A world without hydrocarbons is a past we escaped

From 1 billion to 8 billion

The products made from hydrocarbons made today's world possible. They allowed us to create modern transportation, a medical industry, and electronics and communications systems. They reduced infant mortality, more than doubled life expectancy to over 70 years, and gave people the ability to travel anywhere in the world by plane, train, ship, and vehicle. The risk of dying from floods, storms, droughts, and extreme heat or cold has fallen dramatically over the past century, thanks to sturdier buildings, warning systems, transportation, and emergency response that all depend on hydrocarbons.

Nearly half the world's population is fed by crops grown with synthetic nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas or coal. Without it, global food production could not support today's 8 billion people.

None of the following infrastructure existed 200 years ago in a hydrocarbon-free economy, and none of it can operate today without the products and transportation fuels made from hydrocarbons:

• Hospitals

• Airports
• Militaries
• Medical equipment
• Telecommunications
• Space programs
• Appliances and electronics
• Sanitation systems
• Heating and ventilating systems
• Transportation - vehicles, rail, ocean, and air
• Construction - roads and buildings

Refining unlocked the latent value

Hydrocarbons like oil, coal, and natural gas took hundreds of millions of years to form underground. As the ancient world showed, simply having them was never enough. On their own, they do not serve people well. No one burns raw crude oil, and as noted above, burning raw solid fuels indoors remains one of the world's leading causes of premature death.

It takes a multi-billion-dollar refinery, a gasification plant, or a processing facility to convert Earth's dormant resources into the transportation fuels and the more than 6,000 products that modern life depends on. Planes, ships, trucks, and cars do not run on raw crude oil. They run on fuels manufactured from crude oil in refineries built for that purpose. Refining, gasification, and processing are not something to apologize for. They are the necessary step that turns a long-buried resource into something usable and safe, the same way a seed buried in soil needs water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide from the air before it becomes anything at all.

Seen this way, the story of the past two centuries is not one of humanity becoming "addicted" to hydrocarbons. It is the story of learning to unlock their latent value. Carbon is the element that builds our bodies and the food that sustains them, that supplies the materials for nearly every product we use, and that provides the energy that powers civilization. Before refining, all three, life, materials, and energy, had to come from the same forests, fields, and animals. Refining changed that. Carbon from underground now provides most of our energy and materials, and through fertilizer it helps grow the food that sustains life, easing the pressure on forests and wildlife.

What we really need from hydrocarbons

What we need is not hydrocarbons for their own sake, but the PRODUCTS and TRANSPORTATION FUELS they provide. By all means, let us continue to develop renewables for electricity and explore new technologies and plant-based alternatives, which are, after all, made of carbon too. But none of them is anywhere near replacing the products and fuels that support 8 billion lives.

Much of the rhetoric heard from representatives of wealthy nations at global gatherings focuses on a single goal: lowering global CO2 emissions. That singular focus ignores the multidimensional realities of the environment and, more importantly, ignores energy poverty and the central need for access to a sufficient supply of affordable energy, the only way to raise well-being everywhere and reduce global disparity. For the foreseeable future, much of that energy will come from hydrocarbons.

No one who looks honestly at the early 1800s would want to go back. A hydrocarbon-free economy is not a cleaner future. It is a past we have already lived: shorter lives, children lost before the age of five, and constant pressure on forests and wildlife.

Modern life depends on the products and transportation fuels made from hydrocarbons, the same products and transportation fuels that wind and solar electricity CANNOT make.