on tue NUMBER aug NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER est jay lake jlake jlake com wrote snip second one could make the assumption that ancient or future civilizations would not be hydrocarbon based there are alternative fuel sources including seabed methane biomass and all the usual suspects solar hydro etc some of these could be exploited on a decidedly low tech ie emergent civilization basis however it is difficult to conceive of an industrial civilization that doesn t employ wheels axles and bearings all of which require lubrication i m not an engineer robin anyone but it s my understanding that vegetable lubrication breaks down under stress and that oil or graphite lubricants are the only reasonable choices for high temperature high rotation applications at least prior to extremely advanced modes of chemical synthesis this is a good point there are a lot of alternatives to hydrocarbon products derived from petroleum but these have often been developed as a replacement for petroleum after the technology has been established there is a growing industry in plant derived plastics and lubricants but this is to replicate materials that have been previously created much more easily within the petrochemical industry vegetable derived lubricants have been used the russians used sunflower oil in the lubrication systems of tanks and trucks during the second world war and work is being done in the uk to produce diesel fuel derived from waste cooking oil from fast food restaurants jay s correct in his opinion that vegetable oil is not as durable as petroleum oil but this is only because of the lack of sophistication of the chemistry involved synthetic fuels and lubricants are continuously being developed and i don t see any problems with synthetics ultimately matching the performance of the more conventional products as the rock oil runs out plant oil derivatives will be developed to fill the gap in parallel changes will occur in the designs of the machines to cope with any changes in performance of the lubricants my big concern is if the technology were ever to be lost for some reason re creating a petrochemical industry from scratch without petrochemicals that is going immediately to plant based synthetics would be extremely difficult especially if it were necessary to recreate all of the petrochemical derived products not just lubricants and fuels i suspect that bearing in mind the ingenuity of the human race it would happen just at a different pace imagine an industrial revollution based on for example methane from pig manure or diesel oil from sunflowers all we would then have to do is get used to all the machines smelling like pig farms and fish and chip shops robin hill steamy bess brough east yorkshire this email and any attachments are confidential to the intended recipient and may also be privileged if you are not the intended recipient please delete it from your system and notify the sender you should not copy it or use it for any purpose nor disclose or distribute its contents to any other person yahoo groups sponsor NUMBER dvds free s p join now URL to unsubscribe from this group send an email to forteana unsubscribe URL your use of yahoo groups is subject to URL 