SavantGo

There has not been a lot of reasoned thought about many environmental issues. We all want the environment to be better and we all don’t want to be seen as wasting natural resources, but what about the consequences? The latest environmentalist movement is to stop using crude oil. That is a nice goal, albeit an unrealistic one. We keep hearing about how easy it would be with fuel cells coming, electric cars and the like. That is a great political point, but it really is not going to work. Lets assume for example that every car made tomorrow was a fuel cell or electric vehicle. What would that do to our overall oil usage? 

This is where it gets interesting. If we took every gasoline and diesel vehicle off the road tommorrow our oil usage would decline by exactly 0%

How can that be? The answer is that gasoline is only about half of what we use oil for. Gasoline would actually become a waste product to be disposed of under this scenario. How we would handle that environmental nightmare is another issue altogether, but we will leave that out for now.

The big secret the environmentalists don’t tell you is all of the other products made from a barrel of oil is amazing. Can every product be redesigned so that we can quit using oil altogether? Possibly, but at a great cost to the consumer to do so. This is the thing that no one considers when discussing oil usage.

Just some of the amazing list of products made from or with crude oil are:

Antihistamines, Antiseptics, Artificial Hearts, Aspirin, Audiocassettes, Baby Strollers, Balloons, Bandages, Blenders, Cameras, Candles, CD Players, Clothing, Compact Discs, Computers, Containers, Crayons, Credit Cards, Dentures, Deodorant, Diapers, Digital Clocks, Dinnerware, DVDs, Dyes, Eyeglass Frames, Fertilizers, Food Preservatives, Food Storage Bags, Footballs, Foul Weather Gear, Furniture, Garbage Bags, Glue, Golf Balls, Hair Dryers, Hang Gliders, Heart Valve Replacements, House Paint, Infant Seats, Ink, Insecticides, Life Jackets, Lipstick, Luggage, Medical Equipment, Nylon Rope, Pacemakers, Pantyhose, Patio Screens, Perfumes, Photographic Film, Photographs, Piano Keys, Roller Blades, Roofing, Safety Glass, Shampoo, Shaving Cream, Shower Curtains, Slippers, Soft Contact Lenses, Sunglasses, Surfboards, Surgical Equipment, Syringes, Telephones, Tents, Toothpaste, Toys, Umbrellas, Vitamin Capsules

Now I don’t think that American’s are ready to give up their DVD’s and  artificial hearts just yet, not to mention their heating oil and kerosene lamps for camping, so the same amount of crude oil will have to be processed to make all of the other products.

This leaves us with a byproduct of gasoline. What will we do with all of the gasoline waste? I know we can bury it, no that wont work that would be way to bad for the environment. How about if we burn it in big fires? No, that wouldnt be a good idea.

I know we can make a way to burn it to get rid of it and put something on it to harness the energy and maybe try a scrubber, something like a catalytic converter on the energy producing device and use it to power something.

Something like…..

A car

Note:

The breakdown of a barrel of oil is as follows all measurements are in gallons. 

Gasoline 19.4
Distillate Fuel Oil 10.5 (Includes both home heating oil and diesel fuel)
Kerosene-Type Jet Fuel 4.1
Coke 2.2
Residual Fuel Oil 1.7 (Heavy oils used as fuels in industry, marine transportation, and for electric power generation)
Liquefied Refinery Gases 1.5
Still Gas 1.8
Asphalt and Road Oil 1.4
Raw Material for Petrochemicals 1.1
Lubricants 0.4
Kerosene 0.2
Other 0.4