Brent Young

You may have heard the term petrochemical.

That's the chemical term refers to a lot of the plastic materials that we use in our daily lives.

For example, we're talking on a computer, which, of course, the electronics, et cetera, are made out of silicon and copper and steel and so on.

But there's a lot of plastic that goes into the manufacture of a computer, say, or a mobile phone.

And all of that currently comes from petroleum.

Yeah, there's a lot of our current materials that we use daily are sourced from petroleum products or gas.

So for example, in New Zealand, we no longer refine petroleum to make plastics, but we do make methanol from natural gas, for example.

And that is also an input chemical.

So a lot of these chemicals, such as methanol,

ethylene, you know, building blocks for these materials that go into clothes, they go into carpets, go in furnishings, they go into consumer products and take for granted in our daily lives.

It's a good question.

It could be a thickening agent, perhaps, which could be petroleum derived.

there would be a replacement to a natural alternative.

And the advantage of having a synthetic alternative is that it's through processing, you can essentially have less variation.

The challenge and also sometimes the joy of natural products is their variation and their diversity.

But if you're trying to produce, say it's less in chocolate, which was petroleum derived perhaps, then if you've got a reliable product

input that you can reliably produce to a certain specification that doesn't have that variation, then you're providing a product that people want.

I mean, a lot of the reasons that we have these materials sourced from petroleum because it's high energy density, it's easy to transport, and we have the infrastructure to process it and to produce these products.

Prior to the petroleum age, we used coal.

And I guess prior to that, we were using natural products.