How might things have gone if there were no fossil fuels?

It seems, at first glance, that a lot of our modern technology has been either directly or indirectly dependent on fossil fuels, whether it be coal, oil or gas. Everything from motorcars to plastics have a connection to fossil fuels in one way or another.

Would it be accurate to say that modern civilization would have developed and evolved vastly differently if humanity had never had these resources to exploit?

Has there ever been any speculation as to how society could have turned out if this was the case?

 

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http://chapelboro.com/columns/common-science/a-world-without-fossil-fuels/

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My guess: most of us would be farmers.

 

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Industrialization would have proceeded a lot more slowly after 1885, since it would have been powered by wood rather than coal. This is not the death knell of industrialization, since a great many steam engines ran on wood rather than coal during the early buildout of railroads. In the US, coal did not take over from wood until the Civil War. But it would have slowed it greatly and led to even more deforestation than we saw between 1700 and 1900.

So from 1850 to 1950 we would have seen much slower development of an industrial society. In "new" 1900, when private vehicles were first being developed, steam-powered cars (fueled by wood pellets) and electric vehicles would have been the only options, and thus the switchover to a car-based society would have been delayed. Aircraft development would have been greatly slowed, since the only practical aircraft would be powered by syngas, which is a lot harder to store, or electricity, which has the problem of batteries.

The delays would begin to end around "new" 1950 when nuclear reactors started becoming practical. That would allow us to rapidly ramp up production of electrical power, and start making synthetic liquid fuels for applications (like aviation and spaceflight) that could not live without them.

So the period from 1850-1950 might have lasted 200 years instead of 100 years - and today we'd be where we were in 1950.

 

Water was a source of energy which was in use for many centuries and was the main thing used in doing many things from sawing wood to making items. I'd think that water would have become even more useful as time went along as it still is in use today making electricity for millions to use for everything they are doing. Water would have been used to make hydrogen I believe and that would have been much better than fossil fuels as we now see with the pollution and environmental damage that coal, oil and gas make. Perhaps we would have been in a much better world with waters being used as it is something that is renewable when used.

 

I Would add the wind industry would move the society into a wind mill direction, since in the early times farmers used wind mill to pump water , and even earlier wind energy was extensively used in HOLLAND to grind flower .

 

Irrigation started long before windmills were made. The Egyptians used the Nile River to irrigate their fields thousands of years ago.

 

I agree about irrigation . The point I wanted to make is that wind mill is an addition form of energy to mankind to explore, without using fossil fuel.

 

And hydrogen could be the new way of getting energy to use as well. Since hydrogen is renewable it should be something that research is done about to make that idea come true one day.

 

Making hydrogen from water requires electricity. Hydrogen is not a source of energy per se; it's just a more convenient form of energy, particularly for use in vehicles.

 

(Phys.org) —The process by which plants convert energy from the sun's rays into chemical 'fuel' has inspired a new way of generating clean, cheap, renewable hydrogen power which could solve looming problems with the UK's energy infrastructure

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-blueprint-cheap-hydrogen-production.html#jCp

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...nUnbgJ&usg=AFQjCNHftXAbt4Wz1eerJEAibi32g_NP_w


Researchers at Virginia Tech University have discovered a way to derive large quantities of hydrogen from any plant, a technology breakthrough that could not only greatly lower the cost of hydrogen fuel cells, but also lower the carbon footprint of hydrogen extraction.
The key to this discovery is xylose, the most abundant simple plant sugar. The researchers found a way to use xylose to produce hydrogen, something that had previously only been considered in theory. Because xylose comprises as much as 30 percent of plant cell walls, this new process can attain hydrogen from any type of biomass.
The university explains how the process works:
To liberate the hydrogen, Virginia Tech scientists separated a number of enzymes from their native microorganisms to create a customized enzyme cocktail that does not occur in nature. The enzymes, when combined with xylose and a polyphosphate, liberate the unprecedentedly high volume of hydrogen from xylose, resulting in the production of about three times as much hydrogen as other hydrogen-producing microorganisms.
The energy stored in xylose splits water molecules, yielding high-purity hydrogen that can be directly utilized by proton-exchange membrane fuel cells.


http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...nUnbgJ&usg=AFQjCNEbKk9kWUJyYBbDkYZ1c-fRwa1hgA

 

No comments about this breakthrough to produce hydrogen? With news like this the world could change quickly to a hydrogen based society with enough talk about doing so. Seeing that I'm the only one who tries to bring this to the attention of everyone I wonder why no media is doing something about this matter, to bad.

 

You say this method produces "three times as much hydrogen as other hydrogen-producing microorganisms". How much is that? How much biomass does it take to produce how much hydrogen? And what energy inputs are required to grow that biomass?

 

Did you read the link I provided?

 

That is correct. Things would be like they were, to a large extent before the discovery that some black rocks would burn and then a heat engine could make a large amount of mechanical energy.

 

If you have an argument, bring it here. Don't expect people to extract it from your source.

If this method is such a "breakthrough", just how practical is it?

 

I think that I pretty much agree with Fraggle and Billvon. (Good posts, guys.)

The world today would have kind of a 'steam-punkish' appearance.

I wonder whether urbanization would have progressed in the same way, or whether steam technology would have inserted itself into a more village-based society. Overreliance on wood fuel would probably have led to massive deforestation, though that might be counteracted in part by large fire-wood plantations.

Fraggle's question about iron metallurgy was interesting. Could we make steel with only wood as fuel?

Electricity would be big, but how would we generate it? It would mostly be hydroelectric, I'm guessing. Lots of dams. Given that hydroelectric potential isn't distributed evenly, industrialization and urbanization might be in different places. In our world it's located near coal deposits, in that world it might be near mountains in rainy places like British Columbia. (Which has lots of forests too.)

Probably no heavier-than-air airplanes. Certainly no jets. Do steam-engines exist that are light and powerful enough for aviation? I doubt it. So I'm imagining big Victorian airships, chugging through the sky with smokestacks.

No petrochemicals either. Chemistry would be devastated. No plastic. Synthetic fibers would be problematic. Rubber would really be rubber, from rubber trees. We would be lacking lots of solvents and lubrication products. Chemical feedstocks for many industrial processes would be gone.

Transport might be a lot slower and more expensive. There wouldn't be highways full of trucks, carrying things. Towns would be located along waterways navigable by steamboat. Some people would probably still be using horses.

 

Well, almost half of the world's population still burns shit to cook and keep warm...