Conserving energy means working toward sustainability. Sustainability means that you are using energy at a rate that can be maintained indefinitely. For example, if we use up all of the oil in our lifetime, there won't be any left for our children and grandchildren to use. In this activity, you will learn about conserving energy resources.

In order for a natural resource to be sustained, it must be developed in such a way that it is both available for use today as well as in the future.

Let's look at the oil sands in Alberta. It is estimated that there are between 1.7 trillion and 2.5 trillion barrels of oil in the oil sands. This makes the oil sands the second largest reserve of oil in the world. Currently, about $100 billion is being spent by companies trying to extract oil from the oil sands. These companies have two sustainability issues they must deal with.

They have to extract the oil at a rate that will allow them to regain the money they have invested in a reasonable amount of time as well as make a profit. With this comes the need both to start extracting oil as quickly as possible and to extract the oil at a rate that will allow the company to be in business for a long time.

They have to worry about the environment.

     

Energy conservation is not about making limited resources last as long as they can — that would mean that you are doing nothing more than prolonging a crisis until you finally run out of energy resources all together. Conservation is the process of reducing demand on a limited supply and enabling that supply to begin to rebuild itself. Many times, the best way of doing this is to replace the energy used with an alternative source, such as the ones you learned about in the previous activity.

In the case of fossil fuels and the oil sands being extracted in Alberta, conservation also can include finding new ways to tap into the supply so that the oil sands are not drained completely. This allows for those areas to replenish themselves more. This is not a process that happens overnight, however. When you are talking about replenishing natural resources, you are talking about reducing excess demand on the supply in hundreds of years’ time to allow nature to recover.

Without energy conservation, the world will deplete its natural resources. While some people don’t see that as an issue because it will take many decades to happen and they foresee that by the time the natural resource is gone there will be an alternative, the depletion also comes at the cost of creating an enormous destructive waste product that then impacts the rest of life.

Therefore, the goal with energy conservation techniques is to reduce demand, protect and replenish supplies, develop and use alternative energy sources, and to clean up the damage from the prior energy processes. We all need to work together to accomplish these important goals.