Is it possible to produce cheap saccharide oil solely from fossil fuels? I’m meaning cheaper than currently based agriculture carbohydrates prices

Question

Simple question : in my country with the rise of conservatism is rising the calls to have food containing as most as sugar possible with lowest nutrients/vitamins as possible in order to decrease costs as low as possible (sounds like a worldbuilding scenario but this isn’t fiction though understandable with half of the local population having less than 27€ per months to eat).

So I thought about this case : when peoples become poorer and poorer, food charities go bankrupts thus leaving peoples starving, then politically, this means only short term health matters and medium/long term health is crossed off as promoting healthy diet or food safety standards is almost communism…
As a result would it be possible to completely cut the link between agriculture and food and having mankind using fossil fuels derivatives for it’s food ?
The underlying idea is although measured differently (Watts or joul vs large calories) a given quantity of energy that use fossil fuels is still far cheaper than the same quantity in food for humans.
If yes, would it enable having 2700 calories of saccharide or edible oil per day for less than 35¢ ?

Important note for answering

Please don’t confuse weight or Volume prices and energy prices.

Answer 1

It's undoubtedly possible to synthesise carbohydrates from the hydrocarbons in fossil fuels. Industrial chemistry can make an extraordinary range of compounds starting from petroleum. Starting from coal would probably involve more synthesis steps.

This would be far more expensive than just growing, harvesting and processing plants. The synthesis processes would require a lot of expensive industrial facilities, and would consume a lot of energy. They'd also have to be run to rather high standards to avoid poisoning people who ate the synthetic carbohydrates with side products and contaminants. Plants come with lots of built-in chemistry to avoid that problem.

This isn't a route to cheap food.

Answer 2

As of today 3 November 2024, petroleum costs about 70 US dollars per barrel, or about 0.41 US dollars per kilogram; sugar (in bulk) costs about 0.46 US dollars per kilogram.

One kilogram of petroleum provides about 44 MJ of energy, or about 10,500 kcal, about 4 times as much as the 2,700 kcal target given by the question. This means that from the point of view of pure energy, 250 grams of petroleum can provide the required 2,700 kcal for about 0.10 US dollars.

On the other hand, the question wants the 2,700 kcal in the form of sugar. The energy density of sugar is about 17 MJ per kilogram, or about 4,000 kcal per kilogram. Sugar costs about 0.46 US dollars per kilogram when bought in bulk; this means that from the point of view of pure energy, 600 grams of sugar can provide the required 2,700 kcal for about 0.28 US dollars.

Overall, to get 2,700 kcal one can buy 600 grams sugar of agricultural origin for 0.28 US dollars, or one can buy 250 grams of petroleum for about 0.10 US dollars and try to find a process which can convert 1 kg of petroleum into 2.5 kg of sugar for less than 0.80 US dollars.

Answer 3

Methane. Formaldehyde. Formose reaction.

Start with methane* from natural gas.

Burn it, badly, to produce formaldehyde. Gas ovens sometimes do this by accident, but apparently it is not easy to do completely - industrial formaldehyde production goes another route because it is hard to make the right amount of oxygen go to each methane. To do it this way so that you can (partly) burn your hydrocarbon and eat it too, you'll have to invent a catalyst. I think someone might do that IRL (the first part I mean) and make a lot of money.

Carbohydrates are CH2O(n). Formaldehyde is CH2O. Use the formose reaction to make carbohydrates and amino acids. There's some history to this - ribose from formaldehyde on hydroxylapatite rock might have been the very first chemical reaction on the path to the origin of all life.

If the agriculture prohibition can be bent a little, microorganisms could be used to do a variety of biochemistry on these products in order to give the appearance of a safe and palatable food.

