Some people worry about the world’s dependence on fossil fuels and the future of oil prices/production rates. Suggest that alternatives like solar and wind power, battery backup, electric cars and so on ought to be able to replace most of what we do with oil and eventually the debate will come to a point along the lines of, “The world is reliant on oil. Mining to build your windmills and solar panels requires oil. Agriculture requires oil. There are just limits to what alternatives can replace.”
That isn’t a fringe point either. Besides the sheer scale of the use of oil as an energy source, we use it in thousands of ways as a raw material as well. Even if it is possible to replace petroleum with things like corn oil or hemp oil, we’d want to also farm those things with equipment that didn’t run on petroleum or we’d be working at cross-purposes.
The topic overall is probably too broad for one thread. I want to talk about just one aspect of the issue: replacing heavy industry/machinery with what I’m calling ‘robots’, even though the machines I’m imagining may not all require such a fancy name. Take the example of a bulldozer. Pretty much everyone takes it for granted that earth-moving equipment has to run on gasoline (or maybe propane or natural gas). I can’t think of an example of an electric bulldozer that exists today, but why not? And since the mechanical engineering of things that run on electricity tends to be quite different from the techniques to run things on gasoline, the design could end up being quite different, both to take advantage of ‘robotic’ machines and also to accommodate the different power source.
Check out this thing, for example. It’s a robot that runs around like a cat, next to links to lots of other surprising robots if you are interested. If an electric bulldozer has to be plugged into the grid or be tethered by a cord to a large battery array, it might not be practical for it to spin around and maneuver like a gasoline-powered bulldozer. If it were on legs instead of tracks, however, it could be a platform that walks around forwards and sideways and backwards without tangling itself in its cord. It could easily be more agile on uneven terrain. The actual earth-engaging portion of it might hang down from the center of the ‘platform’ and do its work from a full range of angles, with the kind of agility that robot arms can deliver and a bulldozer bucket cannot. And a viable fuel cell might even allow for untethered heavy machinery like this.
If it can act like a bulldozer, can a ‘robot’ act effectively like machinery to mine copper, silver, cobalt, lithium and so on? If we are to truly build an oil-independent society, we’ll need electric heavy transportation (here is a preliminary attempt), electric mining equipment, and electric factories to build the solar panels, wind mills, batteries and other equipment, not to mention building the robots themselves. Some way of doing agriculture without oil will have to be devised- again, maybe ‘robots’ on legs will be the answer.
When I say “oil-independent”, I don’t mean that 100% independence is necessary. The people that worry about it as a goal tend to be concerned with things like constricted oil supply in a world of rising demand, climate change, and other things like the acidification of the oceans and other effects of the overall filthiness of oil in a crowded world. It already looks like electric transportation is possible- a plug-in hybrid that gets 100mpg is already available at close to an affordable price, and these things are still pretty new. I don’t want to talk about electric cars though, and I think it is clear that we will need more than just those to really remove oil as a threat, both to the economy and people’s finances as well as the environment and people’s health.
To destroy 75%-90% of global oil demand ought to be ‘good enough’ to say it is more-or-less the solution to the problem. But that will require replacing heavy machinery with ‘robots’. The debate is 1) to what degree is this possible, and in what kind of time-frames and 2) Considering the state of the world today, do we have a realistic choice to not attempt this?
