You will prepare and submit a term paper on Energy resources and their impact on economy. Your paper should be a minimum of 3000 words in length.

You will prepare and submit a term paper on Energy resources and their impact on economy. Your paper should be a minimum of 3000 words in length. The reason behind this is that the utilization of these forms of energy is heavily technologically dependent and these technologies are still in the stages of infancy. There are many difficulties in implementing these technologies, some of them being their higher costs and sophistication of usage procedures to the common layman.

Coal is a fossil fuel that is formed in the earth's crust from slow metamorphosis of organic matter under high temperature and pressure conditions. The rate at which coal is formed is very slow and it takes millions of years for the formation of coal. Coal originally formed from ancient plants that after death were decomposed and somehow buried under layers of sedimentary rocks. With the passage of time more and more layers of sediments formed on this decomposed plant matter. This exerted high pressure and resulted in increase of temperature. Over millions of years these physical conditions caused coal to form from the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, and mineral compounds that were present in the plant matter. Coal formation began during the carboniferous period known as the first coal age which spanned 360 to 290 million years before the present day.