Can the world make the chemicals it needs without oil? | Hacker News Reader

Can the world make the chemicals it needs without oil?

sciencemag.org

32 pointsheadalgorithm11 comments

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.

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

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

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/

2. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/how-thin...

This turned out way more interesting than I expected: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A

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.

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-...). 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....). 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.

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

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

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

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!

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