It's Actually About Burning Oil
Not only about how convenient it is for one person to move about.
I have to admit I do get angry when I hear certain facts, reports and statistics around the oil and gas industry. Contrary to my wishes, the human race is not going to stop extracting, refining and using hydrocarbons in my lifetime. I’m very confident we will still be using this incredible resource in 100 years time.
It’s too useful, it’s in so many of the products we use and rely on.
However, it is now painfully clear we would all be better off if we reduced the amount of oil we burned. By something in the order of a couple of billion barrels a day.
So when I hear the endless blinkered micro arguments about ‘convenience’ and ‘range’ from men about cars and their individual journeys, I know I should be patient and listen to them, (but they are so boring.)
Never once do they reference the fact that the fuel that is ‘so easy to refill with’ is in fact a flammable, toxic, imported liquid with an enormous trail of destruction left across the globe before you spend 10 minutes pumping it into your tank.
They never mention that this complex, energy dense fuel uses enormous amounts of electricity and indeed oil to be refined, and once it’s transported in a truck to the filling station, we burnt once. Just once, and then it’s ‘gone.’ Sort of.
Of course it’s just turned into a highly toxic gas that we are all used to. It’s normal. Just like smoking everywhere was normal until the early 1990’s. And in case you don’t know, people used to smoke on planes, on trains, in restaurants, cafes, pubs, the subway/underground/metro system. It was considered ‘normal’ and the people who complained about it were vilified and belittled.
Of course we all ignore the impact of extracting, transporting and refining oil has, we don’t see it every day, we don’t live near an oil well or a refinery, it’s just normal.
Buying petrol and diesel is normal, we’ve been doing it since anyone alive today can remember. Most people aren’t interested in changing anything, it’s become convenient, although I can’t help observing that stopping in a filling station is an unpleasant time and money wasting experience. But it’s normal and I totally understand that.
Everything about the oil industry is normal, we don’t think about it, we don’t have to and the oil industry are very good at keeping our attention somewhere else.
But let me just say this, the people who do live near oil wells and oil refineries, well guess what, they really don’t enjoy this normality.
Cancer rates among children are very high in these areas of Iraq, and of course the wells are run by companies we’ve all heard of. BP, Shell, Exxon, Saudi Aramco etc etc. Normal companies doing a normal, every day job to keep the world moving.
I wonder why we’ve all heard so much about the children working in Cobalt mines in the DRC and next to nothing about the suffering in and around the worlds massive, land destroying, carcinogenic gas spewing oil wells.
I wonder when people are going to learn that modern electric car batteries contain no Cobalt, it’s now used to make stainless steel and of course as an essential in catalyst to remove sulphur, nitrous oxide and other impurities from crude oil.
I genuinely don’t know where all that sulphur, nitrous oxide and other impurities are stored, or are they used in other products?
Cobalt is also used to make airbags in automobiles; cemented carbides (also called hardmetals) and diamond tools; corrosion- and wear-resistant alloys; drying agents for paints, varnishes, and inks; dyes and pigments; ground coats for porcelain enamels, the list goes on and on.
It’s just that the list no longer contains electric car batteries.
But let me just remind ourselves, nothing has changed in the way we drill, frack, burn off gasses, pump, store, ship, refine and eventually burn fossil bloody fuel once in a combustion engine.
That is just normal and a completely static technology that produces vast amounts of wealth, is critically embedded in every aspect of our lives and the very tiny shift away from this total reliance is only just starting to make any sort of impact.
We are all culpable for the damage using this abundant and flexible energy source has begat, we cannot stop using it today, or next week, or next year
But we might, with careful consideration, start to reduce our reliance on it, and instead of making petty arguments about range and ease of refilling, start to consider a slightly bigger picture that acknowledges that we are all privileged to have benefited from this fuel, but it’s time to move on.
I've had the cobalt argument thrown at me driving my EV with its batteries, but I didn't realise that it was used in catalytic converters, so that's something I now know for future banter.
The problem today still is there's still too much demand for oil. My company I work for is based in designing industrial food production machinery, and a lot of the machines are used in crisp/snack manufacturing production lines. To heat the oil to cook the vast quantities of potatoes going through them is entirely achieved through the burning of diesel or gas in equally large volumetric amounts.
There are companies that enquire about using hydrogen, but it's very difficult unless production is started from scratch to utilities it, and they balk at the increased cost of the machinery, let alone the risks of using a very excitable gas that wants to react with almost anything.
So I also feel that fossil fuel usage will be a gradual change, but definitely not irradicated any time soon, and any 2050 carbon targets governments have agreed to are likely to be broken. I expect future generations to suffer from climate change and the costs of that to impact every aspect in their lives, including food production because of the weather, but hopefully it'll get better for them, though way further down the road than I think moral people that care today would want.
Bullying people via the media is certainly not the way forward. I sense a change happening, new "social norms" developing against fossil fuels, though we're only at the "necessary evil" stage