What natural resource is nonrenewable?

Answer 1

Short answer: Fuels such as oil and coal, and metals such as gold, silver, iron.

Long answer: Generally fossil fuels (things you can burn that came out of the ground) are considered non-renewable Natural Resources. Examples are coal, natural gas, and oil.

The idea is that they are not renewable because it takes a very long time to make more (some say millions of years).

Natural resources are called renewable if you can get more of it if you wait a short while. Examples are: wind, hydroelectric, wood, solar.

You probably see the obvious difficulty with using renewables: to take the familiar example of a car, enough gasoline to drive a small car 100 miles weighs about 10 pounds and takes up the room of 2.5 gallons. To hold the electricity to drive that same car 100 miles needs a 400-pound battery pack that fills most of the trunk. Some day (hopefully soon) batteries will improve to the point that this will be less of a problem.

To take the example of a home, except for burning wood (which there isn't nearly enough of), the other sources cannot be "turned up" and "turned down" to accommodate changing loads (like when your air conditioner goes on), and of course solar and wind only work sometimes, so we're back to the battery problem.

It does not seem to me that we will be stop burning LOTS of non-renewable fossil fuels any time in the next 40-50 years, at least. (And this is coming from someone who designed a unique solar collector in the 70's, and a hybrid car better than the designs they're using today in the 80's.)

Answer 2

time is the not reaplaceable resource