Some people may find this method of food production a bit implausible, but here in the U.S. we just had a festival called "Halloween", where millions of little kids beg for treats made by a couple of big corporations using an ingredient called PGPR, meaning "polyglycerol polyricinoleate". The "ricin" come from the same root as the famous umbrella-tip poison, namely the scientific name for the castor oil plant. (Fear not, we avoid security issues with the castor beans by importing them from the Middle East, where farmers diligently cook the toxin on-site to avoid it being used for mass poisonings) Using PGPR allows companies to use less of the expensive cocoa butter, which can be sold in cosmetics instead. Now if you can make kids line up and beg for treats made out of castor oil, I think you can plausibly make food rations out of natural gas.

* Methane is by far the most common component of natural gas, but the next most common is ethane. Add one oxygen to ethane, anywhere, and you have ethanol, which your populace will eagerly consume even though it does taste awful.

Note: I see there's an edited criterion in the question about prices. These aren't really relevant, but let's go. Natural gas somewhere is 2.79 USD/MMBtu today. That's a commodity price, not a retail price, but your factory will be big. 1 MMBtu = 1000000 Btu. Methane is 23811 Btu/lb. 1 kg = 2.203 lb. So natural gas is 2.79 USD/MMBtu x 1 MMBtu / 1000000 Btu x 23811 Btu / lb x 2.203 lb / kg = 0.146 USD / kg. The combustion is CH4 + O2 -> CH2O + H2O, so we get 30 g CH2O / 1 mol CH2O x 1 mol CH2O / 1 mol CH4 x 1 mol CH4 / 16 g CH4 = 1.875 kg of formaldehyde for every kg of natural gas. Assuming a perfect catalyst for a reaction we haven't invented one for yet, that is. The formaldehyde is converted perfectly (in theory) to carbohydrate, which is reckoned on food labels as 4 kcal/g. So we have 0.146 USD / kg CH4 x 1 kg CH4 / 1.875 kg sugars x 1 kg sugars / 1000 g sugars x 1 g / 4 kcal = 1.95E-5 USD / kcal... x 2700 kcal = 0.0526 USD (5.26 cents) per 2700 "Calories". This price does not count the offset income generated by partially burning the natural gas during processing. I can't comment on how plausible it would be that real-world inefficiencies would bring this price above 35 cents.

Answer 4

Bio reactors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioreactor

They take in a raw ingredient, We already have dna-altered bacteria and yeast that can prodcues about anything. So the agriculture argument does not hold- one needs a bacteria that devours oil, alter it to produce saccharose and then have it life in optimized conditions within a reactor. Its done on mass today. The problem is, follow up organisms who devour the saccharose, so you need sterility to start with- and a sort of one way gate, to drop out the produce and refill sterilized oil.

Also not everything in oil is eatable, you would have some "slag" removal ocassionally. You might also need warmth for heating and filtered gas needed by the microorganisms.

Organsims of choice: Marinobacter, Oceanospiralles, Pseudomonas, and Alkanivorax Find your own main character here, who is easiest to alter and maintain.

You either trade time, quality or money for this. Micro-organisms are time-intensive, aka slow, that is why we mainly use them for expensive things like medicine and rarely food. You could speed it up- by having- a futuristic all organic refinery organism, that basically grows directly into the oil field, tapping geothermal for energy and growing the food. You would have a organic looking hole in the ground that shits food into the world. That would make it cheap and it might scale with enough thermal vents.

You can build chemical refineries, which basically just push the sludge through. But they are similar to conventional refineries, in that they need the energy budget for a whole city, expensive parts and additional chemicals produced externally.

Finally, you could do it in a sterile environment, like some moons in this solar system. There, a food refinery, could produce from raw methane and methanol the sugars, freeze them and gun them into longterm trajectory. The MANA (Manufactured Automated Nutrition Allocation) would rain from the sky after drifting in space for a long time.

Answer 5

If the goal is making petroleum into something edible, don't make it into sugar - make it into margarine!

