Comment by tordrt
4 hours ago
I dont think this makes sense, given how insanely much more polluting coal is. You have to burn massive amounts of coal to power the liquid refinery, 50% of the energy lost essentially in the conversion process. In addition to that liquid coal has double the emissions of regular oil. Air quality would have been a disaster.
EVs in scale would have maybe happened sooner, but they would have give us much less value, and I think in the end reaching current EV tech would most likely have taken longer than it did with oil and gas, just due to industrialization and technological innovation would progress much slower without oil and gas...
I think advanced green tech in general would have taken much longer time to develop also on an industrial scale when limited by coal only. Not to speak of human welfare would also have improved much slower.
> Air quality would have been a disaster.
What do you mean would have been? It was a disaster. Perhaps you are too young or insufficiently well travelled to have experienced the effects of burning coal in, say the UK in the 1950s and 1960s or in China even in the last few decades.
Without oil the push to solar and wind would also have been accelerated, probably.
What is it about oil and as that you think made it accelerate semiconductor R&D?
In 1920 in Berlin there were more electrical taxes than gasoline one. But cheap gasoline killed electrical car industry.
Without that electrical cars would proceed to develop and batteries with high capacity would happen much sooner.
As for pollution it would not be that bad. Fuel would be expensive and cars with combustion engines would not happen on massive scale. There would be much more freight by trains and nuclear energy would be developed on much bigger scale.