Over the coming decades, as we live out the age of oil, our societal needs will begin to be addressed by alternative means as the monetary, ecological and societal costs of continuing with petrochemical (petroleum-derived chemicals) solutions become too great.
Large-scale burning of fossil fuels — whether for heat, locomotion or electricity — will one day be a thing of the past. Most accept this fate as reality, though not all agree that this future is imminent enough to warrant concern at this stage. Predictions of global climate change and sea level rise as a result of our fossil fuel consumption have in recent years hastened the search for alternative energy sources.
With the politics, cost and environmental impact of fossil fuel consumption always on the radar, it’s easy to overlook how else the petroleum industry meets current societal demands: by providing necessary chemical feedstocks for the modern materials that we have fully integrated into our daily lives. You can’t blame Ukraine and its citizens for prioritizing their concern with whether or not the Kremlin shuts off their natural gas supply before winter over their concern for where their yogurt containers come from. Stateside, where on the contrary, we’re currently enjoying some of the lowest gasoline prices in recent years, concerns over material sourcing still rarely register.
When you consider that other than wood, glass, ceramics, and metals, most of the materials we use, from plastics to insulation to textiles, are generated from petrochemical feedstocks, it becomes apparent that we are more prepared for the end of oil from an energy standpoint than from a materials standpoint.
Over the course of the last century our chemical processes and products have relied almost exclusively on petroleum feedstocks for the synthesis of organic chemicals and materials — in this context “organic” shouldn’t conjure images of folks in Birkenstocks at the annual Common Ground Country Fair. Instead it refers to compounds composed mostly of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Whether we’re talking about your locally grown tomatoes, your synthetic shirt or your medication, it’s all organic by this definition. Biomass tends to have a higher oxygen content compared with petrochemicals, giving the two drastically different properties as both fuels and chemical feedstocks.
As fuels, petrochemicals generally provide a more thorough burn than most biomass. Burning is the process of rapid oxidation (in this case adding oxygen to carbon) and since woody biomass has so many oxygens to begin with, you could think about it as already half burned to begin with. Since most petrochemicals are less oxidized, they’re “less burned” from the start, meaning a more complete burn. The more complete burn and greater density of energy is why petroleum products are so valuable to us as fuels.
Just as these petroleum products differ drastically from most biomass from a fuel standpoint, the fundamentally different array of reactions they enable has shaped the way industrial organic and materials chemistry has been carried out over the last century.
Transitioning our energy portfolio from oil will take a balanced approach of older technology (burning of biomass or harnessing wind) and newer technologies (solar and tidal power). A similar approach will be necessary for transitioning from petrochemicals for materials and pharmaceuticals: a balance of new chemistry to work with more oxidized biomass feedstocks as well as finding routes to our traditional petrochemical feedstocks from biomass.
With our current set of reactions in the chemistry toolbox and current means for feedstock extraction, we can only afford to make plastic bottles, tough fabrics, paints, and most of our other materials as long as we can afford to keep fueling up on gasoline — which won’t be forever.
With production increasing in the Canadian tar sands and North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields, coupled with a slash in prices from Saudi Arabian crude, leading to sub three-dollar-a-gallon gasoline in many parts of the country, the end of oil doesn’t seem as imminent as it did five or 10 years ago.
Nevertheless, the search for bio-renewable alternatives to petrochemical-based materials needs to ramp up so we’re ready for the end of oil from more than just an energy standpoint.
Reuben Hudson is a postdoctoral fellow in chemistry at Colby College.