Can Civilization Reboot Without Fossil Fuels?

An anonymous reader writes: We often talk about our dependence on fossil fuels, and vigorously debate whether and how we should reduce that dependence. This article at Aeon sidesteps the political bickering and asks an interesting technological question: if we had to rebuild society, could we do it without all the fossil fuels we used to do it the first time? When people write about post-apocalyptic scenarios, the focus is usually on preserving information long enough for humanity to rebuild. But actually rebuilding turns out to be quite a challenge when all the easy oil has been bled from the planet.

It's not that we're running out, it's that the best spots for oil now require high tech machinery. This would create a sort of chicken-and-egg problem for a rebuilding society. Technological progress could still happen using other energy production methods. But it would be very slow — we'd never see the dramatic accelerations that marked the industrial age, and then the information age. "A slow-burn progression through the stages of mechanization, supported by a combination of renewable electricity and sustainably grown biomass, might be possible after all. Then again, it might not. We'd better hope we can secure the future of our own civilization, because we might have scuppered the chances of any society to follow in our wake."

Comments

Re:No

[itzly]

Who cares that solar panels only can convert about 10-15% of the power it receives now

That's not the issue. The problem is that solar panels deteriorate over time, and that a collapsed society doesn't have the technological means to build new ones.

Olde-timey carbon fuel

[nojayuk]

The classic multipurpose "biodeiesel" of old was charcoal, a renewable source of fuel for high-temperature furnaces suitable for making iron and high-quality steel. Its use today is pretty much limited to barbeques and re-enactment smithing but a post-apocalyptic world could easily return to it for such purposes.

Trees don't grow quickly and the production of charcoal was never enough to sustain the demands for process heat for a society even a tenth as large as it is today but assuming a massive post-apocalyptic die-back and natural reforestation it would probably work. It doesn't require any process plant or chemicals to produce after all.

Lower-temperature needs such as locomotive and boiler steam could be met with simple logging of reforested areas without the extra step of turning wood into charcoal.

Re:Olde-timey carbon fuel

[DerekLyons]

The classic multipurpose "biodeiesel" of old was charcoal, a renewable source of fuel for high-temperature furnaces suitable for making iron and high-quality steel.

Yes... and no. During the charcoal era, iron and steel were produced in very small quantities because the amount of fuel and labor needed to produce the charcoal was immense. (And resulted in massive deforestation.) What make iron and steel cheap and powered the industrial revolution wasn't charcoal, it was coke - a fossil fuel.
 

It [charcoal] doesn't require any process plant or chemicals to produce after all.

Yes... and no. Low tech methods of producing charcoal typically involve losing as much as 80% of the process material to produce mostly low quality (I.E. insufficient for iron and steel making) charcoal.
 

Lower-temperature needs such as locomotive and boiler steam could be met with simple logging of reforested areas without the extra step of turning wood into charcoal.

In a low population, charcoal powered scenario, you're unlikely to have locomotives and boilers - it would take literally decades and square miles of forest to produce sufficient iron and steel.

What most people don't grasp when they postulate post-apocalyptic scenarios is the synergistic nature of the advances that powered the industrial revolution - and that ultimately fossil fuels lay at the root of them all. Coke for cheap steel and coal for cheap long distance transportation in particular.

The problem is SUPPLY CHAIN!!!

[calexontheroad66]

The current state of complexity of our civilization is given by a web of supply chains that make it possible to produce very specialized and sophisticated products.
Liquid fuel production requires more than extracting oil from the ground, you have to distill the fractions, filter unwanted contaminants, crack heavy fractions to produce lighter compounds, and do pyrolysis to get gasoline from what is essentially tar.
This all requires a supply chain of materials to be able to construct the tools and equipments to produce what you'll pump into your car.

Then there are fertilizers, you needs sources of fossilized guano that are located around the world, and others like Ammonia based fertilizers that are mostly produced using fossil fuel sources.
Then you have catalyzer metals for reactors, the list is enormous...
And if you think that since the trade barriers have mostly gone, that has meant that most countries have shed duplicate capacity and have specialized and concentrated on only some parts of the supply chain.
That means if things go downhill you pretty much have no way to get some resources, tool or equipment spares and no knowledge how to remake those.

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[CeasedCaring]

So _that's_ why all the roads are full of potholes? I did wonder!

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[NotDrWho]

We already know how to create biodiesel and other fuels from non fossil sources. If we limited their use to critical needs, and had everything else using renewable electric sources, then we probably could do without oil.

The problem is that we don't just use fossil fuels for fueling our cars and power pants. It makes the polymers used in almost every electrical component. It fuels the industrial mining of almost every metal and mineral used in those components (good luck hand-panning for rare earth minerals, or removing millions of tons of earth using only steam engines). It fuels the entire shipping industry that moves everything around (enabling modern industrial processing of raw materials).

Oil and coal do a fuckload lot more these days than make gasoline for our little cars and run our power plants. That's just the obvious use that most of us see every day. Odds are that every single thing your own today is either made from petrochemicals or somehow heavily dependent on them. I myself own exactly one piece of wood furniture made by a local artisan and a few books left by my great-grandmother that may be exceptions to this. Everything else was shipped using petrol, created with coal-based power, or contains petrochemical based polymers. Even the food I eat is mostly shipped in from large farms and ranches in another part of the country.

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[MightyMartian]

I would argue that using hydrocarbons, particularly the long-chain hydrocarbons like petroleum and bitumen, as a source of energy (motive or otherwise) is the most ludicrously wasteful use one can imagine. Oil's importance to material technologies and industrial processes is enormous, and using them to make gas for automobiles is, quite frankly, profoundly stupid. That's not even taking into account the various environmental hazards of the combustion of such substances.

Some day we'll have the energy production capability to create long-chain hydrocarbons out of methane, and then we'll have a nearly unlimited supply of stock for producing materials we make out of oil today, but until then, what we put in our cars seems much more like a short-term problem.