Comment by AngryData
2 days ago
Does that also account for industrial chemical processes that don't have a simple power-energy exchange? Stuff like making fertilizer or solvents and the like do take a lot of electrical power currently, but will require even more rarely accounted for energy to create base reagents without fossil fuels. Like fertilizer already uses 1% of global electricity today, but if we want to create nitrogen fertilizers without fossil fuel sources, it takes up to a 10 times increase in energy requirements to synthesize from the air making it rise to near 10% of current electrical generation. Many oils are used in mechanical components are irreplaceable and have to be sourced, but to do it without fossil fuels and synthesize from organic materials also require a lot more energy than we use to purify or synthesize from fossil fuels. And the same is true of many solvents.
Its usage is technically accounted for in fossil fuel extraction numbers, but generally ignored when people are accounting for total electrical generation and the usage of fuels as heat sources.
Relevant question: fossil fuel dependency has two parts, the "peak oil" part, and the "global warming" part. As we don't have to solve these at the same time, are the things you raise more of a "peak oil" problem or a "global warming" problem?
They are related in that we use different petroleum products for different purposes and today extracting petroleum means burning most of it.