WI: no petroleum..

This post, with an idea for prolonging trench warfare got me thinking. What if petroleum deposits were rendered functionally insignificant prior to their becoming an important fuel source?

Say, for example, a natural variant of the family of "petroleum eating bacteria" develops, and renders all the future oil fields useless.

What's the present going to look like?
 
There was a recent thread in ASB I think, about what if petroleum disappeared or didn't work or something so you should look for that. A lot of key advances wouldn't have been made or been made in a different context.
 

boredatwork

Banned
I think you probably need to move this to ASB.

The closest you could come to it in this forum would be "what if no-one developed petroleum as a fuel source" or "what if the internal combustion engine was never developed"

Problem is - either of those two are just so unlikely, that you're back in the ASB forum again.
 
One possibility is that petroleum fields are generally deeper in the earth than in our world. Combine this with a slower development of the technologies needed for drilling oil wells. Petroleum is still around and still in use, but has a much smaller effect than in our world. It might not be until the alternate world's 1950's or 1960's that petroleum becomes a major factor. Coal-fired ships and trains being important into the 1960's? Land vehicles running on steam or electricity? Can rocketry still develop without a petroleum-based economy?
 
There was a thread about something like this - the question was how would civilization develop on a terraformed world that had no petroleum. Technological advancement would reach it's peak at the first Industrial Revolution, and remain there until an alternative fuel source is developed, such as ethanol or hydrogen.
 
Coal liquefaction (Fischer-Tropsch or Sasol process) will be developed earlier than OTL. F-T Petroleum will be much more expensive than the oil based one, so individual transportation has less importance. Dense electrified train networks remain important transportation method in more countries.

Morgan: Hydrogen is an energy carrier, not an energy source, until somebody finds a way to mine gas giants for hydrogen. ITTL, artificial petroleum remains an energy carrier - the source is still the coal.
 
Perhaps synthetic oil would fufill petroleums role. In which case you have the interesting side-effect of lesser interdependance between economies, as their energy supply is produced entirely by their own industries.

This assumes that synthetic oil could be concieved/developed without preceding petroleum usage.

Oh, and states with access to hydroelectric power sources would benefit from a comparative advantage.
 
I think Hubris is right, whatever the explanation is for the absence of petroleum there would be much less interdependence between nations. This of course would lead to a series of extreme butterflies when it comes to international relations, wealth, and power.

Coal and natural gas will probably remain the major energy sources for quite a long time. But development and progress in electricity is likely to be much quicker than OTL.
In transportation dense rail networks would probably remain the main way people get around. But the electric car might appear around the 1950s and by the 1960s there would be a rather large market like our our auto industry.
With more development on the electric field the computer age is likely to arrive sooner as well.

If electricity does become major energy carrier the nations that can produce it will be given an advantage absent in OTL. It is likely that we would see some rather wealthy countries with lots of hydroelectric (or other resources).

Now a world like this does not necessarily mean a cleaner greener world. Coal will remain in use for much longer, and due to petroleum's absence, in greater use. Coal is much dirtier than petroleum. And until there is research into other ways of creating energy it will coal burning plants would be the way in which electricity is provided. So TTL might actually suffer from pollution problems much sooner than OTL. Once electricity and batteries come along (in greater masses than OTL) the mining for certain elements in them would be quite destructive.

Then the thing that has not been mentioned in nuclear power. A world that jumps from coal into nuclear power is likely to develop a "nuclear revolution" akin to that of the industrial. Once it is discovered there would be much more research and resources poured into its development.
 
I think Hubris is right, whatever the explanation is for the absence of petroleum there would be much less interdependence between nations. This of course would lead to a series of extreme butterflies when it comes to international relations, wealth, and power.

With coal playing the role of oil ITTL, the countries with rich and easily accessible coal deposits will profit just as the OPEC countries do today.

In addition, most catalytic processes (such as coal liquefaction, GtL etc.) as well as fuel cells require platinum, palladium and rhodium - and here we run into a real political problem (actually we will run into them as soon as fuel cell cars become commonplace OTL, too). There are 2 places in this world which hold over 90% of accessible platinum metals: Norilsk in Siberia and the Bushveld in South Africa/Zimbabwe. Who is controlling these deposits will control the energy supply of the world more effectively than the OPEC will ever have.
 
Uh, so what about my synthetic oil idea? Could it be developed without petroleum as a precedent?

If not, Altimiro is right that the coal-controlling countries would be a OPEC-parralel. But I doubt they would hold that position if their was synthetic oil.

Another thought- would biofuel be likely to play a strong role in energy production?
 
Uh, so what about my synthetic oil idea? Could it be developed without petroleum as a precedent?


Theoretically, yes - but it looks a bit far-fetched that a chemist one day enters his lab to develop a novel sort of fuel which is neither known to exist in nature, nor is compatible with any existing motors.

History of ideas is an intriguing topic, also in the field of technology ...
 
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