Small essay on energy crises
Answers
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 …show more content…
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.