Using Crude Oil as a Fuel Flashcards
What does crude oil provide?
An important fuel for modern life.
How do crude oil fractions burn?
Cleanly so they make good fuel.
What is most modern transport fuelled by?
Crude oil.
Eg cars, boats, trains and planes.
Where are parts of crude oil also burned in?
Central heating systems in homes and in power stations to generate electricity.
There is a massive industry of what doing what?
Scientists.
Working to find oil reserves to take out of the ground.
Electricity can be generated by what?
Nuclear power or wind power.
What kind of cars are there?
Ethanol-powered cars.
What can solar energy be used for?
To heat water.
Things tend to be set up for using oil fractions give an example?
Cars are designed for petrol or diesel and its readily available.
How is getting petrol or diesel for your car easy?
There are filling stations all around the country, with storage facilities and pumps specially designed for these crude oil fractions.
So crude oil fractions are what?
Often the easiest and cheapest thing to use.
More reliable too.
How are solar and wind power unreliable?
They won’t work without the right weather conditions.
Nuclear energy is what?
Reliable.
However, a lot of concerns about its safety and the storage of radioactive waste.
Crude oil may do what one day?
Run out.
What do most scientists think about crude oil?
That it will run out.
Non-renewable.
Know one knows when crude oil will run out but there been heaps of predictions. Give an example of one?
About 40 years ago.
Scientists predicted that it would be all gone by the year 2000.
What is happening over time?
New oil reserves are being discovered.
Technology is constantly improving.
Since new oil reserves are being discovered and technology is improving what is happening?
Its now possible to extract oil that was once too difficult or expensive to extract.
What do some people think?
We should stop using crude oil for things like transport as there is alternatives.
We should only use it for more essential things like chemicals and medicines.
What will take time to do?
Develop alternative fuels that will satisfy all our energy needs.
Adapt things so that fuels can be used on a wide scale.
What is one alternative?
To generate energy from renewable sources.
Won’t run out.
Give examples of renewable sources?
Wind power.
Solar power.
Tidal power.
How are oil spills bad for the environment?
Birds get covered in the stuff and are poisoned as they try to clean themselves.
Other creatures like sea otters and whales poisoned too.
How do oil spills happen?
As the oil is being transported by the tanker.
You have to burn oil to use it, how is this bad for the environment?
It is thought to cause global warming, acid rain and global dimming.
