[fpoling]

If oil and gas would not exist, then liquid fuel would be produced from coal. With the latest processes the cost of production is like 80 dollars per barrel, but with processes that Germans developed during WWII it was probably like twice of that in modern money.

In alternative universe that would be cheaper due to massive scale, but the era of very cheap liquid fuel would never happen. So electrical cars on big scale will happen much earlier. And given that coal is much more evenly distributed on Earth, one can speculate that there would be much less reasons for conflicts.

[tordrt]

I dont think this makes sense, given how insanely much more polluting coal is. You have to burn massive amounts of coal to power the liquid refinery, 50% of the energy lost essentially in the conversion process. In addition to that liquid coal has double the emissions of regular oil. Air quality would have been a disaster.

EVs in scale would have maybe happened sooner, but they would have give us much less value, and I think in the end reaching current EV tech would most likely have taken longer than it did with oil and gas, just due to industrialization and technological innovation would progress much slower without oil and gas...

I think advanced green tech in general would have taken much longer time to develop also on an industrial scale when limited by coal only. Not to speak of human welfare would also have improved much slower.

[ninalanyon]

> Air quality would have been a disaster.

What do you mean would have been? It was a disaster. Perhaps you are too young or insufficiently well travelled to have experienced the effects of burning coal in, say the UK in the 1950s and 1960s or in China even in the last few decades.

Without oil the push to solar and wind would also have been accelerated, probably.

What is it about oil and as that you think made it accelerate semiconductor R&D?

[tordrt]

Yeah, my point was that it would have been even worse without oil and gas.

solar, wind and semiconductors all require a very advanced petrochemical supply chain. You simply couldn't produce any of this without products derived from oil and gas.

[ninalanyon]

> You simply couldn't produce any of this without products derived from oil and gas.

That is simply untrue. Everything that is made from oil or gas can also be made from organic feedstock. I don't mean to say that it would be easy and it would certainly be slower to start with but it is certainly not impossible. Remember that the first plastics were made before the age of oil.

One currently used plastic that does not use oil or gas as a feedstock is cellophane [1], another is rayon [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane#Today [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayon

[fpoling]

In 1920 in Berlin there were more electrical taxes than gasoline one. But cheap gasoline killed electrical car industry.

Without that electrical cars would proceed to develop and batteries with high capacity would happen much sooner.

As for pollution it would not be that bad. Fuel would be expensive and cars with combustion engines would not happen on massive scale. There would be much more freight by trains and nuclear energy would be developed on much bigger scale.

[tordrt]

You are talking as if oil and gas delayed the future, which I dont think makes sense at all.

I think we are underestimating all the derivatives we use from oil and gas here.

I think this is all very optimistic. I think not having oil and gas would have been a major setback to global progress I dont think it would have made us more advanced within batteries or electrical cars than we are today. And especially not even close to overall general global progress we have reached today.