Eating Alaskan Oil?

ACEP’s David Denkenberger and Kyle Alvarado, Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering, are co-authors of a peer-reviewed article in the Journal Chemical Engineering Research and Design which explores ways of getting more money out of Alaskan oil and, at the same time, supplementing animal feed. This method could also be useful in global catastrophes such as volcanic eruptions or a nuclear war that would cause burning of cities and the smoke going into the stratosphere reducing sunlight so much that it would be like winter in the summer “nuclear winter.” There are renewed fears of nuclear war associated with the Ukraine crisis. If the sun were mostly blocked and agriculture collapses, scaling up the conversion of petroleum wax into edible fat could provide global fat needs in one to two years with reasonable cost. This work was supported by the Alaska NASA EPSCoR RID seed grant and the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED).