Alternative To Oil

Alternatives to Oil

Since around the year 4000 BC, petroleum has been used by humans as a tool for medicine, construction and clothing. Its use was almost unnoticed by the environment since it wasn’t consumed on a big scale, but with the passing of time, different uses for it have been discovered and put into practice. Mainly since the nineteenth century, oil has become one of the substanceswith the greatest consumption around the world. Since the industrial revolution, little by little, oil has been adapted to be used in different transports, to make plastic, to provide gas, etc… Almost 99.9 percent of the cars in the world use gasoline or gas oil as fuel, plastic can be found in almost every little detail of our daily life. Therefore modern world would not function without oil. Animportant detail about oil is that it is not a renewable resource, and the huge amount of petroleum consumed daily endangers its presence on earth. Besides, oil produces extremely high levels of pollution, which contribute to the process of global warming. So, after knowing these facts, concern should spread among people to look for another source of energy, then, shouldn’t we start searching foralternatives? Or should we start making better use of oil, improving the technologies applied to it in order to use it more wisely?

Whenever we start our car's engine, take the bus, or in a bigger scale, fabricate plastic, oil is in combustion, burning substances such as sulfur (from 0.3% in hydrodesulfurized blends and 3.5% in Venezuelan oil ), sodium and vanadium, which are all contaminatingmaterials, which, in most of the cases, are expelled in a big percentage to the atmosphere (http://www.alken-murray.com/EF_Man_5-10.PDF). Anyways, the most common and well known substance to be released is carbon dioxide (CO2). This affects every urban area, but the big cities are the ones who suffer from smoke clouds and largely contaminated air.The continent that shows the higher rates ofcontamination is Asia, with Iran, Mongolia, India and Pakistan having the most contaminated cities in the world (http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/09/27/the-10-most-air-polluted-cities-in-the-world/).

Today, 19 - 3 - 12, 192.6 Liters of crude oil costs 107.50 dollars. Companies buy per barrel, there, the distilleries process it and what is obtained is: Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), gasoline,naphtha, kerosene, jet aircraft fuels, diesel fuels, fuel oils, lubricating oils, paraffin wax, asphalt and tar and finally, petroleum coke. This petroleum can be used for making plastics, fibers, rubber, fuels, engine oils, etc… Each company, depending on the amount of techification and processes they make to oil, will have greater or smaller costs of production, leading to more expensive finalproducts. In this way, people from the lower classes wont be able to access, for example, to a car, which is expensice to buy and expensive to maintain, as well of course, as to buy petrol. However, it is true that electric cars are much cheaper to run, but they have a great drawback which is having a much greater initial cost than regular cars.

Also, as today’s worldwide fuel is oil, and it isrunning short, Nations are constantly arguing and fighting to be able to control the different oil discoveries around the world. This is so since owning a oil field can provide the government certain power that it wouldn’t have it he didn’t own one. United Stats, for example, declared the war to Irak with the excuse of suspecting they had chemical weapons, but it’s widely known that the real causeof it was the enormous amounts of oil irak had under it’s terrain, resulting in the death of hundreds of young men and civilians. A more recent example would be United States and Uganda, here, since the 1980’s, a dictator called Joseph Kony is running the country. This one is not a normal dictatorship since this man, Joseph, kidnaps kids providing them with weapons and forcing them to kill...