Total petroleum products: 19.531 (million barrels/day)

  Asphalt and road oil              0.343
  Petrochemical feedstocks          0.331
  Lubricant                         0.138
  Miscellaneous products and others 0.089
  Waxes                             0.006

If the oil industry existed solely for non-fuel uses, it would be extremely tiny, and probably entirely domestic. It would not be large enough to fund any new deep or complex drilling, and nor would it be large enough to fund even the fixed costs of existing wells.

Also, keep in mind that some fuel uses, such as welding/soldering gasses, don't have an effective replacement at this time. Cutting fuel use to 0 at this juncture is effectively impossible.

Look at all the steps with some output to gasoline on the right:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_refinery#Flow_diagram_of_t...

No, but if you're willing to spend a lot of energy you can pull CO2 out of the air and use it as a feedstock to make various fuels or plastics. Right now I think you'd have to burn 10 gallons of oil to make a single gallon so that's not efficient at all.

But if you literally had more solar than you knew what to do with (like Germany does on occasion) you could use that energy to make liquid fuels or plastics.

It's at least a decade and probably several decades off. But this is an economic problem, not a technical one.

We're going to need a lot of surplus energy to sequester all of the CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere over the last 100+ years.

There is no point at which sequestering CO2 by use of electricity is going to make sense. Until the day that we burn zero CO2 whatsoever, you're better off using the electricity as electricity and thereby burning less carbon than burning it and then trying to get it back.

And even at that point, we already have a thing that converts sunlight and CO2 into solid form. Plants.

In theory what you could probably do is cultivate algae in the ocean and then scoop it up in a net, bury it in the ground and repeat. But the scale needed to make a dent is harrowing.

Of course there will be. Even burning a small fraction of the Thorium lying in spill heaps today will achieve that. In February 2019, when Tsinghua Uni demos the worlds first commercially viable fusion reactor, everything will change.

We will:

  - convert cubic kilometres of seawater into potable water per day and irrigate the Sahara and the Outback.
  - convert atmospheric C02 to carbohydrate fuels (while there are still need for them)
  - extract cubic killometers of C out of the atmosphere and oceans for construction material.
  - Drop the excess blocks of diamond into the mariana trench, those that we don't use for road base.
  - etc

Is this your own prediction, or something that the university has announced publicly? I haven't heard anything about it.

> Until the day that we burn zero CO2 whatsoever

That day will come. And we'll then be at the point where its time to use cheap renewables to pull CO2 back out of the air and store it in a stable state where it can't be burned again.

problem with computer types is we think that high tech will rule and fix all. and that mind boggling high tech is around the corner always.

Then we are surprised when a Neanderthal wins the Presidency who says he WILL burn more coal. doesn't even matter if it's not economic.

Maybe instead we should become more aggressive. Turn off Trump's twitter. Turn off gmail & facebook in red states.

I wonder if anti aging technology would push people to start seeing climate problems in its larger context.

Something like this: https://www.terrapass.com/climate-change/carbon-offsets-expl...

Rather than using natural gas as a plastics feedstock, they are using methane from organic sources (livestock bioproducts, landfills, other agricultural waste). They are using "greenhouse gases" but not CO2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkeland%E2%80%93Eyde_process

You can also plant nitrogen fixing plants and till them into the soil at the end of the season.

Makes me think about the flurry of ill directed excitement about a catalyst that with energy supplied electricity could convert water and CO2 to alcohol. One wonders if it wouldn't be possible use a similar catalyst to convert nitrogen and water to nitrate/ammonia.