Total petroleum products: 19.531 (million barrels/day)
Of which, deleting fuels,
Asphalt and road oil 0.343
Petrochemical feedstocks 0.331
Lubricant 0.138
Miscellaneous products and others 0.089
Waxes 0.006
which sum to 0.907
If the oil industry existed solely for non-fuel uses, it would be extremely tiny, and probably entirely domestic. It would not be large enough to fund any new deep or complex drilling, and nor would it be large enough to fund even the fixed costs of existing wells.
"Petrochemical feedstocks" means plastic and Haber process nitrogenous fertilizers. Lubricants is probably substantially motor oils, but even Teslas have gearboxes and sealed parts (stearing, suspension, etc) that require lubricant. Same for general industry (regardless of input energy source).
You deleted far more than just fuels. "Hydrocarbon gas liquids", "Still gas", "Special napthas", and "Kerosene" include significant non-fuel uses. Those bring the total as high as 3.390, though it is impossible to determine from that chart how much is fuel use.
Also, keep in mind that some fuel uses, such as welding/soldering gasses, don't have an effective replacement at this time. Cutting fuel use to 0 at this juncture is effectively impossible.
That chart seems odd. From what I'm aware of, not all parts of "oil" are used for the same thing. E.g. before the internal combustion engine, gasoline was an unwanted byproduct of creating kerosene, and was usually dumped into the environment by refiners.
> Can't make fertilizer or plastic out of solar energy.
No, but if you're willing to spend a lot of energy you can pull CO2 out of the air and use it as a feedstock to make various fuels or plastics. Right now I think you'd have to burn 10 gallons of oil to make a single gallon so that's not efficient at all.
But if you literally had more solar than you knew what to do with (like Germany does on occasion) you could use that energy to make liquid fuels or plastics.
It's at least a decade and probably several decades off. But this is an economic problem, not a technical one.
In California and other deserts, excess solar can be directed to desalination plants. Our water and energy shortages are essentially the same issue; solving one goes a long way to solving the other.
> We're going to need a lot of surplus energy to sequester all of the CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere over the last 100+ years.
There is no point at which sequestering CO2 by use of electricity is going to make sense. Until the day that we burn zero CO2 whatsoever, you're better off using the electricity as electricity and thereby burning less carbon than burning it and then trying to get it back.
And even at that point, we already have a thing that converts sunlight and CO2 into solid form. Plants.
In theory what you could probably do is cultivate algae in the ocean and then scoop it up in a net, bury it in the ground and repeat. But the scale needed to make a dent is harrowing.
> There is no point at which sequestering CO2 by use of electricity is going to make sense.
Of course there will be. Even burning a small fraction of the Thorium lying in spill heaps today will achieve that. In February 2019, when Tsinghua Uni demos the worlds first commercially viable fusion reactor, everything will change.
We will:
- convert cubic kilometres of seawater into potable water per day and irrigate the Sahara and the Outback.
- convert atmospheric C02 to carbohydrate fuels (while there are still need for them)
- extract cubic killometers of C out of the atmosphere and oceans for construction material.
- Drop the excess blocks of diamond into the mariana trench, those that we don't use for road base.
- etc
People really do not appreciate what superabundance of energy would mean for man and our current planet.
It will literally be the demarcation point between the age of want, and the ages of plenty.
> There is no point at which sequestering CO2 by use of electricity is going to make sense.
> Until the day that we burn zero CO2 whatsoever
That day will come. And we'll then be at the point where its time to use cheap renewables to pull CO2 back out of the air and store it in a stable state where it can't be burned again.
My bet is some sort of synthetic bio-augmented photosynthesis process (if you think about it - that's exactly what plants do - sequester carbon dioxide in carbohydrates). If we are super lucky that process will also generate edible byproducts.
The weird part about sequestering is that if it's really going to work, people will need incentive to simply put all that energy in to the ground with no immediate benefit for them. You either need heavy government regulation or for everyone involved to be thinking about the larger picture.
I wonder if anti aging technology would push people to start seeing climate problems in its larger context.
Carbon sequestration doesn't necessarily mean driving combustion in reverse to get oxygen and hydrocarbons again. Accelerated silicate weathering could remove a lot more atmospheric CO2 per unit of energy invested and it generates carbonate minerals rather than fuel that people would be tempted to burn again. Like this, "Enhanced weathering strategies for stabilizing climate and averting ocean acidification": http://www.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/cont...
That's pretty cool! Non fuel forms of sequestered carbon hadn't occurred to me, though you would still need to fund the process. Using a carbon tax to fund it as a government function seem likes the obvious solution if it were to be implemented at scale.
"After 10 years of research and development, Newlight has commercialized a carbon capture technology that combines air with methane-based greenhouse gas emissions to produce a plastic material"
Rather than using natural gas as a plastics feedstock, they are using methane from organic sources (livestock bioproducts, landfills, other agricultural waste). They are using "greenhouse gases" but not CO2.
Even better, electrolyze water and run the hydrogen through a standard Haber-Bosch ammonia plant. It's a little more complicated but much more energy efficient. It's been done on an industrial scale in the past with electricity from hydropower.
Yeah that's the thing, hydrogen is the key feed-stock for the Haber-Bosch process. I think currently it's mostly made from natural gas. Though earlier it was made by reacting H2O with coke (coal).
Makes me think about the flurry of ill directed excitement about a catalyst that with energy supplied electricity could convert water and CO2 to alcohol. One wonders if it wouldn't be possible use a similar catalyst to convert nitrogen and water to nitrate/ammonia.
