Carbon is life. It is also the most undervalued
product on Earth. The biology of this planet generally doesn’t work at all
without it. The carbon cycle is one of the best known biological and
environmental processes.
We
currently have a technology where priceless oil and coal are oxidized for
energy. This is the equivalent of selling the kids every time you want to go
for a drive or use the electricity.
This ain’t the old days any more. Good riddance,
too. There are literally millions of different uses for carbon which are much
more valuable to consumers and the industries. It is also eminently
sustainable. That’s not a cuss word, industry. It means big money. It’s also
not a joke, consumers. It means better prices, a better life, and much better products
and technology.
Try a bit of basic chemistry. The fundamentals of
most organic products include carbon. It is now possible to synthesize
materials which didn’t exist when the “traditional” role of carbon was
established. Synthetic stem cells, when
they happen, will need carbon. So will a list of commercial products many times
the size of Encyclopedia Britannica. Auxetic polymers, a sort of
inverted carbon polymer which gets stronger at the pressure
point, will revolutionize everything from mattresses to construction to space
travel.
And that paragraph’s what you can safely say in 80
words about carbon without working up a sweat. I’m not guessing.
In short, anything which doesn’t involve setting
fire to carbon is far more valuable than what we’re doing now. Polymers alone,
long chain organized structures, have more uses than a dictionary is likely to
find terminology. (Actually carbon is one of the main reasons that so many
professional reference texts have to be rewritten so often. They keep coming up
with new products.) Compounds using good quality carbon are good chemistry and
good product.
Byproducts are another point. Even the wastes from
oil production have uses. Sulphur has almost endless uses. In medicine, to use
only one example, there are more sulphur based products than a phone book would
dare print.
The problem with the current “argument” about oil and
coal is that it simply doesn’t address the possibilities of the products. The
oil companies can distribute any alternative fuel through
existing networks, and have their current carbon production turned into
something far more valuable. Coal can be adapted to creating complex polymers.
It’s been done, extremely profitably, decades ago.
Far more interesting is that the products can be
redesigned and reused from the atom upward. The current carbon industry is
perfectly capable of doing that. It’s more a question of commercial viability
than technology. The standard production equation is X product sale price
> Y related production cost. Quite obvious, but if your costing’s out of
whack at any point you can see what happens.
Carbon has a few advantages in this area.
X is determined by what the real cost of working or
reworking the carbon is.
Y is determined by whatever production method is
used.
The beauty of carbon is you can always
go back to the raw material. Literally back to the egg. It doesn’t get a lot
more sustainable than that.
Carbon compounds can be designed to be pulled apart,
and extraction is easy, using the right esters/polymerases. All you really need
after separation is a molecular membrane for carbon, like the water membrane.
It’s existing technology, and it’s about as difficult as buttering toast.
In theory, you can buy $10 worth of carbon, and turn
it into a million bucks worth of product, if you know how.
This means Y in the equation can be costed to
the last cent of the grandkids’ university fees. That makes X a lot more
valuable, and margins a lot safer. Better yet, X is variable, so you have a broader
demand structure you can tailor for the same basic product. Horrifyingly easy,
isn’t it?
It also makes life a lot less pernickety for the
coal and oil industries and those dependent on them, and the gigantic amounts
of capital tied up in them. I mention the capital, because there’s an awful lot
of money in funds invested in equity, and if the industry falls to bits, people’s
savings will go with it. So will the related industries, particularly transport,
agriculture and manufacturing. It’d make the Depression look like a holiday.
So, don’t set fire to the bed while you’re still in
it.
The carbon industries can be the solution to this
mess. Carbon doesn’t have to be a “vanishing resource”, and they’re the best
sources of bulk carbon. Consumers might note that other sources of carbon come
with some infrastructure attached, and that can be expensive. You can get
carbon out of soy beans, too, but it’s not the best source for volumes and you
would currently need a pretty Rube Goldberg technology to do it, which might
also include yet another form of combustion process. We have a renewable, so
why not renew?
Oil, coal, peat, are good sources of carbon. But
peat’s the only one you can grow, and covering the planet in peat bogs to meet
projected energy needs might cause a few concerns.
The Green side of the fence may wish at this point
to note that we would achieve a great deal more by putting organic carbon back
into the environment than we could producing more metaphysical methane bitching
about the subject.
If you’ve got ideas for carbon, can they please:
1.
Be
costed by someone who knows what they’re doing.
2.
Be
edited to avoid the highly counterproductive rhetoric which seems to pollute
every discussion.
3.
Contain
an industry and legislative-standard professional assessment of
benefits.
4.
Include
tooling and production design and related issues, and be clearly set out.
5.
Be
sent to somebody who is in a position to make a decision.
To put it another way, enough with the gabfest.
There aren’t going to be any second chances.