1/ Modern society is awash in stuff. There’s stuff at the grocery store. At the hardware store. At Amazon and eBay. We eat stuff, wear stuff, buy stuff, and store stuff. Click some buttons, swipe a card, tap a phone – and presto! Stuff appears.
2/ We are a carbon-based species. Carbon forms the foundation of our bodies and the external world we experience. Almost everything we touch is carbon-based, including most of our stuff.
3/ Not only is our stuff mostly based on carbon, but the energy required to manipulate materials – to make stuff – comes predominately from carbon-based feedstocks as well. For example, we can’t make copper wire without first extracting energy from carbon fuels.
4/ Since energy is life, mastering the chemistry of carbon and harnessing the energy of stuff to make other stuff is core to the modern economy. When transforming stuff, it is easier to start with stuff that has higher embedded energy than the stuff you intend to make.
5/ Let’s develop a grossly simplified mental model. Picture a four-rung ladder. Because of gravity it takes energy to climb a ladder, but to fall from one is a spontaneous event. In a way, interchanging between chemical compounds is analogous to our ladder.
6/ Sometimes, going from one chemical compound to another releases energy (like falling down the ladder), whereas going in the opposite direction requires putting energy in (like climbing the ladder).
7/ At the top rung of our ladder sits methane, more commonly known as natural gas. Among the hydrocarbons, methane has the most embedded energy. Way down below – on the ground below the first rung – sits carbon dioxide (CO2). CO2 is a thermodynamic sink.
8/ When you burn methane fully, you react it with oxygen and produce CO2 and water as products. That reaction gives off an enormous amount of useful energy – the increased force of hitting the ground from the top rung rather than lower ones.
9/ The next rung down from methane sits oil. While oil is a complex mixture, for our simplistic purposes you can think of it as partially burned methane. Oil still has a lot of potential energy (falling from that height would still hurt).
10/ Unlike methane, oil is an easily transported liquid at room temperature and pressure. As such, oil serves many purposes for which methane is unsuitable. However, you must burn more oil to get the same amount of useful energy – thus producing more CO2 on an equivalent basis.
11/ Further down still is coal. Coal is even more oxidized than oil, sitting closer to the ground. It is also quite dirty, filled with nasty impurities. But coal is cheap and is a solid. You can literally dig it out of the ground with a pick and shovel, as was done for decades.
12/ At the lowest rung is wood. Wood, like all plant stuff, is the product of photosynthesis (so are coal and oil, of course, but wood just died more recently). In a highly inefficient process, Nature starts with CO2 and begins to climb the ladder using sunshine as the fuel.
13/ Since climbing the ladder is hard, Nature doesn’t get very far. Having said that, wood is a fantastic raw material for all kinds of useful stuff, and vegetation is the food that powers all humans, either directly or indirectly.
14/ It makes intuitive sense that if we are using carbon-based materials as a source of energy, we’d want to be at the highest rung possible. This is, in fact, how societies evolve. Wood burning gives way to coal, which eventually gives way to oil and then natural gas.
15/ As societies become more sophisticated, they can afford cleaner environments. Natural gas is the cleanest burning carbon-based fuel. You can use it directly in your kitchen with minimal ventilation for a reason. Nobody would advise firing up the charcoal barbeque indoors.
16/ What’s less well-known is that same concept holds if you are using carbon-based materials to make stuff. Almost all synthetic materials in modern life start near the top of the ladder and are engineered downward in a controlled burn.
17/ This makes sense. The embedded energy to run the process is at least partially inherent in the starting material. Certain high-value materials are worth pushing up the ladder to obtain, but industry evolved the way it did because it is easier to slide down than climb up.
18/ Take polyethylene, which is the highest volume production plastic in the world. Industrially, polyethylene is made by sliding down the ladder: ethane is converted to ethylene, which is then polymerized.
19/ Ethane is close to natural gas on our ladder, while polyethylene has virtually the same inherent energy as oil. To make polyethylene is to descend down the ladder.
20/ In theory, polyethylene could be made from corn, but that involves climbing the ladder with big steps. Corn is made from CO2 on the farm and has an energy content close to wood. To make polyethylene from corn, you first need to produce corn ethanol.
21/ Ethanol is higher up the ladder than corn (roughly in line with coal), but much lower than polyethylene. Jumping yet another full rung, while possible, simply doesn’t make economic sense, even with substantial government support.
22/ We grow corn because we need to eat. We burn ethanol as a minor additive in gasoline because the government tells us to (Iowa is an early primary state, after all). Even that level of political support can’t take us all the way up the ladder to polyethylene.
23/ So, where does stuff come from? As you can probably guess by now, it mostly comes from directly of the oil and gas industry (high up the ladder!). This is why crises of energy quickly become crises of inflation. Most of our stuff comes from high-energy materials.
24/ Without knowledge of where stuff comes from or how stuff gets made, it is easy to assume stuff just appears - like magic. Of course, as Arthur Clark famously said, magic is just the science we don’t understand yet.
25/ We live in a time where few politicians understand how things get made. It is fine to not know where stuff comes from, but it isn’t fine to not know where stuff comes from while dictating to the rest of us how the economy should be run. <fin>
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