Will someone please sell me some plastic?

I recently heard an interview with Gore Vidal on ABC radio. Gore Vidal, now 76 is something of a social commentator. Some would say America's finest. Which is also very strange for a republican. He refers to the government in the US as "the Junta" or "the Regime".
The entire interview can be heard here (streamed as RealAudio) And is well worth the effort of listening. But it was his talk of a study commissioned by Dick Cheney, (Vice President of the USA) which concluded that the world would be out of oil by around 2020, which got me thinking.
We all suspected it. This comes as no surprise. We all knew that this war was over the control of the flow of oil. Iraq has the second largest oil deposits in the world. America needs that oil to run it's industries. That's really all there is to it. But there's something else we shouldn't take for granted. Plastic.
Oil doesn't just supply a range of fuels that transport humans and their chattel around the planet, nearly everything we make to day is derived from oil. Every kind of plastic material is derived from the stuff at some level of refinement. Look around you. The plastic you see in your computer monitor and keyboard is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the components that make up that monitor are made in some part at least, of plastic materials. Materials science is a huge but largely un-sexy platform of industry. Without oil, not only can we not transport our goods but we can't even make them. And there's no currently effective substitute for the polymers we derive from the stuff.
I'm no chemist but I've looked at how the oil refining process works. Nearly every part of the oil is used for something. First they derive the top grade fuels like avgas. (Aviation fuels) Then they refine out the gasoline for general use. This is generally less pure than avgas. Somewhere after that you're left with sludge from which you can derive kerosine. You refine one for aircraft jet-fuel and what's left is used domestically. Following that you get things like diesel oil. A low quality fuel that requires a special engine. It's dirty but it's cheaper.
From there on down you derive motor oil and other lubricants. Even some sexual lubricants such as KY jelly are derived from chemicals at this point. At the bottom of the heap you're left with a very concentrated sludge that yields all manner of chemical concoctions. Including all the plastics.
By passing the raw materials back and fourth through the oil refinery they refine off all these products till they're left with a complex sludge which is useless. But along the way chemists have found ways to make increasing use of that sludge in raw materials and it's an on-going science. Less and less of that sludge is dumped which one could argue is only a good thing.
However, what happens when we start to run out of oil?
I was reading about fuel cells last night. Simply put, these are devices not unlike lead/acid batteries which convert hydrogen and oxygen into electricity with the by-product being water. I'll spare you the details but you can look it up here.
These things are great. A company called BALLARD make real big ones of greater than 100Kwatt which can power buildings and factories. Or you can get them right down to the size of a lap-top battery or mobile phone for portable use. They're rechargeable and the only real bi-product is water. Since they generate electricity from the reaction of combining hydrogen and oxygen to form water. There are inherent problems with this technology but already they've found solutions to most of them. I believe the first commercial fuel cells are already available.
The problem is that they can't replace kerosine to run jet aircraft or diesel for large ships and locomotives. And you can't even build a fuel cell without the materials from which they are ultimately derived. IE: Oil.
I'm sure we won't run out of oil completely. There will still be enough oil to make things from even if there's no way we could afford to use it for fuel. But the problem is that if the cost of fuel becomes prohibitive, the cost of materials will also sky rocket. And the more exotic the materials, the more expensive they will be. I can just imagine people digging up old land-fills looking for any plastics which could be recycled. Plastic will probably never rival gold but I can imagine a time when owning something which makes use of excessive amounts of plastic will be something of a luxury. People will be selling antique plastic items on eBaY and receiving huge amounts of money for them.
But the costs involved in shipping items around the planet would likely soar. So a community might be defined by it's wealth in plastic. In short, I imagine that we are looking at the beginnings of a very different world because of our current, all-encompassing reliance on oil. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing environmentally speaking but because there's so much money involved in keeping the current oil industry running as it is, we are doing precious little to prepare for it. And if Dick Cheney's study is anywhere half right, and the fossil fuel cartels continue to behave as irresponsibly as they have in the past, it's all going to come about rather suddenly.
So save that old plastic. You just might be needing it.

Note: to find out more about Gore Vidal, try starting here.