The Fischer-Tropsch process was invented in the 1920s to turn coal into liquid hydrocarbons. Mostly this was (and still is!) used to make fuel oil and lubricant, but during the Second World War Germany (which had a lot of coal) used this process to produce "coal butter" which U-Boat crews would get as part of their rations.

Since you're starting with oil instead of coal, the process would be a little different - you don't need to produce liquid hydrocarbons, but rather remove the toxic impurities from the hydrocarbons you already have. But the end result has already been shown to be possible!

It's hard to say what techniques would make this practical today, though. One of the benefits of coal butter was apparently that it wouldn't go rancid over the weeks and months sitting in a U-Boat's larder. Food preservation technology has improved since then, so in the modern day there's cheaper and more nutritious ways to accomplish that goal.

And it took an unusual situation to make it remotely cost effective: a country with abundant sources of fossil fuels but which couldn't effectively farm because they were engaged in a total war. Admittedly that is not as unusual a situation as I wish it were.

Answer 6

You can only use petroleum to replace the expensive parts of food, not the cheap parts

Cereal grains like flour and corn are only about \$175 per ton*. Petroleum is about \$550 per ton and non-byproduct things made from petroleum start at about \$1000 per ton meaning that if you are only trying to achieve sustenance level living, without regard for nutrition it is much cheaper and healthier to live off of cereal grains than synthetic or organic sugar. Your goal should not be to make a synthetic source of calories from petroleum, but instead to replace expensive flavoring with cheaper flavorings.

This way you can bring the actual cost of the meals way down. More importantly for your starving masses, this will force your farmers who are currently growing these cash crops free to pivot to staple crops like wheat and corn which give much larger calorie yields per acre. This means the actual material cost of your people need to live off of only \$0.13-0.17 per day; though the actual price will likely be closer to \$0.75-1.50 per day when you include all the costs and markups of packaging, distribution, and retail.

That said, your well to do population will not tolerate just eating wheat and corn all the time; so, you need to "trick" them into abandoning real food in favor of synthetic flavorings if you want to pivot to a staple centered agricultural economy. Salt and sugar are are good options because they are cheap flavorings at just \$220 and \$560 per ton respectively for giving your lower-middle class something tasty but not too expensive in terms of cost or land use. These can not really be improved on by synthetic flavoring though because they are still less than \$1000/ton

The biggest overhead in quality food comes from meat, herbs and spices; so, these are what you need to wean your middle class off of if you want to improve your available food supply for the poor. The wholesale cost of common meats and natural food flavorings are as follows:

• Chicken, Tuna, Catfish: \$1000-5000/ton
• Beef \$5000-10000/ton
• Lamb, Cayenne, Fenugreek, Mint Extract: \$10,000-25,000/ton
• Basil, Chili Pepper, Cinnamon, Coriander, Cumin, Curry Powder, Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, Oregano, Paprika, Thyme: \$25,000-50,000/ton
• Allspice, Cloves, Ginger, Licorice, Lemon Pepper: \$50,000-100,000/ton
• Cardamom, Nutmeg, Saffron, Tarragon: \$100,000-1,000,000/ton
• Vanilla Bean Extract: Over \$1,000,000/ton

So, if you can synthesize artificial meat and seasoning flavorings to make cereal based foods taste like other stuff, you can significantly reduce the cost of food without sacrificing it's apparent quality. (It's real quality may be much lower though). This way your middle class will stop buying seemingly identical but more expensive products made with real food, and it's all supply and demand trickle down from there.

That said, this is not fiction at all. This is exactly what the American food industry has been doing for the past several decades. For example, nearly all of the Mint and Vanilla extract consumed in the United States is actually made from coal tar or petroleum. These chemicals only costs about \$1,000-2,000/ton to produce making them WAY cheaper than their natural counterparts, but if we assume sugar and starches could be made from similarly expensive processes, you would not save any money by doing so.

* All prices listed in this answer are bulk, wholesale (commodity) prices. Actual consumer prices are typically much higher. Also, prices are based on approximate global averages, prices in specific areas may differ.