Fossil Fuels

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Fossil fuels are hydrocarbons, primarily coal, fuel oil or natural gas, formed from the remains of dead plants and animals.

Fossil fuel is a general term for buried combustible geologic deposits of organic materials, formed from decayed plants and animals that have been converted to crude oil, coal, natural gas, or heavy oils by exposure to heat and pressure in the earth's crust over hundreds of millions of years.

When generating electricity, energy from the combustion of fossil fuels is often used to power a turbine. Older generators often used steam generated by the burning of the fuel to turn the turbine, but in newer power plants the gases produced by burning of the fuel turn a gas turbine directly.

With global modernization in the 20th and 21st centuries, the thirst for energy from fossil fuels, especially gasoline derived from oil, is one of the causes of major regional and global conflicts. A global movement toward the generation of renewable energy is therefore underway to help meet the increased global energy needs.

The burning of fossil fuels by humans is the largest source of emissions of carbon dioxide, which is one of the greenhouse gases that allows radiative forcing and contributes to global warming. A small portion of hydrocarbon-based fuels are biofuels derived from atmospheric carbon dioxide, and thus do not increase the net amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

wikipedia.org, Fossil fuel

[edit] Carbon Capture Storage technology

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an approach to mitigating global warming based on capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from large point sources such as fossil fuel power plants and storing it instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. Although CO2 has been injected into geological formations for various purposes, the long term storage of CO2 is a relatively untried concept.

There are various test projects, but the technology is in it's infancy with no commercial scale projects operational. The IPCC has identified a number of barriers to the . A varity of concerns have been expressed about the technology's ability to effectively mitigatge climate change.

An international group of companies launched a plan to build a novel clean coal-fired power plant in Norway by 2011 that would capture 95 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted.