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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see a viable plan to transition for plastics, so I suspect that oil consumption will remain substantial until plastics get enough expensive that we find viable alternatives. Conversely I don’t think we’re actually in danger of transitioning off of oil consumption in any real way in the next 20 years.

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Petrochemical use is currently what, about 20% of total crude oil use? Yeah we'll probably need to start at least trying to tackle that soon even if the CO2 in the atmosphere thing is more urgent, but there's no pressing need to be a viable plan for 100% reduction now if we won't even think about using it for probably a decade at least. We've got the time to move forward one small step at a time and then verify each step so it isn't like plastic recycling ("Oh yeah we'll totally do it" *dumps in lower income country*) and measurable goals on shorter timeframes (say, 30% reduction by 2030) are much more achievable and effective than a vague long term goal of not using any more oil ever, not even a little bit. There's no shame in picking the low hanging fruit first.

Plastic is only cheap because it's a byproduct of oil. It'll stop being as cheap and plentiful if we stop producing oil and we'll naturally move to cheaper substitutes

Although I don't think oil use is going to end anytime soon

Plastics have many substitution options outside of the narrow range where it's the best choice.

I'd be more concerned about how gas is feedstock for pharma, and fertiliser.

> I'd be more concerned about how gas is feedstock for pharma, and fertiliser.

Would you elaborate on what you mean by this? I don't follow.

Gas, including ethylene from oil production, is used heavily in pharma, plastics and fertiliser production. If oil becomes uneconomic to produce, the supply of drugs, explosives, plastic and fertiliser is at risk, at the very least of price shocks.

Peak oil is not really just about untapped stocks, it's about the economics of supply and consumption. We won't "run out" of oil, it will stop being viable to produce it when gasoline ceases to be so economically important.

The feedstock uses of ethylene and lng are justified by the underlying consumption of petrol, diesel and heavy oils. It's profit from waste. If the gasoline isn't used the refineries shut down. If the entire cycle has to convert to fertiliser the economics of fertiliser change, and prices change.

Now I follow. Thanks for the clear and patient reply!

Plastic can be made from hydrogen and carbon. Plastic is a minuscule fraction of our oil consumption. Maybe the oil-free synthesis path becomes economically attractive once we stop burning oil for energy and plastic feedstock is no longer a mostly free byproduct of that.

https://www.statista.com/topics/8418/petrochemical-industry-...

16% of world oil consumption is not nothing. AFAIK we don’t have good replacements and cost isn’t the only reason. And even if it is, think about how pervasive petrchochemical plastics are - it seems unlikely we’d go back so even if we switched to more expensive replacements, that means the price of a lot of stuff is going to go up by a lot…

Nuclear reactors and thermal depolymerization seems promising. We could probably mine every landfill site in America for a century before needing to think about something else.

Right but talk to most people and they’ve bought into this myth that renewables will help get us off fossil fuels while failing to consider the problem systemically. It’s like talking to a wall. We need to build an insane amount of nuclear reactors to get rid of fossil fuels from grid production but also to power secondary things like plastics manufacturing, carbon recapture etc. We need to be soaking up excess nuclear capacity. Excess solar is a joke because ultimately it has to recharge expensive batteries first whereas nuclear has a lot of excess night time and day time energy.

At present rates we’re likely to end up with an order of magnitude more renewable capacity than nuclear capacity, with that availability showing up as an equivalent number in cost. Any novel industrial process that relies on using huge amounts of energy will use the cheapest source of energy if at all possible, meaning that it will be engineered to deal with cheap but intermittent power sources. Unless there is some fundamental physical reason that it can’t work that way.

Nobody is even planning to build an insane of amount of nuclear, but we keep deploying more renewables every year.

I bet a lot of that 16% is fertilizer.

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