this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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According to Wikipedia only around 15% of artificial vanilla flavour is made from wood. The other 85%? You've guessed it - oil.
From what I can find it sounds like plant oils, not petroleum, for anyone else that was confused.
Isn’t petroleum technically a plant oil?
It was plant oil, being fermented anaerobically and heated for millions of years chemically changes it.
Have we tried speed running oil creation like we did with diamonds?
Yes, we have even made bacteria that excretes fuels. But nothing that competes with just pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground at scale like we have with diamonds.
The main scaling issue is that the constituent carbon still has to come from somewhere, and one of the main carbon sources we have is... oil.
The best solution is to move away from carbon based fuels.
As atomicbocks points out, a major obstacle for sustainable fuels for combustion engines is that there isn't enough biomass around. Also why the new sustainable ship engines run on ammonia.
It was not plant oil. Plankton and algae aren't plants.
No