What is special about petroleum?

Petroleum has a high energy density relative to renewable alternatives, many of which were popular throughout much of history. Each energy source we pick to replace the last one is more energy dense, more concentrated, than the last one. Wood to coal. Animal oils to petroleum.  It is why people get so excited about hydrogen, despite some concerns about safety and infrastructure. Paul Graham discusses this phenomenon of increasing density of stuff we like in The Acceleration of Addictiveness and its effect on us in terms of drugs and technology (like t.v. and the internet), but it is clearly and measurably true in terms of popular sources of energy.

Refining petroleum started being commercially viable in the industrialized world when kerosene replaced whale oil as the lamp oil of choice. It is possible that this transition to petroleum saved some species of whales from extinction, as the demand for lamp oil was growing quickly at that time. People sometimes use this as an example of capitalism saving the world, but assigning causation is difficult and I think that all we can say is that they might have happened around the same time. Whether we ran out of whales or technological advances + capitalism or changing fashions saved the whales, this represents just one instance of the general trend of things in our society becoming more concentrated.

Oil lamps are a good choice for illumination in areas where electricity is not widely available, which is no longer the case in most areas of the U.S. If petroleum had been used  only for lamps, it would not have the place it does today in our society. However, the internal combustion engine, running on gasoline or diesel, was popularized around the time incandescent lights were replacing oil lamps in the late nineteenth century. When flying became a reality instead of a dream, the kerosene formerly used in oil lamps fueled jets instead. Petroleum producers have had decades to centuries to find uses for distillate fractions that have less demand. Which brings us to today.

In addition to dominating the transportation fuels market, a staggering volume of our petroleum consumption is in the form of chemicals or other products. Since we consume almost 20 million barrels of oil per day in the US, even a small percentage of oil consumption can amount to thousands of barrels per day of “Miscellaneous Products“. So what else is made with petroleum besides the gas we put in our car? More than 2/3rds of our petroleum consumption is for transportation.

• gasoline (2/3rds, but a decreasing share, of our petroleum transportation fuel consumption),
• fuel oil (includes desiel fuel and heating oil, but also bunker fuel used to power tanker ships because it is too nasty to burn in other contexts),
• liquified petroleum gases (inlcudes the propane loved by Hank Hill, but also contains butane and other light molecules, used for grilling, rural heating, and apparently as a refrigerant),
• jet fuel (kerosene-like fuel to power commercial or military aircraft),

• still gas (non-condensed or non-condensible gas byproducts of refining petroleum, including methane)
• coke (like coal, also fires kilns for making cement and steel, but pure stuff can be used to make electrodes. Coke is more prevalent in non-conventional oil sources.)
• Asphalt and Road Oil (Not only are cars powered by petroleum, but the roads are made out of it too.)
• Kerosene
• Waxes and lubricants (like motor oil or for construction equipment)
• Naptha and other oil for feedstocks and miscellaneous products

So what kind of feedstocks are these chemical intermediates? Where else does petroleum go in our daily lives? The answer goes deeper than most people understand. It certainly goes deeper than anything I was aware of, even while working in the renewable energy field. Oil companies talk about plastics, fibers, medical devices, and fertilizers. But that only scratches the surface.

My awakening to the strangeness of our acceptance of petroleum-derived products started when my midwife asked me to get vegetable based oil for my baby following delivery. It was only then that it struck me as odd that it was a cultural norm to rub petroleum distillate on new born babies in the form of baby oil. Back when I was working on developing cellulosic ethanol at NREL we would talk about how specialty chemical byproducts could be interesting, but if you made them with any appreciable yield, they would flood their market and drop in value as fuel making scaled up. The conventional wisdom was that the only 3 markets that scale together are fuel, livestock feed, and (human) food. After about three years of hearing this, one of the times someone said it to me, it struck me. If we know that for sure, it must already be the case. Oh My God, They ARE FEEDING US PETROLEUM.

We eat petroleum both directly and indirectly. Indirectly, we get it through pesticides,  fertilizers and possibly animal feed. I can only link directly to the general history page, but if you look at the 1970 entry, “A Hunger for More“, BP talks about about extracting proteins from oil to use as fish feed to make fish an affordable dinner option for the average American. In fact, BP was  in the “nutrion” business until 1994.

Michael Pollan apparently mentioned that there are petroleum products in chicken nuggets in 2006.  I don’t eat chicken nuggets, so I may not have paid as much attention to this claim as I now think I should have. But the part I heard through friends and media was that most meals were corn and that was bad. I agree that a diet sneakily full of corn and corn derivatives like high fructose corn syrup may not be healthy, but don’t find corn being hidden in my food quite as disturbing as the concept of eating a petroleum-derived diet. Synthetic colors and flavors are in many food, drug, and cosmetic products and are petroleum-derived (or, to be fair, coal tar-derived). Yes, pharmaceuticals and the processes to make drugs often involve petrochemicals as well.

By being made into many end products at such large volume, petroleum ties together many markets we may currently think of as separate. According to a break down of GDP by industry, The US 2009 GDP was $14.1 trillion dollars. Of that, oil and gas mining was worth $142 billion, petroleum and coal products were worth $120 billion, chemicals, plastics and rubber were worth $ 274 billion, and transportation and warehousing was worth $390 billion. This is already a formidable chunk of our GDP. But If you also consider seemingly unrelated industries, like the $1.05 trillion health care industry and $133 billion dollar agriculture industry may also be intimately tied to petroleum and it’s derivatives, you start to get a picture of how truly valuable this problem is.