the oxygen is mostly lost as a waste product and the carbon is turned into things like cellulose and sugars which the plant uses to build it’s body and fuel it’s cellular processes.
So you can think of the chemistry of burning fossil fuels like a battery. You combine oxygen and carbon to get energy, and to recharge the battery you use sunlight to split them back apart.
Thus in a very real way, all of our fossil fuel energy came from the sun.
Another cool way to consider it is the food that you eat. Fat and carbohydrates like sugar contain carbon and hydrogen. You inhale oxygen and the body’s Mitochondria combine that oxygen with the carbons in fats and sugars to create carbon dioxide, getting energy in the process and we breath that carbon dioxide out through our lungs. Some of it is also converted into H20 and we lose this through the kidneys. So when you eat a large meal, yes most of it is lost through using the restroom, but a lot of it is also lost by breathing it out as carbon dioxide.
The most common way we turn energy into electricity is by spinning turbines usually with steam. The turbines create the energy. Gas and nuclear simply heat up water and use steam to spin turbines. Windpower does the same.
Its not hard to find energy its hard to convert energy into electricity efficiently.
Flowers sounds and colors can give you energy.
Energy is just the ability to do work stored in some way.
You pick a stone up from the ground and hold it at about chest height and the stone now contains some potential energy, from the work you di by lifting it up. if you drop the stone the potential energy will be transformed into kinetic energy as it falls, and the kinetic energy can perform work by deforming whatever it is the stone hits when it lands and by making a sound and by heating up a bit.
Oil is just a complicated molecule that you can add oxygen too to turn into different molecules. The resulting molecules will hold slightly less chemical energy than the stuff going in and the difference gets emitted as heat and light.
You can do the same thing with flowers. Pick a flower, set it on fire and watch it burn. Oil and coal is just plant stuff that has been dead for a really long time.
The flower and the original plant stuff that became the oil and coal got their energy from the sun.
Sound is just air moving around in a pattern. You can try to turn that into different more useable types of energy. This is how microphones work. turning sounds into electric signals.
Colors are just different wavelengths of light. They are very much energy and we can totally turn light into other forms of energy like electricity.
First, I think it might be good to define what energy actually is. Energy isn’t an actual, tangible thing – it’s a quantity of something that allows it to perform work. In other words, in order for something to move or change temperature for example, it needs energy. Let’s say you have a box on the floor and you want to pick it up. The box isn’t going to move by itself, right? You need to do work on it (pick it up) and that requires energy. Energy is a conserved quantity, meaning it can never be created from nowhere or destroyed, it can only change forms.
We can get energy from all kinds of places. First, let’s talk about fossil fuels. These are things like oil, gas, and coal (although really anything that you can burn, like wood, works the same way). These are complex molecules held together by bonds. When we burn wood or oil or coal or gas, we break those bonds, releasing that energy, which we can then use. You could certainly use flowers, because you can burn them, but it wouldn’t be very efficient. Nuclear power comes from splitting the nucleus of a large atom, like uranium. The amount of energy released is far more than the amount of energy released by burning gas or coal. Then there’s renewable energy, like wind, geothermal, solar, and, hydroelectric. These are all just directly converting the energy of something else, like the wind or heat from the sun, into a form we can use.
Sound is also energy. It’s vibrations in the air. That’s called kinetic energy. We could theoretically use that, but it would be extremely inefficient and wasteful, so there’s no reason to. Color is not really a thing. It’s just how our eyes perceive different wavelengths of light. We can and do use light as energy (that’s what solar power is), but color isn’t a thing that has energy. Remember, you can only get energy from something that already has it by changing its form.
The molecules most fuels are made of are very reactive. Meaning, they’re held together with a lot of energy. However, unlike other molecules held together by a lot of energy, it’s really easy to break apart molecules in fuel. All it takes is oxygen and a bit of heat. The resulting molecules don’t consume much energy to form, so the leftover energy is released as heat.
Most other materials that can’t be used as fuel either aren’t as reactive or don’t release as much energy when burned
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