ANDREW-INSPIRED...
This isnt a political statement necessarily...I just thought it was super interesting because we learned about it in O-Chem the other day. Its sorta long, but if you stick with it, I think its really interesting at the end what you can figure out :) (I tried to shorten it up by cutting examples...)
Like probably a lot of you, I always assumed that the really only significant use of petroleum and other fossil fuels was for energy and cars. When on the news it would say that "the price of crude oil went up" and manufacturing plants were suffering from it, I thought this was all because of increased energy costs... I was wrong.
Did you know that probably everyone of you has eaten a petroleum based product? or that right now you are likely to be wearing petroleum based products in your clothes? or that the carpet in your house was made from petroleum?
It turns out that natural gas and crude oil are the world's traditional manufacturing starting materials. Everything you can think of is made of this stuff!! (plus a whole lot of stuff you wouldnt recognize but is used everyday in our products!)
... a few examples: plastics, adhesives, solvents, cosmetics, PHARACEUTICALS (that means we use petroleum for most of our drugs...), vinyl, acetone, LATEX (thats right boys and girls...), paint solvent, coolent, tires and rubber products, and fibers such as Nylon 66
Heres one direct example: Crude oil ---->Benzene ---->Cyclohexane ----> Adipic Acid* ---->Nylon**
*This stuff is in Jello and other foods btw...plus, in '95 the US alone manufactered 1.8 billion lbs of it
(adepic acid isnt even in the top 10 chemicals produced yearly)
**Literally everything has this in it...buttons, thread, shoes, carpets, etc
And here is the awesome part!!! Take a guess about how many pharmaceuticals are manufactured in the US (take into account that little 'ol adepic acid, as i mentioned above, was 1.8 billion lbs all by its self)...
Now get this...ONLY 5% of all the petrochemicals we harvest turn into end-market products
So basically, we are harvesting enough oil to make billions and billions of lbs of each of these products each year, and this only accounts for 5% of all the oil we get out. The rest is being used fuel or is stored.
It puts into perspectice just how much oil we consume all the time... its a scary thought, expecially when its difficult to estimate just how much there is left in there :)
Like probably a lot of you, I always assumed that the really only significant use of petroleum and other fossil fuels was for energy and cars. When on the news it would say that "the price of crude oil went up" and manufacturing plants were suffering from it, I thought this was all because of increased energy costs... I was wrong.
Did you know that probably everyone of you has eaten a petroleum based product? or that right now you are likely to be wearing petroleum based products in your clothes? or that the carpet in your house was made from petroleum?
It turns out that natural gas and crude oil are the world's traditional manufacturing starting materials. Everything you can think of is made of this stuff!! (plus a whole lot of stuff you wouldnt recognize but is used everyday in our products!)
... a few examples: plastics, adhesives, solvents, cosmetics, PHARACEUTICALS (that means we use petroleum for most of our drugs...), vinyl, acetone, LATEX (thats right boys and girls...), paint solvent, coolent, tires and rubber products, and fibers such as Nylon 66
Heres one direct example: Crude oil ---->Benzene ---->Cyclohexane ----> Adipic Acid* ---->Nylon**
*This stuff is in Jello and other foods btw...plus, in '95 the US alone manufactered 1.8 billion lbs of it
(adepic acid isnt even in the top 10 chemicals produced yearly)
**Literally everything has this in it...buttons, thread, shoes, carpets, etc
And here is the awesome part!!! Take a guess about how many pharmaceuticals are manufactured in the US (take into account that little 'ol adepic acid, as i mentioned above, was 1.8 billion lbs all by its self)...
Now get this...ONLY 5% of all the petrochemicals we harvest turn into end-market products
So basically, we are harvesting enough oil to make billions and billions of lbs of each of these products each year, and this only accounts for 5% of all the oil we get out. The rest is being used fuel or is stored.
It puts into perspectice just how much oil we consume all the time... its a scary thought, expecially when its difficult to estimate just how much there is left in there :)