Is Industrial Society on the Verge of Collapse?

[hunter]

52. Heavy crude oils, which are essentially gooey tar, are cracked and hydrogenated to make gasoline...

... and other fuels.

Lighter crude oils are subject to similar refinement to produce more valuable products than their raw distillates.

Gasoline hasn't been a simple distillate, the elementary science book description of oil refining, for a long time.

It's not this:



It's cat cracking, hydro cracking, and a whole lot of further chemistry to maximize final product value.

You know that. The days when the Nazis or apartheid South Africa were struggling to make gasoline out of coal, or the Australians gasoline from natural gas, are long past. The technologies for synthetic fuel production are mature and well established and commonly used in everyday production.

If we knew the oil was going to run out in ten years we'd be hell-bent on replacing it with natural gas and coal and we'd certainly succeed.

It's too bad we don't feel the same urgency about global warming. How horrible do things have to get?

As I say here frequently, like it or not, nuclear power is the only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely, which is something we must do.