America Must Conserve Energy :: Gas Crisis Shortage

Whle researching for this essay, something shocked me. A quote from the American Petroleum Institute saying, â€Å"A country that runs on oil can’t run short† really caught my attention. We need to conserve our fossil fuels and natural oils or find alternative sources of energy because if we do not we will completely deplete the resources we have now and be left with nothing. To get energy, the United States uses many different resources, the majority (88%), however comes from the fossil fuels of crude oil (41%), natural gas (24%) and coal (23%). Today in the US, 2.5 million tons of coal are used a day mostly for utilities (86%), 17 million gallons of petroleum are used a day mostly for transportation (63%), and 50 billion cubic ft of natural gas is used a day mostly in industry (40%) and commercial and residential (40%). (Lecture 121 ppt) These numbers are very high and something needs to be done. There are many things that we can individually do on our own to lower these numbers. Since cars use lots of petroleum, one thing we can do is lessen the amount of time and distance we drive. We can make more carpools, walk whenever possible and use public transportation. Also our utilities use a big chunk of our fossil fuels. One way to lesson the amount we use is to be conservative in our utilities use. We cannot stop using our utilities; however, we can use prudence and not go over board in out use. (Source 3) One way to conserve fossil fuels being looked at today is the use of an engine that uses an energy source such as eclectic. â€Å"In the future, alternative fuel powered vehicles will be predominant, but now, it is not possible to use them realistically. They are not ready for production and have no supporting infrastructure.† (Source 2) There for, many car companies are experimenting with other ways to make their engines more efficient. Many discoveries have recently taken place that enable cars to run on less fuel without sacrificing performance.