How will 500,000 products made with fossils as feedstock & process energy be created post fossil fuels?
Preface. It is quite likely that after fossils are gone, plastics will no longer be made, since they are incredibly complex – PhDs in numerous fields make them possible – and most kinds have been around for only 50 years or less. Thwaites (2011) showed how hard replicating a complex process that we take for granted would be by performing a simple exercise: He tried to make an ordinary toaster from scratch. Even the simplest toaster had 404 parts of plastic, steel, mica, copper, and nickel. After a great deal of struggle, he was able to make the metal pieces, which mankind has made since the Iron Age. But plastics were beyond him. He’d have had to refine crude oil to make propylene, which takes at least six chemical transformations to make into the simplest plastic, polyethylene.
Crude oil is the feedstock for half a million products. What follows is a description of how plastic is made. My book “Life After Fossil Fuels” discusses plastic in more depth — how much biomass is needed, how to replace asphalt and lubricants, and recycling.
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We consume about ONE BILLION TONS of products a year. We live like kings. Of all the fossil fuels we use in a year, about seven percent – 500 million metric tons of oil equivalent, the weight of all the people on earth – is used as both feedstock and energy to make these one billion tons of products (IEA 2018). Mostly its oil for high-value chemicals. Natural gas and coal are used to make ammonia and methanol, but difficult to turn into other products because they require multiple energy-intensive steps (IEA 2018, KAUST 2020).
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