What possible reasons are you talking about? I don’t contend that without oil internal combustion engines would have the significance they do in the modern world. But their development was the natural outgrowth of the studies in engineering, chemistry, and physics that followed the steam engine.
:rolleyes:
So without oil the history of the 20th century would have been exactly the same outside of Saudi Arabia. Germany would still have used blitzkrieg techniques to dominate the opening stages of WWII. It would still have invaded Russia to obtain access to oilfields. Air power would still have prevented the invasion of Britain and opened the way to the Normandy landings. The extraordinary speed of the Russian counter advance into Germany powered almost exclusively by internal combustion engine vehicles would still have occurred.
As a result everything today would be almost exactly the same outside Saudi Arabia. Russia would still have occupied all of Eastern Europe. The western allies would still have given large concessions such as the occupation of Poland, to the Russians in return for them halting their advance at Berlin and the 38th parallel. So the cold war still pans out exactly the same way.
But internal combustion engines would not have the significance they do in the modern world.
That’s it Tripolar. I am no longer going to engage with you in this thread.
Either you lack the ability or the intention of representing what you post with any degree of fidelity, or else you are utterly ignorant that the internal combustion engine *defined *the entire course of the second half of the 20th century. No internal combustion engine, no blitzkreig, no eastern front, no battle of Britain, no Soviet advance across Europe, no Yalta/Potsdam agreement, no Korean War, no cold war.
No internal combustion engine, history diverges completely from reality in 1935 and becomes utterly unrecognisable.
Yet there are no great changes, except in someplace like Saudi Arabia. :rolleyes:
That’s fine. You are very uncivil. You are combining unrelated statements and assumptions to try and prove some point I haven’t addressed at all. You can not refute that the internal combustion engine would be developed anyway.
Honestly I have no idea why you act this way on the board. I find you interesting and most of your arguments compelling. But you should really learn something about civil discourse.
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The early industrial development (esp. in Britain, where it first seems to have developed further) was indeed fueled by wood. But mining coal was a reaction to the depletion of wood resources. I also have a book on indestrial archaeology; one chapter describes early American blast furnaces, initially powered by forests. You can apparently find these in many places in NJ and PA where they were built, had a lifetime of about 10 years before they stripped the wood from a practical distance all around and then closed down.
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The incredible steps in making steam engines more efficient was more of a practical engineering effort than a scientific princple application; the inventors were tinkerers with hardware. However!! the motivation and application of improved steam engines was for improved coal mining. Plus, coal provided more concentrated and vastly more obtainable fuel than wood. So without coal and coal mining, industrial development - ships, trains, mills, steel, etc. - would have been delayed for decades or centuries.
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The scale of the industrial revolution - being a revolution, transforming Britain in half a century then the world in a century - would not have happened without coal, then oil. The arguments in earlier posts are true - ehtanol, coal, oil, are all stored means of transporting energy because machines need stored power. Battery technology after intensive effort in the last 30 years (and eforts to minimie energy needed) means that practical items like portable radios, computers, MP3 players, and phones can run on batteries. Cars are barely there. But - every energy medium, wood or fossil fuel or distilled is just a convenience due to the fact that industrial age machines require a MASSIVE amount of power by historical measure. (Until recently, refined metal had to be guarded - like the copper and lead for thieves today, early metals represented a huge investment - in energy.
Coal and gasoline are widely used for their convenience factor. It takes a lot more effort to prevent the loss of precious energy when like alcohol, it evaporates easily. (Or like compressed gas, it leaks and needs high-quality containers.)
My Wild-ass Guesses:
Without the scale of the industrial revolution, development would have been a lot slower - more like the Chinese model of centuries of progress, than the burst of european development. Thus, an “Industrial Evolution”.
Widely available metal, and other industrial products, helped accelerate progress. In a world where metals are more expensive, guns and cannons would be less available. Nobody would lay iron rails across the country; canals would be the best cheap transport. Mills would also be placed near running water (water wheels), except in Holland. basically, all the things that were done before the industrial revolution.
Without widely available guns, conquest of North America would be harder. Without a green revolution, without industrial food processing, without industrial-scale production of household appliances, there would not be the sustainable population size we see with today’s industrial activity. Every good was widely available and cheaper thanks to cheap energy - cloth, metal, sawn wood, chemicals like gunpowder… Sewing machines (and high volume production of clothing) were another byproduct of improved technology.
Many scientific discoveries are probably attributable to (a) advanced lifestyles and leisure due to industrial development and (b) experimentation that could happen with cheaper materials available. How long to develop electricity and its associated revolution if metal remained expensive? How practical is electric power in a world where miles of copper wires (and millions of telephone poles) are very expensive to produce?
