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Comment by irishcoffee | Hacker News Reader

You’re choosing willful ignorance if you think petrochemicals will be replaced by renewables in your lifetime.

It isn’t going to happen. Planes don’t run on solar. Boats don’t run on renewables. The lubricant needed for wind turbines comes out of the earth. Dams need the same lubricant. Building roads, oil. Installing renewable infrastructure, oil. Running combines to harvest vegetation, oil. Building renewables requires massive amounts of oil.

Renewables are amazing and I’m all for them. Let’s keep that train rolling.

Oil isn’t going away, pretending otherwise is willful ignorance.

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Oil isn't magic, you can just make it, and the reason we don't is merely that it's expensive to do that, whereas it's just there under the ground - as a fossil fuel.

But because you can just make it from ingredients everybody already has, this puts a ceiling on its actual price if you have energy independence. If you need to burn oil, you can't make oil because that's a vicious circle which would need even more oil. But so long as the only you want oil is for its other properties that's fine.

Hydrocarbons are incredibly simple, the clue is in their name, a bunch of Hydrogen (literally the most common element in the whole universe) and Carbon (also extremely common). The only reason not to make any particular hydrocarbons you need (e.g. to make JetA for a airliner) is it'd be very energy intensive and instead you can just distil some crude oil to get the hydrocarbons you want...

Strictly speaking, the oil in the Earth's crust is both finite and more than 50% already extracted.

However, a closed cycle of renewable-powered vehicles and processing sites growing crops for biorefineries which are then hydrocracked into the various petrochemical additives to maintain the infrastructure with surplus left over for the rest of society has been proven to be viable going back to the early 2010s.

Leong et al has a great survey of how the entire market of irreplaceable petrochemical uses (e.g. medical grade plastic) and their upstream steps (e.g. metal smelting for making agricultural vehicles) can theoretically be made to work from wind alone, with total immunity to peak oil when it does eventually happen. Although the carbon molecules are essential, having a no-oil well industrial civilization is just a matter of long and arduous implementation and negotiation with vested interests.

You missed the point of my comment.

> It isn’t going to happen. Planes don’t run on solar. Boats don’t run on renewables. The lubricant needed for wind turbines comes out of the earth. Dams need the same lubricant. Building roads, oil. Installing renewable infrastructure, oil. Running combines to harvest vegetation, oil. Building renewables requires massive amounts of oil.

All of this? About 30% of oil usage on the high end. You are listing the small uses for oil.

May some oil always be needed? Yes. But nowhere near as much as we produce today.

On the low end, we will still synthesize what we need from whatever feed stock is available. Lots of pure industrial intermediate chemicals are synthesized out of natural gas.

Oil will not be viable for transportation and heating very soon due to market pressure alone.

Don't forget that we need cadmium for batteries, asbestos for brake pads, and mercury for lightbulbs.

Did you read the comment you replied to?

> This is, on the high end, 20% of the use of fossil fuels. We overwhelmingly burn oil and gas. If we displaced the burning, Hormuz would not matter (or would minimally matter for a few molecules) and the world would be awash in abundant supplies.

I did. Strongly disagree.

Nobody is sending construction boats out into the various seas on batteries and prayers, to construct turbines. The foundation on which these turbines rest, in the sea, were in no way constructed with renewable energy. The cables were not build, dragged across the sea, and connected, using renewable energy. The transmission lines from the land to a switching station were not built or maintained with renewables.

I'm in boss, I'm in on renewables. Lets fucking go. I'm just not ignoring the whole story.

Ships are starting to become electrified. Currently for fixed routes.

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