A world without hydrocarbons is a past we escaped

Two hundred years ago, the world had about 1 billion people, roughly 7 billion fewer than today. Life expectancy at birth was under 30 years, and more than four in ten children died before their fifth birthday. Apart from coal in Britain and a few other places, it was essentially a hydrocarbon-free economy.

Hydrocarbons were never missing

Yet the world of 1800 was not hydrocarbon-free because hydrocarbons were unknown. People had known and used them for thousands of years. In ancient Mesopotamia, bitumen seeping from the ground was used as mortar and waterproofing; the Greek historian Herodotus described its use in the walls of Babylon. In China, by the Han dynasty some two thousand years ago, wells drilled in Sichuan brought up natural gas, which was carried through bamboo pipes to boil brine for salt. Around the Caspian Sea, where natural gas burned from the ground, fire became an object of reverence, and Marco Polo described an oil spring in the region whose oil was burned in lamps and used to treat camels. In Japan, the ancient chronicle Nihon Shoki records that in the year 668, "burning earth and burning water" were presented to the emperor from the province of Koshi, which extended along the Sea of Japan coast across what is now the Hokuriku region, including Niigata Prefecture, where oil still seeps naturally from the ground.

What was missing was not hydrocarbons, but the ability to unlock them. For thousands of years, people could use only the small amounts that seeped to the surface, as glue, lamp oil, medicine, or sacred flame. The vast store of carbon underground stayed dormant, and its latent value remained untouched.

What the world ran on instead

So the early 1800s was not a carbon-free economy. It ran on carbon taken from living things. Heat for cooking and warmth came from burning wood, charcoal, straw, and dung. Light came from tallow candles and whale oil. Mechanical power came from human muscle, horses, and oxen, all of which had to be fed from the land. Clothing came from wool, cotton, flax, and leather. Nearly everything people ate, wore, built with, and burned was taken directly from forests, fields, and animals.

Life was hard and dirty, with many deaths from weather and disease, and the burden fell on nature as well as on people. Britain had cut down so much of its forest that it was forced to import timber and turn to coal. Whales were hunted toward collapse to keep lamps burning, and it was kerosene refined from crude oil, not a conservation treaty, that largely ended the demand for whale oil for lighting in the second half of the 19th century.

When people depend on living things for life, materials, and energy all at once, humanity and nature compete for the same land. Unlocking the latent value of carbon stored underground for hundreds of millions of years is what ended much of that competition.

Even today, about 2.1 billion people still cook with polluting fuels such as wood, charcoal, dung, crop waste, kerosene, or raw coal, on open fires or simple stoves. The World Health Organization links household air pollution to an estimated 2.9 million premature deaths a year. For a quarter of humanity, the hydrocarbon-free economy of 1800 is not history. It is daily life.

More than 6,000 products that did not exist in 1800

Today, crude oil, natural gas, and coal supply more than 80% of the world's energy, and they are also the raw materials for more than 6,000 products that did not exist in 1800.

• Transportation fuels:Gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and bunker fuel refined from crude oil power cars, trucks, planes, ships, and rockets for space travel.

• Industrial raw materials:Ethylene and other petrochemicals, made from natural gas liquids and crude oil, are the building blocks of plastics, synthetic fibers, rubber, solvents, and lubricants.
• Everyday products:Propane for gas grills, butane in lighters, paraffin wax, asphalt for roads, and the plastics in medical devices all come from hydrocarbons.
• Heat and power:Natural gas and coal heat homes, run power plants, and deliver the extremely high temperatures needed to make cement, steel, and glass.

In fact, crude oil was a staple of the U.S. economy long before automobiles became popular. From the 1860s, kerosene refined from crude oil lit homes across America and around the world.

Energy is not the same as electricity

Many people use "energy" and "electricity" as if they meant the same thing. They do not. Electricity accounts for only about one-fifth of the world's final energy consumption. Wind turbines and solar panels generate electricity only. They cannot make any of the products or transportation fuels that come from hydrocarbons.

Electricity itself is a child of the hydrocarbon age. One of the world's first central power stations, Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station in New York, opened in 1882 and ran on coal. Today, every method of generating electricity, whether coal, natural gas, hydro, nuclear, wind, or solar, is built with products, components, and equipment made from hydrocarbons. So are electric vehicles, and so is everything that runs on electricity, from smartphones and computers to data centers and X-ray machines. Without hydrocarbons, there would be no renewables, and nothing for electricity to power.