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Coal Compare And Contrast

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Oil and coal, as the modern day person knows them today, appear to be vastly different from one another, not only by the means in the ways required to extract either energy sources, but in the way that it functions and how it can be used as energy. However, both of these energy sources do have their similarities, and one of which is their revolutionizing characteristics that transformed their eras and toward present-day times. Coal may have been bulky and required to burn much more of itself in order to travel long distances than was required of oil, but navigation over waters and over land drastically changed in the creation of the steamship and the railway because of the rise of this energy source. Conversely, oil, as aforementioned, did …show more content…

While gasoline is widely used for automobiles, to use this fuel for other types of transportation such as that of long-distance travel would not be as beneficial as diesel due not only to the price of gasoline, which is much more expensive than diesel, but its energy content is also lesser than that of diesel and not as plentiful. Diesel engines are also much more efficient than gasoline engines due to the way these engines are built and function. Conversely, as aforementioned, coal based ships and vessels were much more troublesome than oil-based vessels. Coal ships required larger crews than those on an oil based ship, which can be composed of only 18 people, while crews on coal ships were much larger as the ship required one set of workers that would continually be shovelling and burning coal while also having another crew who would take care of the rest of the ship’s functions. Furthermore, while coal-based vessels required having coaling systems in specific strategic places, diesel engines could instead refuel at sea and not as often as coal due to its fuel having a much higher energy content and was therefore much more efficient. With the introduction of the diesel engine came longer distances of travel to bring goods and raw materials across the sea or the air and making ocean shipping the cheapest of long distance transportations of goods, primarily because the kind of oil used in shipping ocean vessels is the cheapest kind found and is also the dirtiest of

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