Quote:
Originally Posted by Bestbrian
I think there would be a lot of local refining and inventiveness, but I wonder if what was produced would be too valuable to burn in light of the need for lubricants and its value as a trade good. How tough is it to refine motor oil and axle grease?
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Doubt it would be too valuable to burn. Mechanization for a lot of people would be the difference between life and death. A farmer with a tractor can plow a lot of land. Plowing even 40 acres with animal labor isn't easy or fast, and without animal labor...you are looking at maybe a few acres, per person.
So, it doesn't take a petrochemical engineer to get low molecular weight hydrocarbons (eg, ethanes) out of oil, which are the primary energetic component in gasoline. A lot of wells will produce "drip gas" as well, which is considered "natural" gasoline. The problem is, these low molecular weight hydrocarbons have an octane rating of around 50. It works fine in low compression, long stroke piston engines, but does not work (really at all) in modern high compression engines.
A big part of the modern gasoline / diesel refining process is not so much in the fractional distillation of oil into liquids but in the additives downstream of the raw refinery process. The easiest/cheapest way to boost the octane is to use TEL or tetra ethyl lead. This has other downsides, like lowering IQ in children. MBTE is another additive they used to use to boost octane before it started showing up in ground water and reservoirs. You can use ethanol also, but it's not nearly as helpful in ratio terms. In any event, the big challenge for producing gasoline would be getting the right additive chemicals added in, almost all of which are downstream from an intact oil industry (and the chemical plants are usually located in close physical proximity to existing refineries). These are the things that would require a petrochemical engineer and some chemists to get going starting from the ground up. Not impossible, especially in university towns near oil fields (e.g., Texas Tech in Lubbock probably has the brain power to stand something up more or less from scratch).