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Comment by iuygtfrgth | Hacker News Reader

It is, we had whale oil which needs handling in barrels and could be burnt in lamps, so we switched to crude oil which was then refined to the same grade as whale oil and could be handled in the same barrels and burnt in the same lamps. Then we switched to tankers but the oil could still be burnt in the same lamps so no consumer change, then the consumer changed to using it in their cars but we shipped it in the same tankers.

Now we have a system where we can only use a fuel that is delivered in a certain quantity to a local gas station as a liquid that can be burned.

Compare this with the electricity grid where we can switch from coal to nuclear to wind to gas without anyone noticing.

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Maybe I'm just ignorant, or blinded by cognitive biases, but I always imagine the combination of gas/diesel and internal combustion engines as an engineering optimum, reached iteratively after decades of wandering through parameter space. At least wikipedia's version [1] of the history of cars seems consistent with this, showing a history of dozens of engine designs and fuel choices (solids, liquids, gases, and electric batteries) long before the ICE came to dominate. (Maybe I'm unreasonably optimistic, but I'm unsurprised we've succeed in breaking free of our original "path", steam engines). Perhaps it's my lack of imagination, but I'm not aware of any practical fuel (chemical or otherwise) superior, in energy density and convenience, to liquid hydrocarbons. Nor am I aware that there was a historically superior way of obtaining liquid hydrocarbons to letting them gush out of the ground, which I understood was the least expensive source for them throughout modern history.

Am I simply rationalizing the history of modern transportation, and if so can you enlighten me as to the "paths not taken" that I'm blind to?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile

If oil hadn't been available do you think Karl Benz would have sat down and invented the entire drilling, refining and transport system before he started on the car?

The ICE was possible because oil infrastructure was there - the first gas stations were the pharmacists who already sold the oil

Nobody is claiming anything about the internal combustion engine. Uvdiv is claiming that oil is not an example of path dependence because it is actually optimal. That there exists a path to get to the ICE does not refute the argument.

I'm with uvdiv here: the idea that the modern oil industry exists due to path dependence ignores the massive fact that petroleum was by far the most concentrated, easily transported exploitable form of energy on the planet in the 19th century.

If an efficient approach to convert hydrocarbons into electricity had been invented, we all would be driving electric cars today.

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