Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com