COLUMN

What Are Fossil Fuels?

What Are Renewables?

By MIKE ZAGATA • for Hometown Oneonta & The Freeman's Journal

Based upon what I read in our papers, there seems to be a lack of information and/or understanding about fossil fuels and the so-called “renewables.”  This might be a good time to attempt to get all of us on the same page.

The descriptive term “fossil fuels” includes coal, oil and natural gas - the energy sources that were formed millions of years ago as sedimentary deposits in lakes and oceans.  They represent plant and animal material that settled to the bottom of those water bodies and were, over millions of years, subjected to pressure.  As a result, they were transformed into coal (hard coal or anthracite and soft coal or bituminous), oil and natural gas.  Because they took millions of years to form, they are considered to be non-renewable – some day we will run out of them.