Generally speaking when it comes to chemistry if it includes the carbon atom it’s called organic chemistry, because every living thing contains carbon (and hydrogen and oxygen).
The problem is that just because carbon is the *basis* for life as we know it, that doesn’t mean carbon *is* life, carbon is just another element.
Chemistry and Physics sort of meet at the border between elements and compounds, so for example iron (Fe) as an element is pretty hard to destroy, and pretty easy to recycle, but a compound like acetylene C2H2 is pretty easy to destroy, so pretty hard to recycle.
The elements within acetylene, carbon and hydrogen, are pretty hard to destroy, and pretty easy to recycle.
The definition of recycling meaning to get back to square one.
See with acetylene you get H-C-C-H and the two out bonds are single bonds, and the central bond between the two carbon atoms is a triple bond, so lots and lots of energy can be released by breaking that bond, which means lots and lots of energy has to be input to make it.
There aren’t any acetylene wells. It’s not a naturally occurring substance in *that* sense…. though there are natural processes that produce it in small quantities.
Speaking of wells, that sort of brings us to oil, another compound, not an element… and yes, you can make hydrocarbons in a lab, so the question becomes, where did the oil come from?
The truth is nobody actually knows for a fact, most of the worlds oil reserves are at a depth that significantly exceeds the maximum depths at which any fossils have ever been found anywhere on the planet, ok, the counter argument is plankton don’t leave a fossil record, and oil is from that very primitive “bug soup” era of planetary development, and that might be so, or it might not be so, it might also be so that conditions might arise spontaneously to create it, after all, the “bug soup” did not create oil according to the theories, the bug soup just sank to the bottom of oceans (presumably to depths where there was no 0xygen) and then millions of years of “earth processes” covered it an compressed it and converted it and so on, so the bug soup is no more than an ingredients list, so by definition the claim is that it is the only possible source for the ingredients list.
There is just that troubling little problem that most of the world’s oil is too deep to be a fossil *as we know it*, even the recent discovery of the world’s new oldest fossils in greenland was basically made on the surface, not six miles down, where we are finding more and more natural gas and oil (basically related chemical compounds based on the elements carbon and hydrogen)
Which brings us back to my earlier statement that we do not actually *know* where natural oil and gas hydrocarbons come from, we have some pretty good theories, but we don’t actually *know*
This doesn’t mean that oil is an infinite resource constantly being produced deep within the earth by natural processes, we just do not actually *know* for a fact that it isn’t produced by some natural abiotic process deep within the earth.
Either way it is a reasonable assumption that in the past 100 years we have been consuming it faster than it is being produced, but even that is still an assumption, there could be oceans of the stuff 10 miles down, that’s an area we know less about than the surface of mars.
However the fact that otto diesel pioneered an engine running on peanut vegetable oil should convince you that at least as far as the chemistry goes, there is nothing special or exotic about oil / hydrocarbons / organic chemistry.
The only real significant fact is that while recycling elements such as iron is a lossy process energy wise, recycling chemical compounds is an *extremely* lossy process energy wise… so starting with ready made hydrocarbon soup is *vastly* more energy efficient than starting with the bare elements.
Perhaps the simplest organic compound is CH4, four hydrogen atoms and one carbon atom, so simple even the bugs in your guts can make it as a byproduct of digestion, put shit in a tank and draw off the gas and you have a methane digester, and you can run a motor off the methane, or you can use it as a building block for your larger hydrocarbon chains.
Anyone who has worked with a gas axe knows oxy-acetylene torches kick ass, oxy-propane is for limp wristed fags, but anyone who has worked with oxy acetylene knows that despite how fierce the flame is, there really ain’t that much of it in one bottle.
Start at methane and work your way up through ethane and propane to butane, and you’re getting closer to something that is easier to keep liquid at room temperature and atmo pressure, you’re not there yet, but you are getting closer, and around about gasoline and diesel, you are up near the apex of being easy to handle and dense (a liquid) and having a lot of energy per weight / volume, and then it starts to tail off again towards coal and ultimately diamond (diamond will burn, just not easily)
So a bit like H2O (another compound) having a sweet spot in liquid gas solid states and life and so on, hydrocarbons have a sweet spot in an oxygen rich environment as chemical fuels.
At this point it doesn’t really matter where the come from, all we need to know that burning them in oxygen for energy is hugely easier and hugely more efficient than trying to input energy and reverse the process.
So pretty much all chemical reactions that involve burning something in oxygen are great at releasing energy, but they are pretty much one shot processes in that you can’t afford to reverse them.