Without cheap fuel, the world would be very different. When this fuel is no longer cheap, I hope we have developed alternatives…
So all in all, we woul not have had as big and fast an industrial development without cheap energy. If we don’t develop adequate
WWII would not have occurred, indeed, WWI would have been unlikely, as coal would not be available, nor oil for ships boilers. ANY alcohol operated aircraft could not manage the performance of the bombers and fighters of either war as well. Lacking those resources, the ability to cross the Atlantic with personnel and war materiel is problematic at best.
A tank, even a highly primitive model, would be also lacking the driving force of a petrochemical powered engine.
If one deconstructs the industrial revolution and removes petrochemical energy, it would be unsustainable, due to the limiting factors of forestry and farming.
I’m going to go off in a different direction and suggest that many of the energy problems could have been solved with solar heating. A simple Google search will turn up many hits for low-tech solar devices that can be used to cook food, heat water, etc.
This could certainly be used to distill alcohol. It can also be scaled up to produce electricity.
In addition, some of the earliest pieces of industry used wind and water power. You can grind wheat and weave cloth this way, for example. Wind has obvious disadvantages in its predictability, but you can create artificial waterways to power a water wheel. Again, these can also be used to create electricity.
Since some of the earliest cars were electric, you can get transportation without an internal combustion engine. Yes, it’s limited compared to gas, but it doesn’t rely on ethanol or wood.
As another prediction: you don’t see the end of slavery until industrialization makes machines cheaper than slaves. So I think an oil-less world is one in which slave labor is an accepted necessity for much longer.
The volume of metal required (let alone the number of people, their transport and supply) would be much more limited without coal. WWI would not have happened. It would be more on the scale of Napoleonic wars, pre-railroad technology. Try to estimate how much forest area would be denuded to produce one moderate-sized steel battleship…
Without the luxury of manufactured goods, scientific progress would not happen at the rate it did, so no electricity, batteries or electric motors, smooth-rolled steel reflectors for solar, etc.
Take as an indicator that even in places where solar power would have been ideal - I.e. Arabia, Egypt, Indian subcontinent - it was pretty much unused until modern times because there was no practical use and tech.
Without motors, the easiest transport of large cargo is water - oceans, rivers, or canals. Until railroads replaced them, canals were a huge transport boom in 1600’s and 1700’s France, and England and early 1800’s USA , where terrain permitted this.
We forget how incredibly extravagant all our processes are in energy, compared to earlier times, when firewood had to be gatherd by hand. Large urban collectives are only possible with modern transport. (In Rome, the cart traffic bringing in grain was so big it snarled the streets, and one emperor decreed it must be done at night…)
Thanks for the great replies. One of my questions was touched on, but just briefly and I was wondering if there was a factual answer: If the world were not as old as it is and humans had just sprung up without those pesky intervening dinosaur years, would we have the amount of oil we have now? Would we have coal?
Read Carboniferous - Wikipedia
The coal deposits come from forests and swamp deposits 300M years ago, long before the dinosars (150-65M years ago).
Fossil fuel - Wikipedia - liquid fossil fuels tend to come from deposits of plankton and other (marine) life that sank to the ocean floor and was buried in anaerobic conditions. There is no specific age, the article mentions some is as old as 650M years ago. (If you notice, much of oil deposits tend to be where there were significant river deltas, where such debris would accumulate form the river system.
So it would be an unusual world indeed that did not have fossil fuels. In places like Scotland and Ireland, there are areas where peat moss is accumulating in bogs to such depth that the locals chop it out in bricks and use it for fuel. A million years or more and this might turn into coal, if it is covered over and compressed by other deposits; the crappier version of this not as good coal (lignite) can be used, but tends to be used only for power plants since it is not as pure.
So, it’s hard to describe a planet with NO fossil fuel, since it’s accumulating all the time.
Thank you. Exactly what I was looking for on all counts!
Biodiesel contains 3.24 times the energy invested in it’s manufacture.
http://ces3.ca.uky.edu/energy/biofuels/biodiesel.htm
Biodiesel was first created in the 1850s.
It is possible to also use vegetable oils as lubricants.
Google Search.
So, at least up to the dedication of petroleum distillates for fuel and lube of gas and diesel around the turn of the century, an oil-less world wouldn’t be too different…IMHO.
Yes, the problem with this stuff, as with metals, etc. - figure out how many acres you would need to produce an automobile (or worse, truck) one full tank of biodeisel. This would mean that fuel / energy / industrial products would be so expensive that the products would be extremely rare.
Another issue is convenience. Coal came broken into small chunks that a fireman could shovel into a steam engine; better than wood unless you spend a lot of time chopping it into smaller bits. Gas takes a long time to evaporate, compared to alcohol, so can be more easily transported. Both are very dense in terms of energy.As for solar or even hydro electricity, we still don’t have reliable, efficient large storage mediums for that. Hydro at least is its own storage, just build a bigger dam to hold what you need.
