Keeping Us Together with Chemical Energy

Have you ever looked at the walls and wondered why the drywall holds together but doesn't stick to your skin when you touch it? Or why does water poured into concrete harden it when it dries?

Chemical energy explains all of this and more, such as how cells breathe. In fact, without chemical energy, nothing at all would be held together except through gravity, so we'll take a look at this energy to understand how everything keeps its shape.

Turning Hydrogen and Oxygen into Water

Let's start at a very simple substance to explain chemical energy.

A water molecule is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, hence the term H20 (meaning two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen) being coined. So what keeps these atoms together? Why do they have a tendency for all intents and purposes to “stick” together?

When two hydrogen atoms and a single oxygen atom combine to form water, they use chemical energy to form a chemical bond, and some of the atoms' chemical energy is transformed into bond energy which keeps the atoms together. It allows the electrons to be shared among atoms, and a molecule to stay intact.

Chemical energy should not be confused with nuclear energy, although the two forms share similar purposes.

Nuclear energy is more commonly known as fission or fusion reactions, which break apart or combine atoms respectfully.

In fusion, atoms combine to become an entirely new atom, unlike in a chemical bond, when two atoms combine but remain separate, held together by their electrons as opposed to meshing into a single atom.

When atoms combine into a molecule, their chemical energy decreases the exact same amount as is transferred into their bond energy holding them together.

When they break apart, their bond energy is transferred back, so the potential for chemical energy always remains the same – it's just sometimes in a different form.

When you eat food, the food is digested by your body, and the chemical energy of the food is stored by your body to be used as kinetic energy, which it changes into before use.

Another common example would be burning a pile of wood. The heat catalyzes a chemical reaction between the wood and oxygen, resulting in CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions.

So now you see that chemical energy provides us with the energy we need to run around while holding together most everything we see. It's similar to nuclear energy, but the differences are very important to understand.

Without chemical energy, we'd be hard pressed to stay together.