What Type of Energy Is Stored in Coal?
Coal plays an integral part of keeping society functioning. People rely on the burning of coal to generate electricity in order to keep everything, from household appliances to industrial machinery, running.
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What Coal Is Made Of
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Coal is made up of mostly dead plants that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. During that time, the organic debris at the bottom of swamps were covered by layers of water and dirt over millions of years, effectively trapping the energy of dead plants.
How Coal is Created
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Over millions of years, dead plants were trapped and compressed by heat and pressure from the earth. This compression produced a combustible black or brownish-black rock made up mostly of carbon and hydrocarbons. Today, we call this coal.
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How You Get Coal
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People get coal by either surface or underground mining. Surface mining is only efficient if most of the coal is exposed and easily visible from above ground. Underground coal requires miners to dig deeply into the earth, which can be more effective, but more dangerous due to the risk of collapsing rock and dirt.
How Coal is Used
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People use coal to produce almost half of all the electricity in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Coal is an abundant fossil fuel that serves as combustible energy. This energy is burned in power plants to create steam, which in turn rotates turbines that generate electricity.
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References
- Photo Credit coal image by Vladislav Gajic from Fotolia.com
