The Non-Energy Uses of Hydrocarbons and the Energy Transition

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]

Woven City: The Hydrogen City






As we have expressed in this column, Japan has important reasons to bet on the development of hydrogen as fuel to achieve energy security and decarbonize the economy. In that logic, the Toyota group and the energy company Eneos Corporation seek to develop a prototype city to explore the use and application of hydrogen.

Woven City is an initiative developed by the Toyota group and is located in the city of Susono, in the prefecture of Shizuoka, Japan; it is defined as an urban incubator to carry out tests and demonstrations of different technologies in the construction of the foundations of the cities of the future.

This implies that inside it, interconnectivity technologies and digitalization of services will be tested to improve the living conditions of the inhabitants, the companies and recreational centers around it. In terms of energy, inside Woven City hydrogen will be tested as a source of energy.

What implications does Woven City using hydrogen instead of other energy sources have?

It would mean that in the city they would not use energy from fossil sources. Therefore, if you want to cook, you would use an induction stove with electricity and not LP gas or natural gas.

The electric energy generated in the city comes from hydrogen and serves as lighting, power source and heating source and to drive light vehicles.

In that sense, hydrogen is presented as the source of energy that could make Woven City sustainable and, therefore, applications of hydrogen are investigated from its production, distribution, application and integration with other developments such as digitalization and intelligent temperature control, to give some examples.

Woven City Intends to Generate Alliances for the Future

Woven City is a project that seeks to generate alliances for the various applications that are developed inside it, and in energy matters Toyota’s ally is the company Eneos Corporation. The company will be responsible for the development of the service stations that would fill the tanks of hydrogen automobiles, which gives continuity to the business model of service stations, unlike automobiles that require electric connection and whose main source of recharge are homes, offices, shopping centers and parking lots.

The stations would use a hydrogen generation model based on electrolysis with renewable energy sources, mainly solar —that is, green hydrogen— and, therefore, it constitutes an effort to advance in decarbonization in cities.

One of the most interesting points of the project is, undoubtedly, that the leader of this development is Toyota Motor and it is built in one of the company’s facilities near one of the automobile production plants. This implies that the company is getting ahead of the next generation of vehicles, although the bet is not in plug-in electric vehicles but in vehicles that use hydrogen.

With this we can observe that Toyota is preparing for the future and with a view to maintaining its business model and adapting to the new social demands, mainly carbon neutrality, and it extends it to integrate it into a much broader project such as smart cities. We hope to see more news about this development in the near future.

This article was originally published by Business Insider México.
Date: July 6, 2021
Original Link: https://businessinsider.mx/woven-city-ciudad-hidrogeno-japon-opinion-paul-alejandro-sanchez-energia-circular/ [offline]
Archived Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240623043726/https://businessinsider.mx/woven-city-ciudad-hidrogeno-japon-opinion-paul-alejandro-sanchez-energia-circular/ [Archived]

Don’t Let Them Tell You It Can’t Be Done!






We live in times of confrontation and it would seem that suggesting something different from what we know is a capital sin that is punished with a penalty of silence; dreaming is prohibited —which is undoubtedly the beginning for innovating and transforming—. If you mention something about renewable energies, green hydrogen, energy transition, the knight-errants of the internet will seek to correct the audacity of going against what is known.

I imagine it would be as if the Florentine community of the 16th century had gathered outside Leonardo DaVinci’s room to demand that he stop designing instruments for flying, with arguments such as that man was destined to be on the ground, because if God had wanted it, he would have given us wings. Nothing different from the old inquisition that condemned men of science to death at the stake.

Let us go to the beginning of the 20th century, to the year 1908. Imagine the master blacksmiths saying: “there is still a long way to go before a Model T replaces the horse,” “there are not enough gasoline stations,” “How are you going to fill a tank on a long trip between cities?”, “The automobile will never replace the railroad.”

A leap further ahead in time would take us to RIM, the company that manufactured the Blackberry and that underestimated the potential of the market that Apple opened with iPhone. The company did not believe that people wanted a phone without a keyboard or a series of apps beyond email, messaging or the web browser. Even with the launch of the iPad that would open the tablet market, RIM executives would point out that they did not serve any specific market.

The wonderful thing about technology is that it does not advance as companies or governments would wish, but rather that it has its own inertia. We could talk about thousands of examples: whalers resisting the growing kerosene market at the end of the 19th century, or the producers of kerosene lamps themselves resisting the first incandescent bulbs lit by electricity.

Today we can see more and more drones in the streets or a memory card the size of a fingernail with a capacity of 1 TeraByte —which is equivalent to 1 million Megabytes—. There are more cameras than ever, with better definition than in recent years, and that, combined with more precise facial recognition, has generated very interesting moral debates and debates about the limits of the State.

Voice recognition, real-time translation, artificial intelligence and autonomous automobiles, to cite some examples, are advancing by leaps and bounds and there are still those who question whether the Earth is flat because they cannot see its roundness, without thinking, for example, that the first private space trips under the command of Space X have already begun.

In the world, solar energy breaks records in capacity and time, as do storage and green hydrogen. And also, why not?, conventional technologies such as combined-cycle turbines, nuclear fission or direct air CO2 capture, with which artificial diamonds are now even produced.

There are even challenges that we will see in the future that we still do not perceive in their complete dimension. The waste from batteries and solar panels, light pollution or the saturation of the immediate airspace could also require thinking about creative solutions in the long term.

This is circular energy and this is what this space is about: that no one tells you that it cannot be done, that you should conform; that it is impossible to think or even dream of a better world. That they do not tell you that it is too early to think about green hydrogen or decarbonization; that they do not tell you that it is not possible to have 100% renewable energy and storage; that they do not tell you that you cannot think or dream of a better world, because, quoting Heraclitus, the only constant is change.

This article was originally published by Business Insider México.
Date: June 22, 2021
Original Link: https://businessinsider.mx/energias-renovables-innovacion-opinion-energia-circular-paul-alejandro-sanchez/ [offline]
Archived Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240229054340/https://businessinsider.mx/energias-renovables-innovacion-opinion-energia-circular-paul-alejandro-sanchez// [Archived]