The Rise of the Hydrocarbon-Dependent World We Know and Love

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Written by Paul Wiseman for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Previously, we introduced fossil fuels--particularly crude oil and natural gas--to society through the early 20th century. These fuels, being plentiful, portable and energy-dense--showed that they could outwork humans and horses (the latter still providing a gauge for vehicular prowess) thousands of times over.

Energy transition architects are faced with matching or surpassing those three advantages in order to reduce airborne carbon while providing earthlings a simple option for maintaining their current lifestyle of indoor climate control, widely ranging travel and remotely-farmed food supplies, among others.

In this installment we consider some major, taken-for-granted benefits of the hydrocarbon revolution, then look at numbers showing the corresponding rise in fossil fuel usage--an upturn that some expect to continue for several more decades, in spite of trillions of dollars spent to the contrary.

Battles Over Oil
The oil revolution may have started in earnest with World War I, the first mechanized war. While it was still mostly fought on foot, horseback and wagon, a smattering of airplanes, tanks, and diesel-powered warships gave governments a heads-up that this was the force of the future. By World War II, oil-deficient Japan was invading Southeast Asia to fuel its war machine, Germany was accessing Moravian oil fields in its Sudetenland grab, and the Allies won the war, benefitting greatly from America's abundance of oil.

With the end of World War II, soldiers returned home from "The World" ready to leave the confines of rural America, where they formerly had toiled on the family farm or walked a few blocks between home and work. As the big cities' concrete-jungled urban areas grew more crowded and more expensive, the former rural residents looked to areas that combined urban convenience with rural greenery--the suburbs.

These developments housed fewer citizens per square foot and included yards for dogs and swing sets. They also required longer and ever-widening roads to ferry the residents between work and their dream home. Those roads were plied by cars now considered gas guzzlers, with 10 to 15 miles per gallon the norm. This was a costly proposition on several fronts.

Gasoline, oil changes, tire replacement and babysitters, along with suddenly massive highway construction, were the obvious costs. Trains and buses handled much of this traffic in still-crowded eastern cities, but the sprawl of western Meccas like Houston, Dallas/Ft. Worth and Los Angeles meant mass transit lacked the customer density it needed for profitability. Additionally, individual houses with outside walls on four sides and above cost more to climatize than did apartment buildings with shared walls and basement boilers that can warm a whole building.

The Real Wind Beneath Our Wings
It is revealing that the first major league baseball teams to be located west of St. Louis came about in the late 1950s, as airplanes got players to their 154 games (the schedule was expanded to the current 162 games in 1961) across the country in hours instead of the days that would have been required by trains and buses. In addition to Hank Aaron and Mickey Mantle, droves of Americans also took to the increasingly friendly skies, domestically and internationally. Another demand for cheap and plentiful fossil fuels was born.

The Original Climate Change
When Willis Carrier invented air conditioning in 1902, it made barely a ripple across general society. Its original purpose was solely to help control humidity and temperature in industries such as printing. It was loud, clunky and expensive to own and operate.

Large buildings and movie theaters were among the first to adopt this indoor climate change in the 1930s, and by the 1960s, it was spreading 73-degree comfort far and wide, particularly in places like Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, and throughout the south and the desert southwest. In fact, some have joked that Willis Carrier settled the south.

Migrating from fans to window units to central air has exponentially added to a household's comfort and to its energy bills.

Fossil Fuel Use Skyrockets
Recently, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) put out a chart of U.S. energy use in several categories, spanning a time frame from 1776 to 2023. On that chart, the use of all forms of energy, especially petroleum and natural gas, ramps up tremendously right after WWII, and although less dramatically, it continues to increase to this day.

In fact, says energy consultant and writer Art Berman, "Half of all historical oil consumption has been since 2000."

While these milestones paint a picture, they are only the bare minimum of the whole scene. Health care, plastics, electronics, entertainment, communications--the list goes on and on.

Having established the now almost-invisible reliance on cheap and plentiful energy in today's developed society, the next installment will examine the environmental issues and the rise of the "green movement." After that, we will investigate whether a New World Energy Order can compete with the hydrogen society.

Industrial Info Resources (IIR) is the leading provider of industrial market intelligence. Since 1983, IIR has provided comprehensive research, news and analysis on the industrial process, manufacturing and energy related industries. IIR's Global Market Intelligence (GMI) platform helps companies identify and pursue trends across multiple markets with access to real, qualified and validated plant and project opportunities. Across the world, IIR is tracking more than 200,000 current and future projects worth $17.8 trillion (USD).