[astrodust]

I think the point of the Mad Max plot was not that you couldn't extract oil from other sources, but that the damage had already been done to the economy and society so it was past the tipping point and already on to pure chaos.

By the way, we exploit oil sands which are about as heavy as you get. The stuff is basically asphalt.

[dozzie]

My point is that Mad Max assumed a very sudden and unrepairable damage that can't be worked around.

It's hard to believe that people would panic if the oil price went high, or even sky high. It wouldn't be pretty, sure, probably several industry sectors would die, but I don't see how it would end our world.

Most of the oil we use today is consumed by transportation, but there are plenty of other propulsion systems than just internal combustion engine (to name a few: electric ones, pneumatic, flywheel, external combustion (that can run on burning guano; e.g. Stirling engine)). Then there is the thing that we can still produce gasoline artificially from coal, it's just more expensive than how we get the gasoline currently.

I don't question the vision of collapsed society shown in Mad Max (I don't know if it makes senese or not, I just don't think about it). But how and why the society collapsed (MM1 version) doesn't stand the basic scrutiny.

[pmoriarty]

"It's hard to believe that people would panic if the oil price went high, or even sky high. It wouldn't be pretty, sure, probably several industry sectors would die, but I don't see how it would end our world."

You might be interested in watching "The End of Suburbia":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug

[yarrel]

All of our food is produced and distributed using oil.

Starvation would end our world pretty quickly.

[dozzie]

> All of our food is produced and distributed using oil.

Regarding distribution:

- we had working short-distance transportation with no oil whatsoever for ages literally, and for mechanical transport, there are alternatives to burning gasoline, it just won't be at the speed of 60mph

- long-distance transportation using rails is much more energy efficient than anything we use today, barring maybe moving by rivers, and rail infrastructure only sucks such heavily in the USA

Production, too, is not that reliant on oil. Most of the gain of modern agriculture is not due to mechanization, but due to fertilizers and pesticides. It's chemistry what brought us prosperity in this field, not mechanics.

[astrodust]

Every single thing you're describing here is catastrophic and world-ending.

The world without oil looks like North Korea. The world with oil looks like South Korea.

Without fertilizer there will be mass starvation, this is absolutely assured. It doesn't matter about production or transport. There won't be any food in the first place.

[dozzie]

> Every single thing you're describing here is catastrophic and world-ending.

I fail to see how replacing a Diesel engine that burns diesel oil inside its cylinders with a Stirling engine that burns dried guano in an external combustion chamber is world-ending.

Not to mention that old style diesel engines usually can run on cooking oil(!) or ethanol(!), so the migration to alternative propulsion wouldn't need to be that immediate. Transportation of goods critical to survival (e.g. food) could still be secured.

And we aren't discussing the world where fertilizers disappeared. We were talking about the world without gasoline.

[VLM]

Far upstream the refinery machine you're looking for is a hydrocracker and wikipedia link

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracking_(chemistry)

Cracking is not a net energy gain... However, if you're refining more asphalt than you know what to do with and have a shortage of shorter chain hydrocarbons, you can at considerable cost (economically and energeticaly) crack them and turn a useless pile of asphalt into burnable gasoline.

Coal to gas is convoluted. Coal to methanol somewhat more reasonable. Methanol being quite toxic is no laughing matter but then again benzene and mystery meat in gasoline is no laughing matter, probably "methanol causes blindness" would be all over the clickbait but it wouldn't be much larger of a problem than cancer from gasoline at a societal level.

All you need to end the world is about three days without food deliveries. That's about a factor of a hundred faster than the NIMBY permitting problems preventing installing steam engine rail between food warehouses and retail stores or whatever.

Fertilizer IS natgas. There's no such thing as a natgas or oil well, there's just wells with different ratios of natgas to oil, ranging from admittedly near 99% of one or the other to darn near 50:50 (by mass or volume). Its really quite problematic and dangerous. Yes the average chain length of crude oil is a nice stable diesel fuel but the std deviation is quite high leading to amazing explosions and fires due to 1% by mass being butane bubbling out catching fire then setting the rest of the plant on fire. Crude oil really is annoying and if it weren't so energetically valuable I donno if we'd use it as a feedstock for everything else, just TDP natural oils or something. Not to mention crude oil is full of "stuff" vanadium and sulfur and whatnot.

The wikipedia you want is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

Basically you mix steam and natgas to get hydrogen, then you mix hydrogen with atmospheric nitrogen (under immense pressure and high temp) to make ammonia, quite an important nitrogen fertilizer directly, but also indirectly via acid plants and much hand waving the other fertilizers kinda sorta depend on ammonia and there's no other industrially viable nitrogen source.

For fun if you really want to trigger "hydrogen economy" enthusiasts you can point out ammonia is a better hydrogen storage technology than any other tech we have and its still ridiculously impractical.