It seems like everything these days has some sort of plastic in or some other chemical or product derived from petroleum.
I know we have derivatives from all sorts of things but petroleum seems to be the top dog.
I was thinking it was just because we have so much of it and/or we’re doing what we can to make use of the byproducts that arise during various petroleum refinement processes.
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Petroleum is a derivative itself. Oil is the base product.
Oil is a complex hydrocarbon, chemically extremely useful.
Oil can be refined (heated to varying temperatures), and the resultant vapours used for other things – petroleum comes off at one temperature, diesel at another, kerosene at yet another and so on.
The fact we set fire to it to move around is literally the least useful thing we can do with complex hydrocarbons.
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