From hopping into a vehicle to head to school in the morning to turning off your bedroom light switch before jumping into bed at night, your day is full of countless activities that rely on energy resources. For example, you would not be able to blow-dry your hair without drawing electricity from an energy resource such as wind power, or you would not be able to tell the time on your watch without a battery.
Petroleum is a fossil fuel that Americans use nearly every day as an energy source. In 2012, the United States consumed 6.79 billion barrels of petroleum, 75 percent of which as gasoline, jet fuel and heating oil. This means that most cars, trains, buses, boats and planes use petroleum every day for transportation and heating purposes. Certain products -- including kerosene, asphalt and road oil and propane -- are also petroleum-based, and these are products that many people use daily.
In 2012, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that over a billion short tons of coal, which is also a fossil fuel, were mined in the United States. The country has the largest recoverable reserves of coal on the planet, according to geological estimates. Eighty-one percent of this coal was used to generate electricity so people could complete everyday tasks like heat their water, turn on their lights, power on their televisions and charge their cellphones.
Renewable Energy Resources
Wind, solar, biomass, biofuels, hydropower and geothermal energy sources are all renewable, which means the Earth or sun are continually producing or replacing them. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, two increasingly used renewable energy sources are wind and biofuels. This means that every time you plug in your coffee pot or blast music from your stereo, the energy you are using to power the item could be coming from wind turbines. By way of biofuels, though the car or bus you travel in may not be using ethanol or biodiesel yet, more and more vehicles on the road are drawing their power from this renewable resource.
All Charged Up
Computers, calculators, remote controllers for video games, wireless computer mouses and wristwatches are among many items you frequently use that often depend on batteries as their source of power. The batteries inside the devices come in several shapes and sizes, but they all have one thing in common: how they supply power. Batteries store energy in the form of chemical energy and discharge it in the form of electrical energy, and all of them have three parts: an anode, a cathode and an electrolyte that combine to generate an electric current.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology: How Does a Battery Work?
- U.S. Energy Information Administration: Use of U.S. Wind and Biofuels on the Rise
- U.S. Energy Information Administration: What Are the Products and Uses of Petroleum?
- U.S. Energy Information Administration: What Is the Role of Coal in the United States?
- Jeffrey Hamilton/Digital Vision/Getty Images