Carol: Thank you and I seem to have spent part of last night creating a thread that proved I am no pote.

Meanwhile I have to contradict what an earlier poster said:


I can't remember that SF author with the comment about wasting crude by burning it. I heard it long ago and believed it until I actually got to work in a refinery. Crude is a natural product. When it is refined it is broken out into various products of varying volatilities, some of which are sold to be burned, others which are turned into chemicals and solids. So when you are burning gasoline you are burning what was a waste product until the internal combustion engine came along. A lot of plastics are made from natural gas, however, and I have no idea if that is removed from the burnable part, or if indeed you are burning potential chemical goodies when you heat your home with NG. On the other hand, it is way more efficient than heating your home from electricity that was itself generated by combustion.

That poster was myself.

Well it turns out that plastics come from a host of sources, portions of refined crude included. Among them are refined gases, the lightest products of a refinery, and naphtha, which is a light gas but heavier than gasoline. Naptha produces intermediate feed products for plastics, and also is a fuel and also gets 'cracked' to produce lighter fuels such as gasoline.

So it is correct to observe that we have all sorts of choices when we produce crude, the same stuff is useful for fuel and for many other products, including chemicals, fertilizers, plastics.

The world of plastics encompasses way more than petrochem. There are plastics from cellulose, natural rubbers, soybeans, even casein from milk. And of course, much plastic can be recycled. Yesterday I heard a radio program where in another country there was talk of banning disposable plastic bags and requiring only heavy duty reusable bags be used, because the lighter ones were blowing around and getting chewed on by animals and blocking drains etc.