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Comment by zeristor | Hacker News Reader

A certain amount of irony in that the Azolla blooms were deposited on the sea floor, and people are now looking to see if they've become large deposits of oil and gas.

How long do we have to wait before people give up on fossil fuels?

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Somehow I thought that a significant proportion of oil ended up in non-fuel products (plastics, lubricants etc). So I was going to comment on how difficult it would be to give it up. But after a bit of digging I found this[0] and it seems the vast majority of it is used for fuel.

Question from someone who knows nothing about refining, if we did move away from oil/gas as fuel, would we still have to extract as much to gain the same amount of non-feul petroleum products?

[0] https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/In_a_barrel_of_oil

If we keep the current levels of consumption, then yes, we won't need that much oil. However, if oil will stop being used as fuel, petroleum products are expected to become much cheaper, which could raise the demand.

But first demand would drop, making a lot of extraction less profitable than it is now. Wouldn't a lot of the oil suppliers go out of business (forever) before we could "rescue" them by buying even more plastic crap we don't need? Also, even if we started building our houses out of plastic or something, I can't imagine that covering as much use of oil as we are currently burning.

Saudi oil is still quite cheap to extract, so Canadian oil sands producers going bankrupt wouldn't stop all production.

Also, a producer going bankrupt means their assets are sold for pennies on the dollar which would enable a low cost producer to take over without the huge sunk costs of the original producer.

Source on petro products becoming cheaper?

It's the natural inference from supply and demand (so I agree it's possible), but it's worth keeping in mind that oil is a very big capital-intense business. Extraction, multiple rounds of transport, and refining all have significant economies of scale.

Some of those scale advantages might break down if demand downscaled to any small fraction of current, which could make the fallout unpredictable.

I'm also not sure how fungible a barrel of oil is. That is to say, is the fuel fraction of current production easily repurposed for making plastics, or is that fraction more or less destined to become fuel of some sort? If fixed fractions are just compositionally destined for certain uses, a collapse in demand for those fractions could actually increase the cost of the remaining in-demand fractions since they still have to cover the costs of production.

Plastic products still contain most of the carbon that was originally in the oil, so I don't think it will be a problem for the climate even if we keep extracting oil and making plastic out of it. It will be just like making steel out of iron ore. We only need to stop burning that shit.

From a climate point of view certainly but we need to stop dumping plastics in the ocean desperately, we are fucking up the largest biosphere on the planet.

Last I checked about 4 percent of the produced oil went into the production of plastic.

The plastic celluloid slightly predates the beginning of crude oil extraction. Plastics can be made starting with non-petroleum chemicals, such as cellulose.

See also Henry Ford's plastic car made from soybeans, wheat, and corn, and designed to run on hemp fuel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean_car However, making cars from foodstuffs may be inconsistent with feeding 10 billion people.

Until we find a way to economically cleave the ether bond in cellulose it’s more or less a byproduct of food production and can’t be used for a whole lot else. (edit: I meant anything food related, obviously you can make paper, rayon etc. out of it.)

What starts to encroach on the biomass used for food is when you start using the sugars (producing ethanol etc) which is what would be used to make plastics (like PE) that are currently made from oil.

I've read that oil or derivatives is used in a very large proportion of industrial or construction products and proxesses.

As has been remarked, the problem is less about extracting it and more about burning it. However, to answer your question, in the absence of any extraction its still quite easy to make oil from any carbon-based substance (search "thermal depolymerization"). We will never run out of oil - at worst, we will run out of "cheap" oil. However, as plastic is ludicrously cheap anyway, I don't see that as a major problem. Sure, it might cause some companies some headaches, but it won't cause any major disruption to modern life.

Humanity seems to be in the death throes of hydrocarbon addiction

This sort of comment always strikes me as a sort of faux-ignorance to reality. Nobody’s addicted to fossil fuels. People simply have a demand for energy, they just want to power their homes, and meet their transport needs.

> Nobody’s addicted to fossil fuels

Yeah we can quit any time.

Everything about this statement is wrong.

> addicted

Nobody’s addicted to anything here. There’s a demand for energy, and a supply of it in the market.

> addicted specifically to fossil fuels

Even if you put aside the frankly silly premise that anything the market has a demand for, it must be addicted to, the demand is for energy, not energy produced in a specific way. If you had two light bulbs, one powered by coal, and another powered by a renewable source, do you think there is a single person in the world that could tell them apart?

Well, people aren't addicted to heroin, they want their opioid receptors activated. :).

> Even if you put aside the frankly silly premise that anything the market has a demand for, it must be addicted to, the demand is for energy, not energy produced in a specific way.

Addiction also is a thing until it doesn't. Addicts can kick their addiction, especially if the underlying need is fulfilled by something else.

> If you had two light bulbs, one powered by coal, and another powered by a renewable source, do you think there is a single person in the world that could tell them apart?

Doesn't matter. The market cares about whether you can sell fossil fuels at a profit. Energy demand is what creates a fossil fuel demand, and our fossil fuel addiction will only end when we're able to close off the fossil fuel tap without immediately collapsing the whole civilization.

This is ridiculous. You're purposely conflating need/demand for addiction to try to spin something a certain way. I need food, water, air, etc. and yet would not call myself an addict. Would you?

I don't think any one is claiming oil is a viable solution long-term, so why are you bothering?

Addiction is not a binary state. I simply have a demand for tech discussions. Yet I’m addicted to HN. It’s fairly easy to identify addiction - you try to quit.

Addiction isn’t just whatever you say it is, it’s a word that has a defined meaning. Addiction is the pathological pursuit of a relief. Now even if you think our consumption of energy is pathological (and if you want to assert that, you’ll have to prove that our consumption of energy is generated by a mental disease), then the addiction would be to energy, not energy generated by a specific means.

This level of absurd hyperbole really doesn’t help anybody except climate deniers, who can quite rightly say ‘climate activists rely on absurd hyperbole’, or worse.

It’s an energy addiction, not a hydrocarbon addiction. Similarly, people get a nicotine addiction, not a cigarette addiction. They can switch to alternatives, like cigars, patches, and ecigs. Luckily, our alternatives are better - solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear.

The process workarounds required to run an airliner on geothermal energy are still kind of elaborate though.

The market is the only source of fuel for people, thus until alternatives on it become viable or until fossil supply become scarce, whichever first.

Maybe you meant 'oil'?

We tried waiting, it didn't work. We're just starting to try more things. Society appears to be too slow to fix this.

Hell, people buy new SUVs far bigger than they have any use for and tell us they need it while the politicians try to protect the industry. If we just leave it be we'll never make it.

> How long do we have to wait before people give up on fossil fuels?

Probably not that long. Oil extraction is such a resource-intense process that some alternative, be it nuclear or otherwise, will become more economically viable.

So, this is all a part of natural cycle. Humans are part of life on Earth. Some life on Earth captures CO2, and the other emits CO2, until it runs into some consequences; then the cycle repeats.

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