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.
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