Introduction
Crude oil and natural gas result from compression and heating of ancient organic materials over geological time and, of course are not renewable in a human time scale. Known reserves of petroleum are roughly estimated at around 130 to 200 billion tons without oil sands, or 600 billion tons with oil sands. Consumption is currently around 3 to 5 billion tons per year. At current consumption levels, known recoverable reserves would be dried up in approximately 30 years for relatively easy extractable sources and 100 years if petroleum from sands is recovered. Potentially, that leads to a global energy crisis in a medium term. However, many parameters can extend or reduce these evaluations such as, for example, the fast increasing oil demand from fast developing countries, mainly China and India, the overall economic situation, new oil prospecting efforts, new economically viable exploitation of non-conventional oil sources, use of alternative energy sources etc.
Oil consumption for plastics polymerization, formulation and processing is in the order of some percent of the global oil consumption. Used energy is also partly produced from crude oil. As a result, it is essential to plan these technical and economic upheavals by replacing crude oil sourced polymers with non-oil materials.
Agricultural potential of our Earth being limited, we must take care to avoid competition with food crops and preferably choose raw materials among agricultural, urban or industrial wastes and carbon dioxide overabundant in our atmosphere. The most promising way is the production of bio-monomers and bio-blocks replacing equivalent or similar oil-monomers. Processing methods can follow microbial, chemical, mechanical or genetic ways. After conventional polymerization, end products are similar to commodity or engineering petroleum-based plastics.
In addition to basic advantages of bio-sourced plastics, the bio-monomer way provides some major benefits as discussed in the sections below.[ Last edited by Pureland on 2013-11-26 at 14:40 ] |