When was fossil fuels first used

Smil's books devoted to this argument are awash in numbers, statistics, estimates, and calculations. But some sketches of the high-level objections give an impression. The barriers to total conversion—much like the problems that plague our energy infrastructure—are a funny mixture of policy, technology, infrastructure, and physics.

For example, the possibility that nuclear power might take up any of the load in the U. Infrastructurally speaking, nuclear is not that different from coal or liquified natural gas.

Fuels are brought to a site, where they are consumed while giving off enormous amounts of heat that runs a steam turbine which generates electricity. And there are good reasons for this! But compare that decision to the one made by France, which went all-in on atomic power and generates about 75 percent of its energy from nuclear reactors. As far as converting to wind and solar, Smil sees much bigger technological and infrastructural hurdles.

A switch to renewables means a transition in terms of both resources and prime movers. The character of renewable resources is fundamentally different from that of fossil fuels. Where fuels are highly dense stores of energy and relatively easy to reliably transport, the renewables are characterized by the highly fickle ebbs and flows of nature. Some days are sunny, others have clouds. Some days are windy, others are quiet, still others are too windy to safely run the mill.

The exception is biofuels, but remember how hilariously inefficient plants are at converting sunlight to biomass? Converting that biomass into fuels adds even more inefficiencies and you end up needing to convert huge swaths of the planet's surface over to fuel growth.

Smil thinks it's completely unfeasible. Which brings us to Smil's last key concept: energy density. Energy density is sometimes used to discuss the capacity of volumes of batteries and fuel. He uses the figure as a means to try to compare the various means of producing energy and the demands for using it.

Every fuel transition wood to coal to oil to gas has involved moving to higher densities. We have benefited every time from more energy per area of land given over to energy infrastructure. Renewables buck that trend. Once you account for the inefficiency of conversion and the irregularity of generating at full capacity, the energy density of wind or solar installations is far below that of oil and gas.

They simply take up a lot of space. The strange rock that burned like a log must have been very exciting back then. For many years, only a few places with easy access to coal used it. Outside China, one such place was Britain. It was hard to miss there. People could go to the beach and pick up lumps of coal. During the years of Roman rule in the British isles, they used coal to heat water for the public baths.

Source: U. Email Share Print. Send your feedback to todayinenergy eia. Ancient civilizations did not have the technology to either drill or refine oil, but they used the petroleum that they found seeping on the surface for construction and waterproofing. According to ancient Greek historian Herodotus , bitumen from a small tributary of the River Euphrates in modern-day Iraq , was used for the construction of the wall of Babylon, the most famous city of ancient Mesopotamia. Mesopotamians also used bitumen for road construction and sealing and waterproofing their boats.

The Sumerian civilization—which dominated the Mesopotamia region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what we now refer to as the Middle East between 4, B. Mosaics and brick columns were one of the achievements in art and architecture of Sumerians. Oil was also used for lighting. Oil was lit in a firepan, which was later replaced by the wick oil lamp. The Romans used oil found in the Dacia province, which is now Romania, to burn as weapon to use in warfare. The Chinese found oil reservoirs in salt wells and drilled wells deep feet to reach natural gas and oil in underground reservoirs at some point around B.

A few hundred years later, the Chinese also built bamboo pipes to carry natural gas to homes for heating and lighting. Some cultures also used petroleum as skin medicinal treatment as civilizations such as the ancient Persians, pre-Columbian Indians, and Sumatrans in the 10 th century believed that crude oil had medicinal benefits. Native Americans would use soft asphalt, or hard asphalt melted in the sun, to glue arrows to shafts and knives to handles. The ancient Chinese civilizations and the Persians are thought to have used natural gas to heat homes.

By the 19 th century, natural gas was predominantly used for lighting in lamps, including streetlamps. Coal , for its part, is much more widespread than oil and natural gas which are concentrated in reservoirs in some places around the world. People have been using coal since the cavemen and have been mining coal for more than 1, years—in China as well as in the UK.

Archaeological relics found in Britain suggest that coal was used during the Roman rule on the British Isles in the 2 nd and 3 rd centuries. The Romans even took some coal back with them to Rome. In the 13 th century, Marco Polo described the use of coal in China.