
Can the world make the chemicals it needs without oil? - headalgorithm
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/can-world-make-chemicals-it-needs-without-oil
======
bsder
Why would we care about oil being an industrial feedstock, though?

If you quit feeding cars and power plants with oil derivations, the _VAST_
majority of your CO2 problems go away. And, because the rate of consumption
will drop through the floor, we would have enough oil to last centuries or
more.

------
kk58
Removing fossil fuels won't solve co2 problem. Agriculture, animal husbandry,
building heating, industrial power all are major contributers.

It's lazy to think driving Tesla's will cure climate change. Our biggest
problem is agriculture. We are cutting forest to grow crops and feed animals
which emit methane .it's a triple whammy. Losing a carbon sink, increasing co2
production in the supply chain and also increasing co2 in the value chain.

We need to eat and farm better

~~~
staplers
Whens the last time you looked up real numbers? Transportation contributes
vastly more than livestock to co2 release.

~~~
bacr
You have to look beyond CO2 emissions to assess climate change impact. The
IPCC land use report from this past August does exactly this [1]. The
associated reporting is also quite good [2].

The grandparent is right: cutting down forest to grow cattle feed is a triple
whammy.

1\. [https://www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/)

2\. [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/how-
thin...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/how-think-about-
dire-new-ipcc-climate-report/595705/)

------
nn3
Didn't understand the point of the plant in Norway making synthetic fuels
using water power for cars. When the cars burn the fuel, the CO2 in it will
still be part of the atmosphere and increase the temperature. So what's the
advantage over using fossil fuel? I can see it making sense to just move away
from fossil fuel, as when you worry it running out or being too expensive or
funds crazies. But it doesn't seem to be useful for helping the climate.

~~~
dredmorbius
Fossil fuel reintroduces sequestered carbon into the atmosphere and biosphere.
This results in a net addition of carbon to the biosphere.

Synthesized fuels from atmospheric or oceanic carbon take _currently resident_
carbon from the biosphere, convert it to fuel, and reintroduce it to the
biosphere. _There is no net addition of carbon to the system._

Keep in mind that this _only_ works if you're sourcing carbon _from the
biosphere_. As a contrast, earlier suggestions to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels
from sources such as limestone, made in the 1960s, would _also_ increase total
biospheric carbon, and would _not_ be carbon neutral.

The problem with fossil fuels is the _scale_ of carbon dioxide being added to
the atmosphere, about 32 gigatons per year
([http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/news/2015/march/global-...](http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/news/2015/march/global-
energy-related-emissions-of-carbon-dioxide-stalled-in-2014.html)). Reducing
that, or turning the net _negative_ , is what we have to do. Jeffrey S. Dukes,
"Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) is an excellent reference to the rates of
fossil fuel formation and utilisation
([https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1....](https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.pdf)).
We're burning oil at roughly 5 million times the rate at which it first
accumulated.

Before humans relied on fossil fuels, virtually all energy we used came from
plant energy, via either human or animal muscles, or in some instances, fire.
Small additional amounts were contributed by wind and water power, a minuscule
amount by geothermal energy. A phenomenal exploration of human history through
the lens of energy is Vaclav Smil's _Energy and Civilization_ (2017), or
Manfred Weissenbacher's _Sources of Power_ (2009) which divides all of history
into five eras: hunter-gatherer, agriculture, coal, oil & gas, and the post-
oil world.

As Gregory Clark notes in _A Farewell to Alms_ , there are effectively two
periods to human history: Before and after 1800, typically given as the start
of the Industrial Revolution.

Back to synfuels: the principle advantage of these is that _liquid hydrocarbon
fuels are phenomenally useful_ They're long-term stable, extraordinarily
energy dense, largely safe, can be utilised across and extreme range of
scales, in engines ranging from a few watts to 100 MW output, and across all
modes of transport: road, rail, canal, sea, air, and rockets. If sourced from
non-fossil carbon, they could remain useful, though attempts to do so have not
proved economical or scalable to date.

------
atemerev
Yes. It requires a lot more (thermal) energy for synthesis, which can be
readily provided by nuclear power.

------
f00zz
Companies like Lego are already using so-called "green plastic", polyethylene
produced from sugarcane ethanol. It's still polyethylene, though (non
biodegradable).

------
AtlasBarfed
Why do we need to not use oil for chemical production? They aren't necessarily
producing CO2 being adapted to other forms.

~~~
AtlasBarfed
To clarify, I'm assuming oil that is used as inputs for the chemical's
synthesis, not any energy used for the synthesis.

EVs will devalue oil in the short run since it reduces demand. But then again,
oil has been so heavily exploited that easy-to-get oil is long gone, so if EVs
drop demand below a threshold, then oil production will fall off a cliff.

Crossing my fingers and hoping!

