Comment by fpoling
10 hours ago
Since WWII where Germans mastered production of fuel from coal oil is not necessary for feedstock. China is ramping up using coal to produce methanol and other precursors for its chemistry industry. Then Teraform startup managed to produce methanol via CO2 capture from atmosphere using solar batteries.
So in alternative world where oil would not be available coal will serve its role. The only big difference would be less geopolitical tensions as coal is much more evenly distributed.
And in yet another alternative where even coal is not available something like modern civilization will still be possible but the path to it will be entirely different.
Already tens of thousands of years before learning to use fossil coal, humans learned how to make charcoal from wood.
This can be considered as the first method for extracting an almost pure chemical element from its compounds.
While in the beginning charcoal was used mainly for non-essential activities, like drawing, eventually charcoal was the reducing agent required for smelting metals from their minerals, first lead, then copper, then many others. Without charcoal, humans would have remained in the "stone age".
Without fossil coal, anything that is made from coal can be made from charcoal, except that this requires a lot of additional energy (for making first the charcoal; but with modern technology it is not necessary to pass through charcoal; carbon dioxide can be reduced to substances like methanol or formaldehyde or passing through syngas to hydrocarbons, which can feed other chemical processes).