Global economic activity energized by the first half of the Oil Age from 1900 to 2000 saw rapid development worldwide of wealth in OECD nations mostly, financial markets, investments, broad complex economies with many parts. First piston engines fueled by gasoline & diesel, though battery electric had an early peak before in the late 1800's, the gasoline engine and Ford's production line of reduce labor complexity with machine or robot assistance gave way to mass manufacturing of automobiles such that Toyota for example, in Japan, has made millions of exported vehicles sold in most countries around the world.
99% of the vehicles in world require fuel, gasoline or diesel. That includes all the airplanes, ships, tanks, trucks, trains, most it burns fuel to make energy.
Fueling all human activity with finite fossil fuels has created an economic trap of transitioning away from wasting oil to conserving oil carefully in hyper efficient vehicles like the 2022 Toyota Corolla Hybrid that gives me 64 MPG all day long in city & highway use averaging well north of 50 miles per gallon on regular unleaded gasoline, nothing special, though I tend to add ethanol free gasoline distributed by CENEX and don't like ethanol in gasoline because ethanol has less energy and hygroscopic as in ethanol in gasoline attacks moisture from the air, and a I live in a rainy area where it commonly overcast and sprinkling for many days in a row.
Governments do not even address this issue, because its been known since the early 2000's that all the easy oil has been burned up, so any new oil mined from Earth going to cost way more, even using every industrial oil mining trick under the sun!
Even agriculture increased output in response to petrochemical fertilizer availability, along with many herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and pesticides made from downstream chemicals made from crude oil or natural gas as input ingredients. Say Black Gold, crude oil contains chemicals that can be converted into millions of other chemicals. UPF foods have 10,000 different chemical additives, most of which are probably not healthy to consume.
Peak oil easy to understand. If you have glass of water, cup of tea or coffee, it starts out full, then as you drink it you deplete it and it runs out. If we consider an oil well like a giant glass and oil mining like a giant straw to suck the oil and gas out, then eventually the well runs out of oil too.
We are coasting on fumes of ancient sun light that became plants buried over millennia, under heat & pressure converted into oil, crude oil or petroleum. Ancient sunlight is what fuels aircraft and automobiles today. But it took millions of years to make all of that oil and we have burned up most of it in less than 100 years increasing human population from 2 billion people alive at the same time to 8 billion people and most of them want a car now :) How are we going to sell cars and fuel those cars, for 8 billion people? Exactly, a hard problems to solve, even with every generation of new biofuels, the oil party ended in 1999.
Roads made of asphalt for vehicles fueled by gasoline, it seems we have enslaved oil as a material, chemical feedstock and fuel, increasing human popular 6X along the way. Today we have resorted to boiling tar sands with natural gas heat to make heavy tar sands oil and other previously unprofitable hydrocarbons are now resources used by oil refineries.
As the price of oil increases over time the oil companies will conserve the existing oil fields to drag on their ability to generate profits.
Fueling society with gasoline and diesel almost like giving each person an army of slaves and land. We liberated huge amount of cheap easy energy with early 1950's oil industry expansion, but we can't just drill more into a finite resource. The way we waste fuel today not sustainable and will cause gasoline and diesel to become very expensive in the future.
Fabrics are made of petrochemical plastic fibers, like Polypropylene, nylon, rayon, acrylic, spandex, lycra, elastane, fleece, viscose, velvet.
Many lawn and garden chemicals, packaging for laundry soap, tooth paste, tooth brush handles and the brush fibers, plastic inside cars, in the bumpers, dashboard, side skirts, even the front window made of a glass sandwich filled with clear plastic.
Polymers and plastics made of oil are everywhere. Vinyl windows and siding or plastic deck boards that do not rot. Plastics are in many consumer products for washing hair or conditioner, as acrylic polymers, microplastics people are bathing with. Even the shower nozzle made of chrome or nickel plastic plastic and the nozzles and gaskets are polymers made of oil petrochemicals.
In agriculture diesel fueled machines convert hydrocarbon energy into food calories then fuel the shipping of those foods, fruits, veggies, to distant markets, in a fuel wasting energy intensive system integrally dependent on cheap fuels. The airlines today only pay $1 per gallon US of Jet A fuel for commercial passenger aircraft and complain that if the fuel any more expensive it would not be profitable to operate an airline for passenger air traffic. The air quality near airports terrible because nothing clean tech like an automobile engine exhaust catalytic converter was possible to adapt to airplane engines.
No comments:
Post a Comment