alt Hacker NewsIf oil and gas would not exist, then liquid fuel would be produced from coal. With the latest processes the cost of production is like 80 dollars per barrel, but with processes that Germans developed during WWII it was probably like twice of that in modern money.
In alternative universe that would be cheaper due to massive scale, but the era of very cheap liquid fuel would never happen. So electrical cars on big scale will happen much earlier. And given that coal is much more evenly distributed on Earth, one can speculate that there would be much less reasons for conflicts.
I dont think this makes sense, given how insanely much more polluting coal is. You have to burn massive amounts of coal to power the liquid refinery, 50% of the energy lost essentially in the conversion process. In addition to that liquid coal has double the emissions of regular oil. Air quality would have been a disaster.
EVs in scale would have maybe happened sooner, but they would have give us much less value, and I think in the end reaching current EV tech would most likely have taken longer than it did with oil and gas, just due to industrialization and technological innovation would progress much slower without oil and gas...
I think advanced green tech in general would have taken much longer time to develop also on an industrial scale when limited by coal only. Not to speak of human welfare would also have improved much slower.