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Energy from Fuel Cells
The general picture
We cannot create energy. Fortunately, we do not need to, because it is all around us. Einstein proved that even matter itself is energy. According to his theory, the energy contained in a 1 kg brick would allow an individual to live for more than 20 years.
That’s quite a lot. However, it is not possible to turn all matter into energy.
In general, we obtain energy by burning things. Burning means to transform one type of matter into a different type – like wood into ashes and gas. The process releases energy, which we can capture and use for heating, powering engines etc. We may need to invest something to get the process going, like a match for a piece of paper, or an electrical spark for a car engine, but once that is done, the energy released by far exceeds the initial investment.
Where does this energy come from? We cannot create it out of nothing. The answer: It has been ‘injected’ during the creation process of that particular kind of matter. Let’s take oil as an example.
Theory has it that oil is the result of animals and plants, which lived millions of years ago. The energy that was necessary for these beings to live, and for all those before and after, came from the sun, in the form of light and heat. Plants use the sunlight, CO2 and some other elements from the envrironment to build matter. Animals feed on the plants building more complex types of matter. At some time they die and decompose. According to scientific theory, today’s oil originates from processes such as these. That’s just one example.
Thus, the energy did not come out of nothing. It came from the sun and has been transformed into matter by the growing processes on earth. The sun fuses hydrogen into helium atoms, releasing energy in the process. Once the hydrogen is all used up, or some time before that, it will start to process helium etc.
Oil is non-renewable fuel - once it’s burnt it’s gone. As the world supplies are finite, we will run out of oil at some time. The same goes for all fossil fuel. Strictly speaking, also these substances were ‘produced’ somehow by physical and chemical processes inside the earth. However, they are effectively non-renewable as the ‘production process’ took hundreds of thousands of years and nobody can wait that long.
On the long term, it is better to use renewable energy sources - like solar power. Plants can also be turned into fuel. Gasoline from plants would be renewable – because plants grow back.
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