Energy Crisis Essay Research Paper ENERGY CONSUMPTION

Energy Crisis Essay, Research Paper

ENERGY CONSUMPTION CRISIS

Energy is important to our nation for many reasons. It is a key economic driver. It offers new market opportunities for business. Providing energy to our nation has been an exciting challenge in recent years. Many changes have been constant throughout that period. The past tells Americans that predicting the specifics of the energy future for our nation with great accuracy would be unlikely. Americans get their energy from different types of resources. With all the different resources Americans believe that an energy crunch shouldn’t happen.

The crisis is a nationwide energy discontent in which natural gas rates have soared to the highest level in 15 years, and OPEC has slashed its oil output again to keep prices up. Most Americans know their the ones, who are mostly to blame for the energy crisis. Americans greed drives us to demand more space and privacy, more power and speed, and more comfort and ease. Satisfying these demands requires the burning of more fossil fuels. Due to the large amounts of energy that Americans use, the demand for more energy resources are becoming low. The energy crisis in California could spread throughout the United States unless answers to these problems of energy consumption can be solved.

If the energy crisis should happen to spread throughout the United States, there would be a large demand for more energy resources. More and more efforts are being attempted for finding new types of energy resources for the long term. Large amounts of money are being spent on different types of energy. Prices

will continue to grow if there is a shortage of energy. Americans will have to pay more for energy in the years to come if the oil and natural gas prices continue to go up, due to lack of oil drilling spots. Long term energy problems will be solved with all the new types of energy out there.

Early in the 1970s, natural gas was thought to be a declining fuel. Outdated and counter productive pricing regulations handcuffed the industry. The picture today is decidedly different. Natural gas is being counted on to fuel most of America’s economic expansions way into the 21st century. The regulations of the 1970s have been replaced by a restructured gas market, and the industry has responded. The demand for gas is growing faster than anyone predicted. The United States economy is also growing faster. Environmental regulations that favor natural gas consumption are more firmly in place and are becoming much stronger. More than half of the growth for natural gas, over the next 20 years, will come from the electric generation market. The use of natural gas in this country could increase by more than a third in the next 20 years. In the electric power generation industry, natural gas could increase as much as 250 percent for power generation.

The United States now has two percent of the world’s proven crude-oil reserves. Most of the American produced oil comes form old wells, where the output declines over the years. Production costs are lower overseas, so it is cheaper to buy from OPEC nations than from many American suppliers. Increasing energy

supplies requires not only wells but new pipelines to transport oil and natural gas. In 1998, the United States consumed 9.8 million more barrels of oil a day than it produced.

The economic miracles of the 20th century were powered by fossil fuels. The 21st century may be seen by an equally dramatic change from fossil fuels, and the environmental chaos they brought. The result may be less than an energy revolution. The cost of fossil fuel energy produced is comparable to that of electricity. A fuel cell cleanly and quietly combines oxygen and hydrogen to produce electricity. Fuel cells could one day sit in thousands of basements producing power and hot water, without fossil fuels. Some fossil fuel lobbyists still argue that it will be difficult and expensive to find an alternative to oil and coal.

Nuclear energy also called atomic energy, is a powerful energy released by changes in the nucleus core of atoms. The heat and light of the sun result from nuclear energy. Since 1945, uses of nuclear energy have been developed. The energy that is released by the nuclei creates large amounts of heat. The heat can then be used to make steam, and the steam can be used to generate electric energy. Nuclear power plants have two main advantages over fossil-fuel plants. When a nuclear power plant is built, it can be less expensive to operate than a fossil-fuel plant, because a nuclear plant uses a much smaller volume of fuel. Many experts believe the benefits of nuclear

energy outweigh any problems involved in its production. According to those experts, oil may be so scarce by the mid-2000s

that it may be too expensive to drill. If nuclear energy were fully developed, it could completely replace oil and coal as a major source of electric power. But, the number of problems must be solved before nuclear energy can be fully developed. Almost all of today’s power reactors use a scarce type of uranium known a U-235. If large amounts of U-235 continues to be used at its present rate, the world’s supply of it will become so small that it will be to expensive to mine and process by the year 2050. The only way nuclear energy can replace other energy sources, is that it must be based on