Contrast this with a battery in an EV such as a tesla, it’s pretty easy to reverse *that* chemical process and put the charge back in and revert things to their previous chemical state, but, it’s still a *long* way from perfect… my new nimh AA cells claim 2100 charge discharge cycles, that is a ***looooong*** fucking way from a lossless reversible process… so while the number of atoms of each ELEMENT in that cell aren’t going to change over time (apart from hydrogen outgassing porosity) it is the COMPOUNDS that never quite get put back they way they should be each time, and as such the battery ages and dies.
So we have elements, and we have compounds, and compounds have chemical reactions, and chemical reactions with oxygen that liberate a lot of energy are great at liberating lots of energy, but to all intents and practicality they are one shot processes, and we have other chemical reactions that are pretty much reversible, that can be used to store energy, but the comparison between the two types of chemical reaction when measured per volume or per weight is hopeless, do you want lots of energy is a small weight / volume, or do want a mainly reversible process, pick one.
So, any non nuclear electricity generating plant providing electrical power to any and every EV is basically all just chemistry at work, that’s all it is, it’s just chemistry.
I do not want to knock chemistry too much, because chemistry can be some amazing shit, but it can also be some really mundane shit… lighting your farts CH4 + O2 = H2O + CO2.. this is not the new wave of the cutting edge science future come to save us as a species.
If we get away from chemistry and compounds and steer towards physics and elements, well, it’s all pretty standard shit by now, we pretty much know all the viable elements now, we pretty much know all of the basic alloys and compounds of said elements and their properties, ain’t nobody going to accidentally spill a drop of mercury into a furnace and make star trek transparent aluminium that is also harder than diamond and stronger than spider silk and more temperature resistant than titanium.
So there isn’t any sci-fi unobtanium physics and materials science around the corner that is gonna save us as a species any time soon.
So what we are left with is SCIENCE, as in REAL FUCKIN’ SCIENCE.
Real science tells us that one way chemical reactions burning shit in oxygen are a great way of producing energy, and that more or less reversible chemical reactions in sealed vessels is a reasonably good way of storing energy, in other words, one is a FUEL, the other is a BATTERY.
Every vehicle has mechanical losses, rolling resistance, air resistance, etc etc, so it takes X amount of energy to go a mile at V speed.
Substituting a FUEL for a BATTERY doesn’t change that.
What it does, as opposed to the IC engine, is it introduces another “lossy” conversion stage, another lossy CHEMICAL process, between the chemical production of energy by burning a fuel in oxygen, and pushing that vehicle down the road.
If the whole process including the energy generation centrally is chemical, then the whole process is significantly less efficient *overall* than burning the fuel in the vehicle.
Nuclear (non chemically) generated power, sort of starts to make sense… nuke generated power and next gen supercapacitors, starts to make real good sense.
Significantly LESS efficient overall chemical processes, doesn’t make any fucking sense at all, and it brings us right back to the start, an overall less efficient process is Ok if it is more convenient than a more efficient process, AND if there is no shortage of the chemical compounds being converted to energy.
My eneloop nimh batteries, says on the pack, charged at the factory by solar power, yeah, ok, that’s another story, ROEI for solar cells is not so great, takes a lot of energy to make them, but it’s kinda green, kinda, now imagine if they were charged at the factory by a coal power plant.
Yes, I know, coal, another “fossil fuel”… and anyone heard of marie curie, pitchblende, every single nuclear power plant on the planet would be shut down immediately and permanently if they released half as much radioactive waste as any coal power plant, because coal is relatively full of radioactive materials.
How can dead trees be so full of radioactive materials?
A fucking nutcase I knew years back (lizard overlord shapeshifter body snatcher type) made more sense than anyone else at a science symposium when he suggested that the only way that this could have happened is if all the planet millions of years ago was carpet bombed globally from orbit with nukes.
Because those radioactive ELEMENTS (uranium and thorium) within coal sure as shit came from somewhere, then you get into the real science, and down at the trace level there is uranium and thorium in almost every bit of rock you can pick up, and it was all made in stars somewhere, which iron itself being the common end product, and if that isn’t proof that elements are pretty indestructible, nothing is.
Tesla and other electric cars are driven by chemical reactions at least as much as any IC powered vehicle, moreso if the power to charge them is generated in a non nuke power station.
To call them “electric” cars is misleading, to say the least.
They are chemical cars, same as my old diesel volvo shed.
Takes more than just a bit of the shine off them, don’t you think….
Science/facts/education, bad for sales, bad for the economy.