Oh? What industry are you in and do you have a source for that statement?
Because you see car oil synthetics are preferred over mineral maybe?
Because 20 years in automotive and composites says that’s full fantasy.
Just ONE example off the top of my head, carbon fiber, is almost entirely oil. It’s a oil derived plastic that’s burnt and spun and burnt again while being treated with more oil. It’s non-recyclable and pretty damn dirty, I’ve yet to see a carbon that was oil free, but please let me know when you have found one!
Silicone rubbers are well known to have far superior mechanical and chemical properties than carbon-based rubbers. 99.9% of the time the only factor is cost. N-butyl and urethane have some advantages for certain chemicals, which is almost never relevant. Silicone plastics are at least as good as common plastics like PVC, ABS, HDPE etc. Fancier stuff like flouropolymers, definitely not.
> Because you see car oil synthetics are preferred over mineral maybe?
Is this some kind of gotcha you're trying to set up? Synthetic oils are not silicones.
> Just ONE example off the top of my head, carbon fiber, is almost entirely oil.
NB that I was specific- lubricants, plastic, and rubber. There is a composite made from silicon... Fiberglass. It's orders of magnitude more common than CFRP and in many applications s-glass is both stronger and lighter. Still bonded with carbon, of course.
Overall you're responding to an argument that I am not making.
Well, off the top of my head, there's diamond and charcoal. Not to mention the carbon that's in all living things.
Context friend.
Carbon as in carbon the topic of carbon fiber. OR - please share your process of taking charcoal and getting carbon FIBER from it, we'll be billionaires!
Still a pretty open question. Those uses are powerfully subsidized by the fuel applications- aside from military use, all the things you listed add up to <2% of all oil. There is a massive oversupply.
Oil processing involves reforming molecules catalytically into other forms of hydrocarbons. It's not just separation. If fossil prices increased substantially, it would be very difficult to predict if natural hydrocarbon sources would be cheaper. Natural oils are quite cheap but narrowly distributed, unlike crude oil, and form different mixes when reformed by various processes.
The bottom line you should take away is that we absolutely don't need oil. We could replace it totally with natural sources using essentially our current product chain (eg steam cracking facilities) at a very reasonable cost. It's far and away the smallest problem with not using oil. To put that in context, it's a smaller problem than making steel without coal/coke, which is a solved problem. India makes nearly all their steel with natural gas.
I'll also point out that silicones are much better products for most lubricant and plastic/rubber uses. Oil is cheap and usually inferior, except for most engineering plastics.