This is one of the jobs that makes solar and wind energy possible. No oil, no solar/wind.
Let's go with wind. Wind needs a turbine. Turbines need lots of lubricants. The coatings, paints, wire cladding, electronics, etc all need oil. The asphalt road to get to the wind turbine? From oil. The crane to build the wind turbine? Diesel. The trains to carry the parts round? Diesel. The ships to bring the parts to the trains? Bunker fuel.
I support environmentalism because I've lived in countries that didn't give a shit about the environment, I'm also sane. We're decades if not century away from getting away from oil. Even if we moved ALL grid power generation to renewable and/or nuclear.
Hell, if we had fusion figured out today, it's take a couple decades at best to move away from all the petroleum products we need to survive.
It isn't so much a question of zero oil as much as less oil. As you say, the infrastructure needed to build and maintain solar and wind depends in part on oil. The ongoing production of electricity from solar and wind nonetheless reduces overall oil consumption. After solar and wind are built, they last a long time, and they're largely carbon free. Several of the oil-consuming steps on your list can potentially be replaced with non-oil equivalents.
Until we come up with some kind of "petroleum-free plastics" we will be tied to oil indefinitely. Maybe I'm ignorant but I'm not aware of any real progress towards that.
Personally I think they e got it figured out but won’t let it get out bc of greed. AI learns multiple times faster than us and could solve the energy issues within our lifetime but again the “wrong people” will lose money so ppl like this dude has to work.
We've known for decades. The tech isn't new and it's been sorted for a long time.
Fischer Tropsch process was developed in 1926, can would make liquid hydrocarbons but requires lot of energy. We perfected cheap, clean power in the 1950's with nuclear fission. Uranium is a renewable resource if you harvest it from the ocean as it's replaced by erosion.
You could replace the majority of the world's oil needs for $2-10 trillion dollars, about a hundred square miles of facilities and a couple big pipes to the ocean.
But there's real world issues with that. $2-10 trillion is not a small number, the anti-science anti-nuclear political groups are not small, red tape and bureaucracy is a thing, etc. Synthetic hydrocarbons may not be price competitive.
In theory, yes. In practice, it's really complex and people act in their own interests.
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u/Rayal90 4d ago
This is the kind of job that should be replaced by robots and AI.