How much do we rely on oil as a chemical feedstock?

Every single discussion about oil focuses on the fact it’s used as a fuel. However, I look around myself and I see plastics, food grown with petroleum-based fertilizers, medicines, and, potentially, even more oil derivatives that would still be oil derived even if we completely moved away from using petroleum as a fuel.

Am I wrong? Is oil just not that important as a chemical feedstock? Or is this a problem everyone seems to be ignoring?

It’s a very minor problem, easily ignored.

Only a comparatively small amount of oil is needed for these uses; most oil is used in transportation fuel. If that use can be eliminated, or significantly reduced, there will be plenty of oil left for hundreds of years of these other uses.

OK, could I trouble you for a cite for that? I’ve tried and failed to research this on my own, and any time you mention ‘petroleum’ on the Internet the moonbats come out to drop wingnuts on your head. :wink:

My emphasis.

Eliminating or significantly reducing the use of oil for transportation fuel hasn’t exactly shown itself to be an easy problem.

Sorry, no. It comes from reading I have done (from books & articles, not online). And, like you said, looking online gets hundreds of sites, many contradicting each other. And probably half of those are from oil companies, or groups or schools funded by them. Not worth the effort.

Fuel uses include things other than transportation, too, such as home heating oil.

This claims 2.5% for petrochemical feedstock in the US, based on 2005 data:

Note that some of those percentages are for things that are byproducts or leftover fractions from the processing for other uses. It’s not like having no need for gasoline and fuel oils allows you to make all that petroleum into asphalt instead. If you still wanted the asphalt, you would probably find yourself with a surplus of lighter hydrocarbons to find a use for.

Except that I think that, with the current economy, there’s a surplus of the heavy stuff like asphalt. So if we reduced fuel usage, we’d just have less of a heavy surplus.

And anything containing carbon can in principle be used as a feedstock; the only reason it’s always oil is because oil is (for now) cheap.

The real bottleneck for chemical feedstocks isn’t carbon. It’s nitrogen. That stuff we breath is practically useless. If you come up with an economical way to turn that into ammonia or amines and you’ll be a millionaire fast.

From the Department of Energy, the US used 887 million barrels of petroleum for non-energy purposes in 2009. This includes asphalt, pentanes, lubricants, petrochemical feedstocks, and special naphthas. The “petrochemical feedstock” use amounted to 168 million barrels. This is compared to 18.7 million barrels per day (6.8 billion barrels per year) of "petroleum products supplied, " which is roughly domestic production plus net imports.

There’s a limit to how economical that can be. There’s a steep energy cost in going from elemental nitrogen to almost any nitrogen compound, which is why atmospheric nitrogen is useless in the first place (and also why nitrogen gas is safe for use in welding, and why so many nitrogen compounds are used in explosives). So the cost of fixing nitrogen is basically an energy cost, and the only way to make it cheaper is to make energy in general cheaper.

Except that even at the steep thermodynamic cost of direct conversion, we are still behind by far. Among other things, it requires hydrogen gas. A process thaT uses protons from acid or even water would be a huge improvement.