Sublime

First, we would need a zero-carbon way to power the refining process. We could do that with clean electricity or with hydrogen produced from clean electricity.

As the British had discovered to their grief in steel, it is almost impossible to maintain a technology edge amid declining production, and the huge new refineries and pipelines in Texas and California were inevitably a generation ahead of the Standard’s.

it should be obvious that displacing and replacing such a mass is not something best handled by government targets for years ending in zero or five. Both the high relative share and the scale of our dependence on fossil carbon make any rapid substitutions impossible: this is not a biased personal impression stemming from a poor understanding of the

copper as the standard choice first for water pipes, and later also for heating and cooling systems.

I’m also following some companies that are developing synthetic alternatives to palm oil so we don’t have to cut down so many forests to make room for palm plantations.

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Distillation columns use 3 percent of total U.S. energy to separate chemical and oil products, but most operators, instead of continuously monitoring the purity of product as it emerges, test only occasionally to make sure samples meet specification.

In 1895 it issued a memo to oil producers announcing that henceforth it would ignore the market price entirely and transact directly with them at a “take it or leave it” price. 264 Over time, oil became a