There are other sources of energy in the world. These have mostly been touched on. Here’s a handful that I’ve considered:
- biofuels such as ethanol or biodiesel - take up a ton of arable land and don’t produce a lot (if any) more energy than they produce
- wood - abundant for a time, but would quickly be depleted in a world without fossil fuels. Ironically, it could be argued that global warming would be a much bigger problem without fossil fuels as the world would have been quickly denuded of trees without fuel alternatives.
- solar - good for small-scale use, but difficult to scale up. Moving towards the modern silicon photovolatic industry that we have today would have taken much longer without fossil fuels, I’d wager.
- water - water power is pretty ancient and does scale up pretty well. Building large dams isn’t an overly complicated engineering challenge, so it’s possible that hydro power could have contibuted significantly to industrial process and even powered some societies
- Geothermal - Geothermal power is available everywhere where you can dig deep wells, so I could see modern societies eventually embracing it, but there’s few places on Earth where it’s obviously a good source of power (Japan, Iceland, Hawaii, etc) and where it’s not obvious, there’s a number of challenges to making effective use of it.
- nuclear - Nuclear power is a huge resource and if fossil fuels didn’t exist, it seems like the natural choice for society-changing energy. My money would be on a nuclear-power based Earth if there had never been fossil fuels
I notice that I forgot wind, which is quite useful for primitive societies (sailing ships and windmills are some of the earliest inventions) and could contribute significantly to a modern society.
I would also note that battery technology would potentially be more advanced than what we have today, with the potential need for significant electricity storage.
It’s really critical to remember that lots of the industrial products we use require absolutely enormous amounts of energy to produce. The transportation networks that ship the products. The factories that create the products. The homes and living spaces of the workers. And absolutely hugely, the energy to refine the raw materials.
The industrial revolution built on cheap steel on an unprecedented scale. It’s absolutely possible to create steel using wood or other biofuels. But your overall annual steel production would be limited by the amount of acres of fuel you could devote to steel production. Modern steel production would be simply impossible without coal. Of course you could have steel, but not on the scale needed by an industrial civilization.
Without cheap steel–steel cheap enough to build ships and railways and skyscrapers out of–you don’t have an industrial revolution.
Without oil but allowing coal, the industrial revolution looks pretty much exactly the same until the 1900s, because everything ran on coal. Then comes the transportation revolution made possible by cheap liquid petroleum. Well, we can still have our transportation revolution, but the energy will have to come from coal. Not a problem, we can create transportation fuel from coal, all those early steam powered trains and ships were coal fired, and so were plenty of early automobiles. But it’s not hard to transform coal into more convenient or denser liquid fuels, it’s just more expensive.
But without coal, there’s no industrial revolution, period. Or rather, we have a tiny revolution fueled by wood and wind and water, and then the wood/biofuels and wind and water are used to the maximum extent possible and we’re dependent on a fixed annual energy budget that can’t be increased. And that annual energy budget is a fraction of what was needed for the industrial revolution.
Yes, the book I have on industrial archaeology has a chapter on wood-fired blast furnaces of the late 1700’s, early 1800’s. They would build one in pristine New Jersey (???) and it would run for about 10 year maximum before it had stripped the massive virgin forest for miles around and had to close. And… all that wood was chopped by hand and transported by cart to the furnace, so it was cheaper to move and build a new brick blast furnace chimney than to transport wood from farther away.
We forget how the whole industrial revolution was a serious bootstrap process. The deeper coal mines with powered drain pumps and powered winches were the inspiration, necessity, and first use for efficient steam engines, which provided the power to move coal to the blast furnaces that produced more steel for railroads so the advantage was not limited to waterways, and provided the cheap power so that mills and factories were not limited by available water-power for machines and wood resources for heat-based processes. It also provided the mass transport power to allow vast volumes of food and material to feed larger and larger cities. Today, it’s cheaper to make a car or computer or almost anything in Asia and ship it here, even into the middle of the continent, than to pay local wages to assemble it locally; even if the raw materials come from here, or Africa, or Saudi Arabia.
Unless you use a woodstove to heat your home (an indulgence) live near a woods where you are allowed to chop your own firewood (a rarity!) you lose track of how much physical work a simple task like finding enough material to heat you house in winter could be. We take high-energy-consumption labour-saving devices for granted.
In his book* Sea of Slaughter*, Farley Mowat mentions that one of the forgotten motivations for the arly exploration/exploitation of North America was biodeisel… Well, not exactly, but the demand for oil for heat and light was a driver for the exploration of the Gulf of ST. Lawrence and environs. The vast herds of seal and walrus were driven into corrals, then boiled down to extract animal fat. When technology got better, we instead scoured the seven seas and denuded them of whales.