You can download Fossil Hydrocarbons Chemistry and Technology ebook here.
- Title: Fossil Hydrocarbons Chemistry and Technology
- Author: Norbert Berkowitz
- Publisher: Elsevier Science & Technology Books
- Pages: 395
The decade of 1973-1983, in which most of the Western world moved from economic turmoil and panic created by an oil crisis to blissfully “putting it all behind us”, illustrates how easily we persuade ourselves to forget what should have taught us a profound lesson~and how cavalierly we face the need to secure long-term supplies of liquid fuels.
The oil crisis abated not because of how we responded to it, but because the major Middle East oil producers raised output in expectation of recouping revenues that had fallen victim to the Iraq-Iran war. This generated an oil glut that halved crude oil prices and allowed us to return to the status quoante. Laissez-faire economic policies once again allowed profligate use and/or export of diminishing indigenous reserves of gas and conventional oil. Alternative sources~the heavy fossil hydrocarbons that could help us to attain reasonable energy self-sufficiency~were once again consigned to the dimrecesses of our collective minds.
Research and development, which outlined and sometimes defined the new technologies through which self-sufficiency could be achieved, was abruptly discontinued. And development of future crude oil supplies once again became centered on distant sources over which we have little, if any, control. All this occurred, despite the demonstration by major commercial ventures (in particular, South Africa’s coal-based SASOL complexes and production of “synthetic” light crudes from Alberta’s oil sands) of what is technically possible and could be competitively accomplished.
It is difficult to understand a mindset that allows such energy “policies”~and, not coincidentally, reflects a deplorable disregard for macroeconomics on which all national well-being ultimately depends~as anything other than an attitude of apres mois la deluge.