There are many products obtained from the processing of oil and natural gas that we use every day, even when we do not recognize them as derivatives of hydrocarbons. They are in the asphalt of roads, industrial lubricants, the synthetic rubbers in tires, the coatings that protect infrastructure, the insulation of electrical cables, adhesives, resins, and medical materials. In many of these cases there are alternatives, but they do not necessarily offer the same performance, durability, or cost.
This introduces a difficulty that is often left out of the discussion about the energy transition. We can replace a growing share of the gasoline, diesel, or gas used to generate electricity, but stopping the burning of hydrocarbons does not mean that we stop needing the molecules that we obtain from them. A solar panel or a nuclear reactor can produce the energy necessary to manufacture a polymer, but they do not produce the carbon that forms part of that material.
The problem becomes more complex because oil and gas are not processed only to obtain the products that we want to preserve. A refinery separates and transforms crude oil into different streams and, although it can partially adjust its yields, it cannot produce only lubricants, asphalt, or petrochemical raw materials and eliminate the rest. Gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel currently represent a large part of the volume and of the revenues that sustain the extraction, transportation, and processing of oil.
This means that considerably reducing fuel consumption also changes the economics of non-energy products. If demand for gasoline and diesel decreases, producing the relatively small quantities of derivatives that we still need could become more expensive, because infrastructure and processing costs would have to be distributed over smaller volumes and some production chains would no longer have a sufficient market.
In that sense, we could currently be close to a point of greater economic efficiency, in which practically all the fractions obtained from oil find a market and contribute to sustaining the joint cost of extraction and processing. This leads us to consider that the transition should not consist only of proportionally reducing oil production, but also of preserving the fraction that is still useful and its economic costs.
In the short term, one possible response is to invest in processes to convert a much larger proportion of the barrel directly into petrochemical raw materials instead of first producing large quantities of fuels. It is a relevant adaptation because it anticipates a market in which the value of oil could gradually shift from energy toward its material uses.
In the longer term, the solution would have to go even further and also replace fossil carbon. Research exists to produce industrial molecules from captured CO2, biomass, waste, and recycled plastics, in addition to processes that combine CO2, hydrogen, and clean electricity to synthesize hydrocarbons again. The necessary chemistry exists at different degrees of development, but bringing it to costs, scales, and levels of efficiency comparable with current chains continues to be the main obstacle.
For this reason, the energy transition faces two different problems. The first, much more visible, consists of replacing the hydrocarbons that we burn. The second will be to find a competitive source of the inputs that we still need to produce other products that we use in our everyday lives. As we advance in the first, the economy that today makes many of those products cheap will also begin to change and could especially affect lower-income households.
This article was originally published by La Prensa OEM.
Date: August 20, 2026
Link: https://oem.com.mx/la-prensa/analisis/opinion-de-paul-alejandro-los-usos-no-energeticos-de-los-hidrocarburos-y-la-transicion-energetica-31654320 [Online]