Natural Resources and Energy Sources Analysis

Natural Resources and Environmental Impact

Natural resources: Assets that are derived from nature and meet human needs.

Environmental impact: The effect of a particular human activity on the environment. The concept can be extended to the effects of a natural phenomenon.

Environmental Risk: The possibility of an event occurring in order to produce a catastrophic impact on the natural or social environment.

Resource Classification and Sustainability

Renewable resources: These are resources that, with proper treatment, can maintain or even increase their amount. Always available, renewables are the main resources of biological origin.

Nonrenewable resources: These are those existing in a given quantity where exploitation can eventually exhaust them. The best strategy is to use them as little as possible and reserve their use for those applications where they are irreplaceable.

Inexhaustible resources: Those that are not exhausted, regardless of the uses or the number of humans employing them.

Energy Resources and Their Sources

Energy Resources: Those that are successfully exploited with the main objective to obtain energy, though they may also have other applications.

Sources of Energy

• Renewable: Wind, geothermal, hydraulic, tidal, solar, and biomass.
• Non-renewable (Fossil): Coal, oil, and natural gas.
• Non-renewable (Nuclear): Uranium, plutonium, and hydrogen.

Fossil Fuels and Combustion Processes

Coal: The carbon process is the formation of carbonization and occurs in anaerobic conditions.

Oil: A natural mineral oil; its formation is similar to that of coal, consisting of organic matter amended by anaerobic degradation processes.

Natural gas: This is a diverse mix of hydrocarbons in a gaseous state, including predominantly saturated methane. For its handling, it is committed to a process of liquefaction, which facilitates channeling in pipelines and storage.

Nuclear Energy: Fission and Fusion

Nuclear fuels: These are used to extract energy from nuclei. For the energy that holds them together, nuclear reactions are utilized.

Uranium and plutonium: In nuclear reactions of fission, a large atomic nucleus is bombarded with neutrons, causing a division. This causes its atoms to form two lighter elements, and a portion of the total mass of the heavy nucleus is transformed into energy.

Hydrogen: The fusion reaction is the reverse process of fission; two light atoms collide and form a heavier atomic nucleus, releasing energy. This process produces no emissions.

Renewable Energy Alternatives

Renewables are characterized by not exhausting their sources of production. The main source of renewable energy is biomass.

• Solar: The energy reaching the earth in the form of electromagnetic radiation coming from the sun can be harnessed in thermal and photovoltaic conversion versions.
• Wind (Eolica): Energy is obtained from the kinetic energy driven by the temperature difference between different atmospheric masses.
• Tidal: Obtained from marine tidal movements. Its practical application is currently scarce and has a complementary use.
• Geothermal: Harnesses the internal heat of the earth.
• Biomass: Organic matter produced by living beings. In combustion, although it shows CO2, it is considered the same amount that is absorbed by the living biomass, provided that the balance is zero.