Explains the impact of the Libyan civil war on the global economy, the importance of oil, and how the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering plays a key role in changing our daily lives and the future through research into petroleum-based products and eco-friendly materials.
The price of oil has gone up a lot. When asked why, most would agree that the Libyan civil war is the reason. Why would a civil war in a country in central North Africa have such global repercussions? There are many other political and cultural reasons, but oil is a big one. Libya has the world’s eighth largest oil reserves and exports 72% of its daily oil production to foreign countries, so a civil war in Libya is bound to disrupt oil production and exports, causing the price of oil to skyrocket, affecting many countries.
Oil is not only valuable as an energy source, but also as a strategic resource that has a significant impact on the global economy and politics. For example, a spike in the price of oil can lead to higher commodity prices due to increased logistics costs, which in turn can lead to inflation, which negatively affects the global economy. For this reason, civil wars in oil-producing countries such as Libya are more than just conflicts between nations, they are global issues.
So why is the introduction to the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering suddenly talking about the Libyan civil war and how it affects the world? The answer is that the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and oil are inseparable.
Petroleum as we know it, or crude oil, is not just gasoline that we use to fuel our cars. It permeates every aspect of our lives through a variety of processes. Imagine a group of chemical and biomolecular engineering students in a university classroom, and let’s take a look at some of the things that are made from petroleum, one by one, to see how much of our lives are made from petroleum.
First, let’s start with the things you’ve prepared for your students. The professor has brought a laptop, a projector, and a microphone to make it easier to deliver his lecture to the students. Unfortunately, the plastic surrounding the laptop, the microphone, and the projector screen are all made from petroleum. The glasses that help you see the professor’s eyes, which have become very puffy from studying for a long time, are also made from petroleum. The same goes for the leather shoes the professor wears. The artificial leather is also synthesized from petroleum.
Now that we’ve gone overboard with the professor’s stuff, let’s take a look at the students’ stuff. The heavy-duty backpacks made for poor engineering students carrying heavy textbooks, the multicolored ballpoint pens and pencil cases they splurged on for the new semester. Students, like professors, are supposed to be barefoot. Of course, not all students wear shoes. Unfortunately, the rubber in their sneakers comes from petroleum, and the chairs and desks they sit at are also under the shadow of petroleum. The plastic that makes up the chairs and the paint that covers the rough wooden surfaces of the desks, even though they look like wood, also comes from petroleum.
But is that all? We forgot the most important thing: clothes. Synthetic fibers are the most obvious example of something made from petroleum, and these petroleum-derived materials are deeply embedded in almost every aspect of modern life. It’s not just the clothing industry, but also healthcare, electronics, and even the household products we use every day. Without plastics, we wouldn’t be able to imagine the convenient life we have today.
Now, imagine this. A professor is giving a lecture. Of course, you don’t have a microphone, so you have to raise your hand. The students are concentrating on taking notes because they don’t want to miss anything he says. But it’s hard to hear him. The professor doesn’t have glasses and is lecturing with the book in front of him. By the way, both the professor and the students are naked. Of course, some of them are wearing natural leather clothes and cotton panties to cover up.
In such a small classroom, there’s not much left over after all the petroleum-derived stuff. Petroleum is used in many areas of our lives, including gasoline that runs our cars, electricity that runs factories, and greenhouse cultivation that allows us to eat fruit even in the cold winter.
In this reality, the research of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is not just academic. In fact, research in chemical engineering and applied chemistry focuses on finding answers to questions about how the products we use every day are made and how they can be improved to be more efficient and environmentally friendly. For example, recent research has expanded into the development of environmentally friendly materials that can replace petroleum-based products. This is an essential endeavor for a sustainable future.
The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is where we study the technologies that make petroleum so widely available in our daily lives. The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering can be divided into two main departments. Chemical engineering, which is responsible for process design and planning, and applied chemistry, which develops products by studying chemistry that can be applied to real life.
If we go back to petroleum, when it is extracted from the ground, it is just black water. However, ‘chemical engineering’ is the study of how to separate this black water most efficiently through various processes, and ‘applied chemistry’ is the synthesis or study of various substances that are separated. Of course, the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is not solely about petroleum. It can be thought of as a department that studies how to chemically synthesize or separate various substances that exist on the earth and apply them to real life. In addition, recent research and achievements in biology have expanded the scope to include biological and environmental fields, not just chemical approaches.
For those of us living in the so-called “oil age,” the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering plays a real and important role. The research conducted in this department allows us to understand the complex scientific processes behind the conveniences we take for granted. In addition, the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering will play an important role in solving many of the challenges and problems that our society will face in the future.
I am very grateful for the opportunity to introduce you to a department that means so much to me, and I hope you will continue to watch the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering as it changes and evolves to meet the times ahead.
