The rise of industry seemed to be tied to the steam engine. That means coal. Petrolium and other fossil fuels have moved humankind along quite rapidly in the last 150-200 years.
So where would we be without any petrolium at all? Would humankind come up with another type of fuel, or would we simply never have advanced on this planet beyond where we were in 1800?
The " alternative " fuel sources being researched and used today all rely upon petrolium. If nothing else, I’m not sure you could BUILD a huge windmill farm without petrolium. Not just the structure, but the wiring and infrastructure that allows power to flow.
Lacking that resource, I suspect that we never would have had a successful Industrial Revolution.
We would’ve burned down a lot of hardwood to make charcoal to get things started, then with the taming of electricity, hydro-electric would’ve taken over, supplemented with wind, and, eventually nuclear. It probably would’ve taken longer, and certainly we’d be hurting for the lack of plastics.
Thinking about it, the lack of plastics would be harder to deal with than the lack of fuel. Sitting at my desk, there’s petroleum everywhere: my laptop, my phone, the cube walls, my jacket, my glasses, picture frames, and containers. It’s simply part of everything. Without fuel, things take longer, and move slower, but without the rest of the petroleum products, we lose more than speed.
Whales (at least whales with significant amounts of oil) would be completely gone. The discovery of petroleum was instrumental in ending the viability of commercial whaling in the late 19th Century.
Incidentally I think the premise of the OP is mistaken. If I understand the article correctly the explosion accounts only for sea-based shale deposits which isn’t “most” of the oil we produce today.
Having said that, exploring what would happen in world without petroleum is certainly an interesting exercise.
Interesting hypothetical! However, in regards to fuel, ethanol and/or biodiesel could have readily covered for petroleum, I suspect. On the plastics issue, I’m not sure how much petroleum is truly necessary for them – rubbers generally come from latex, which can be derived from plant sap, and there are several kinds of cellulose-based or other bioplastics. The greatest advantage of petroleum is that it is relatively abundant and easy to acquire, not that it enables us to do things we couldn’t without it, at least to my knowledge. If there had never been any petroleum, it’s conceivable that we simply would’ve settled on the next-easily available resource(s); one possible outcome would be for our culture to value its resources more, and to be generally less wasteful with them, with probably far-reaching consequences such as the development of efficient mass transit as opposed to individual means of transportation early on, and less dependency on throw-away luxury items in our economy, or things like that.
So, perhaps some breakthroughs would have been delayed, but I don’t think any would have been made thoroughly impossible.
Petroleum is not the same as coal. Are you imagining no oil, or no fossil fuels of any kind?
Back in the early days of the automobile industry there were plenty of competing designs including electric and steam cars. But gasoline burning cars won out. Without gasoline we’d have went with the alternatives of electric and steam.
If there were no coal, then probably the industrial revolution would never have happened. That doesn’t mean we’d be stuck at the level of technology of the 1800s, just that railroads and steamships and airplanes and steam powered factories and mass electrification would be impossible. We wouldn’t have the cheap mass produced goods that are the basis of our economy. Until someone develops nuclear power.
Lemur866 already said what I was thinking…we didn’t need oil to make steam power when we have abundant reserves of coal. Unless coal is off the table too, which might have brought us to several other alternatives. Water power could have replaced steam for early industrialization…the Romans were well on their way to a water powered heavy industry base when things went tits up for them. Also, there are other alternatives like methane that are pretty abundant and perhaps could have been explored more intensely had there not been any oil.
As for plastic, my understanding is that plastic doesn’t require petroleum, it’s just that petroleum makes for cheap stock. It’s possible that some form of plastic could have been invented from other stocks…or maybe some other alternative but equivalent product. Or I suppose we could have done without it and just used wood and cloth.
My guess is that our technology and society would look a lot different today. Perhaps personal transport wouldn’t have taken off (though fuel can be refined from coal, or perhaps steam or electric would have been the direction). My feeling though was that we were ripe for SOME kind of innovation even before steam took off…something would have happened.
Popular Science has sensationalized a scientific finding. While I have no doubt that the guys at the University of Alberta have shown a likely mechanism for the formation of some petroleum source rock ~93 million years ago (mya), this in no way accounts for ‘most’ of the world’s petroleum reserves as the article states.
93 mya falls in the Upper Cretaceous Period, approximately at the Turonian-Cenomanian boundary. By my back of the envelope reckoning, many of the world’s big oil fields and provinces produce from reservoirs that are older or considerably younger than that. Ghawar and others in Saudi Arabia, Cantarell and others in Mexico, many of the North Sea fields, and Prudhoe Bay, the Gulf of Mexico Fields, the Anadarko basin, and the Appalachian basin in the USA, to name a few.
Further complicating this, the source rock for most reservoirs is considerably older than the reservoir itself. It is highly unusual in most places for younger source rock to charge older reservoirs.
This is purely speculation, but I think that more of the world’s discovered hydrocarbons are sourced from the mid-Jurassic than the upper Cretaceous.
However, the speculation on a petroleum-less world is nevertheless fascinating.
While it was the steam engine that drove the industrial revolution, there was also a great deal being done with water turbines at the time that was mostly overshadowed. They were building iron waterwheels putting out 100 horsepower in the early 1800s. I’d wager you’d still have gotten the rise of centralized industry, as powered factories overtook home-based manufacturing. It would be less dense, though, since you’d be limited by water-access. That kind of manufacturing would have led to much of the same materials and mechanical engineering, and while it would have been slower, there’s no doubt in my mind that we’d have gotten an electrical grid in time.
We do now, definitely, but I’m not arguing for a 1:1 translation of fuel consumption, and around the time petroleum came into its own as fuel, we maybe had a world population of around 1.6 billion – if we had the need for alternative fuels that early on, things might well have gone differently enough to at least more or less support a populace and its need for fuel from what we can grow, and as for fertilizers, I’m no expert, but I don’t think you need any petroleum for the nitrogen based stuff.
Besides, there’s at least methane, too, or don’t we get natural gas as well?
Furious_Marmot said what I was going to say on the geology front(only better :))
As to the OP - the IR was driven by coal, not petroleum, so we’d still have had it, as others have already said. I do think we’d probably have a lot more oil-from-coal technology in order to have portable fuels, but generally, I think the shape of things would be the same.
For instance, early plastics like Bakelite were synthesised from coal tar and coal gas-derivatives, not petroleum products.
Hello, back from weekend away. ( Doncha hate hate hate it when someone composes and OP and then… never returns? I do ! )
Great responses. Seems based on replies so far that petroleum made it a LOT easier to make a LOT of things. Bakelite was replaced by plasics. Fair enough- but do we then extrapolate that all plastics we use today could have been formed using Bakelite if that was all we/they had?
Yes, things would have happened more slowly. Cars would have run based on other technologies. Maybe. But look at it this way- the fact that we can ponder those other and in some cases older technologies is partially due to the fact that they were not primarily used. Petroleum was. Step back. Big picture. Large scale changes in industry, technology, transportation, distribution of wealth, advances in health, etc. Would they all have occurred slower without petroleum? Or not at all.
And, if the answers for some of these shifts in human history has to be “not at all”, well then how much ALL of human development would have failed? The dark ages ended for a specific set of reasons. The rise of heavy industry occurred because of a specific set of reasons. Lacking petroleum, how far would we have gotten by 1850? By 1900? By 1950?
Is that a whoosh? I think they pretty definitively showed that a gunpowder engine was not feasible. There were other things that would have been used if there was no petroleum.
