Peak plastic
warrenellis.com
warrenellis.com
At $20 or $30 a gallon, oil is completely unaffordable as a fuel but still perfectly viable as a raw material. Obviously we'll substitute out other materials for the least important use-cases, but we won't have to radically rethink the manufactured world. According to the DoE, plastic production accounted for just 4.6% of petroleum consumption and 1.5% of natural gas consumption in the US.
The costs of all raw materials are rising, many of them much faster than the price of oil. Many metals have doubled or tripled in price over the past few years. Commodity foodstuffs have surged in price. Quality hardwood is increasingly scarce. We fetishise oil, but we have a generalised resource problem due to the rapid improvements of living standards in the developing world. There are only three plausible scenarios - people getting used to consuming much less, the development of nuclear fusion, or a third world war.
And from three scenarios, the second is at the moment impossible because of physics and the first because of current state-of-art of economy and politics.
Note that those that claim there's "enough energy" for at least 100 years always calculate "at current consumption rates" which means "no growth" whereas economists and politicians both assume steady growth. As soon as you include the "measly" (from the politicians view) growth of only 3% per year you have to expect double consumption in only 25 years, four time that in 50 years, eight times in 75 and sixteen times in a 100.
Even if it was possible, who knows if we could even get them built. I half suspect we (as a country) will pick WWIII over nuclear reactors, we're so afraid of them.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Pharmaceutical+drugs+made+fro...
Plastic is easily replaceable with cleaner and healthier materials (glass, wood, ...) Not everywhere, but on the basic necessities for sure. Also, we don't need to use new storage materials every time, but reuse more quality ones.
Forgive me if I respect the decentralized distributed thinking of 6 billion people, including millions of economists, engineers, materials scientists, etc., over one random commenter on HN, but I personally have no reason what-so-ever to believe that your judgement that the ROI on oil is higher in plastics mfgr than in transport.
Burning the stuff now is a perfect example of future discounting: it values having energy now over having something that can be used and reused. It's also an example of tragedy of the commons: the energy utility goes to whoever uses it, climate change is a cost for everyone, and unregulated markets don't minimise those costs.
As a hobbyist wood turner who makes my own wooden plates and bowls, I suggest that eating off of wooden plates (or "treen" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treen_(wooden) as it was called) is actually kind of nice. It takes no more time to wash, the texture is earthy and solid, it's hygenic, and it makes you feel in touch with your environment.
(NOTE: I'm not a crazy hippy. I write Ruby, build CNC machines, and look forward to living in the asteroid belt some day...but it's still aesthetically nice to use stuff that has a personal imprint and local texture to it)
That's the main point for me
By the way, I never understand why they don't make roofs on houses out of plastic. It seems like they'd never degrade or leak, and it would be faster to install.
Are shingles really that cheap?
Cost wise, they fall between asphalt shingles and clay tiles or slate (that's a big spread). They can last better than asphalt and should need fewer repairs if you live in a hail or extreme wind area.
Here is a project that got plastic slate recently. http://www.professionalroofing.net/webexclusives/webexclusiv... The extreme labor cost and difficulty of access to repair justified the extra material cost.
http://www.kunstler.com/index.php
I think Kunstler's site is a bit over the top, but it's an interesting "ha ha, only serious" view of peak oil.
Things like this peak plastic article remind me that we better get to work on crazy stuff like fusion or orbiting solar powered microwave transmitters (to run Google's asteroid mining data center, of course) if we want to avoid a long slow decline into another dark age.
I would be much happier if we committed those resources to maintain the nuclear infrastructure we already have in place, to keep it going safely for as long as possible.
We will never hit peak uranium. The "exploitable uranium resources" numbers floating about are for deposits that would be commercially exploitable roughly at present prices. The thing is, the cost of the raw uranium is a very small proportion (less than 0.05%) of the cost of running a fission plant. In other words, you could multiply the market price of uranium by 1000 times, and it would only increase the cost of running the plant by 50%.
But, well before that, it becomes cost-effective to separate uranium from seawater. Where we have enough for tens of milennia. If that runs out, it then becomes cost-effective to mine and refine nuclear fuel in space and return it to earth. At present-day launch costs. Peak Uranium will never happen.
And if it somehow did, thorium is roughly a thousand times more plentiful than U-235.
Now even if we're at peak oil now which is certainly not necessarily true, the Hubbert Curve (where the definition of peak oil comes from) shows that peak occurs when 50% of the oil has been extracted.
Thus we can assume we have at least half the oil available to humanity not yet extracted (let alone all the non-traditional oil techniques like tar sands which boost reserves by an order of magnitude).
My point is that while the price of oil will go up as supply can't keep up with demand, we are nowhere near being in the position where oil is not available for materials. We're also nowhere near being in a position where oil's not economic for materials, because as plastic, oil is arguably very valuable.
Sure we may reach a point where oil's primary value is as plastic, once we solve the other-energy-source challenge. But we don't need to worry about running out of feedstock for plastics, and we certainly won't need to excavate old landfills for the stuff. At least not soon.
IIRC heating oil is a more-direct competitor for the particular type of oil that is used in plastics.
RTFA: "Even though plastics are made on a massive industrial scale, they still account for less than 10% of the world’s oil consumption."
Thus we will likely commute shorter distances before we cut down on plastic, though we may use fewer disposable plastic products than before.
Why aren't we already using hemp for plastic, paper, etc?
Toxic, oil-based plastics can not go away fast enough. You chemists have been poisoning humanity for far too long and now you seriously want to advocate using them more instead of looking for alternative solutions?
You are a part of the problem.