Crude oil or petroleum a chemical feedstock widely converted at oil refineries into butane, propane, hydrogen, gasoline, diesel, sulfur, lubricating oils & many other petrochemicals in downstream processes. When these carbon & hydrocarbon fuels are reacted with oxygen from Earths atmospheric gases, heat or pressure & or light is produced, thus gasoline in an internal combustion engine produces heat & pressure to shove the pistons down to turn the crankshaft connected by the transmission to the wheels & tires to propel a conventional ICE automobile, car, SUV, truck, bus or similar passenger vehicles. In the consumer context this consists primarily of light duty cars & SUV's which are very popular lately.
Think of the typical 20 lb Propane tank that can be refilled with around 4 gallons or ~15 liters of pressurized liquid propane gas mixtures at large painted white colored tanks of much greater capacity at many gas stations & farm stores.
Once filled, if kept in dry storage, a painted steel propane tank filled with propane has a multi-decade shelf life, though they are illegal to refill after some date stamped into the handle area for DOT law compliance. Composite fiberglass propane tanks are much lower mass or lower weight, but have a shorter useful life before they can be legally refilled & are more fragile to impact damage when being moved around.
I use propane from steel bottles as the fuel for our ~10 pound metal forge, to smelt pneumatically crushed aluminum beverage cans. Once the masonry dry crucible filled with liquid hot aluminum, I use a large steel spoon to remove dross or oxidized labels & other contaminates, then add more crushed cans until I have more than a KG of liquid hot aluminum, then into a hot preheated graphite mould, I cast aluminum bricks for fun as a hobby. This propane fueled furnace operated at about 30kw of heat energy from propane combustion.
Most people use propane for a propane fueled barbecue outdoor grill, oven or stove, typically made of stainless steel. Similar to natural gas, propane very clean burning, and also popular as an alternative fuel in ICE vehicles that originally ran on gasoline that can after being propane fueling kit modified, can run on propane.
In some parts of German automotive propane kit retrofitting very popular because propane cost about half as much as gasoline, such that operating the vehicle on propane results in radically lower costs since fueling costs often over the lifetime of a vehicle dominate the vast majority of the total cost of operation, along with other more fixed rate capital depreciation, taxes & insurance costs.
Electricity can be made in portable generators that run on propane, those most portable backup generators are fueled by unleaded regular gasoline, sometimes with fuel stabilizer added to increase the shelf life of the fuel from 3 months to 2 years.
In commercial thermal power plants, coal, trash, biomass & other combustibles like wood are combusted to make heat that is used to make steam to turn power generating steam turbine generators. Recuperation & multi-stage, multi-pass recovery of the steam energy can increasing system fuel efficiency to 70% thermal efficiency, far better than even the 2ZR-FXE engine Toyota been using in their hybrids, with 43% thermal efficiency, which is considered superior in the automotive sector in terms of thermal efficiency, where many other automotive engines are around 30% thermal efficiency at converting the fuels chemical energy into propulsive energy to move the vehicle.
Hydropower can be used by creating large dams on rivers, and this a popular way to make GW scale electricity & for pumped hydro energy storage & for irrigation of agriculture.
Solar PV can be used to make electricity, though it tends to only work for a few hours per day in very sunny locals, or bright locations without shading problems & persistent access to the sky light, even on bright cloudy days, technologies like mono crystalline solar PV N-Type panels work in overcast conditions well, as do the more expensive CIGS or Cadmium Indium Gallium Selenide aerospace grate PV films that are also sold by Bouge RV for use on the roofs of campers & trailers.
Nuclear Fission can be used to extract energy from the fission of uranium, enriched uranium, thorium or other isotopes or nuclear fuels.
Geothermal & ocean thermal power & wave power & tidal power & offshore wind power can be used to make abundant amounts of electricity.
Biofuels like Biodiesel or DME for example can be used to fuel vehicles that originally burned conventional diesel, as can hydro-diesel from Trillium Energy :)
Coal often burned in thermal plants to make electricity, as coal a very cheap but sadly very dirty burning fuel, thus many efforts are being made to phase out coal power. I personally think that gasification of coal followed by the conversion of coal gas into synthetic fuels via the Shell GTL or Gas to Liquids polymerization processes a better idea of how to use coal. The coal gasified can then be mined for all the metals like mercury that's more valuable than silver, uranium, lead, arsenic, sulfur, cadmium, nickel, iron, phosphorus & many other trace metals, when this is done on an industrial TW scale.
Solar Thermal energy another way to take advantage of free solar radiation from the sun. Many pool heaters mounted to the dark asphalt roofs of single family homes in America have solar thermal water heaters, otherwise it's very expensive to heat the pool in cooler weather. This can also be used to aid in heating hot-tubs, especially well insulated models with a thermal cover to keep the heat in for prolonged periods between use. Make sure to keep the chemistry of the hot-tub water well tuned & acidic or it can cause infections.
Using mirror to concentrate the sun, many solar thermal power plants use hundreds of thousands of pole mounted solar tracking heliostats that precise concentrate the sunlight onto a large dark flat black heat exchanger that heats so steam can be made for turbine generators 24/7 like the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, a concentrated solar thermal plant in the Mojave Desert. The $2.2 billion facility was developed by BrightSource Energy and Bechtel. The largest investor in the project was NRG Energy which contributed $300 million. Google contributed $168 million. The United States government provided a $1.6 billion loan guarantee and the plant is built on 3500 acres (1,400 ha) of public land. It makes 3-5X more energy than a CCGT natural gas plant that uses the same amount of natural gas, and over time the Solar thermal generating system increased its annual power produced through upgrades & improvements. By 2017 it was meeting its name plate capacity, nearly doubling the initial power output vs when the plant when online initially in 2014.
This not an exhaustive review, but I believe in IFR or Integral Fast Reactor, fission fuel breeding reactors are the best & most intelligent way to make abundant amounts of heat & electricity. I believe that fuel breeding reactors are the future of nuclear energy.
Excess heat from nuclear reactors can desalinate sea water, make green hydrogen, provide district heating in winter in cold locals & even heat building in the complex & make hot water & steam for a variety of uses. In the 3.3 GW Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station reactor complex in AZ domestic waste water collected in sewer systems & storm drains provides the cooling water or heat sink for the reactors.
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