Life Without Fossil Fuels

Strange as it may seem, the people in the world of Dark Rivers have never discovered fossil fuels. Instead almost all their fuel comes from Solar, Wind, Geothermal and Tidal power stations and the main non-renewable form of Energy is provided by vegetable oils and fats.

Since the 1960s, all road vehicles have run on solid fuels.
Private vehicle ownership is rare, because the price of fuel is too great for all but the rich, so usually cars, vans and trucks will be owned by a collective or company.
The finest solid fuel is sometimes called ‘Tallow’, although in reality its only resemblance to the animal-fat which it is named after is its appearance. It is a white, waxy slab a few inches square and an inch thick, which produces a minimum of smoke and runs smoothly. People usually buy the yellow-coloured fuel called ‘Butterbrick’, which is slightly less efficient but cheaper. Both, however, are much more reliable and efficacious than the ‘Superoil’ internal combustion engines which started in the 1920s, which would often stop in the middle of the road, clog up or even explode.

The majority of the vegetable oils which are refined into tallow and other fuels are produced in Europe, especially Anglo-Celtica. Thousands of sunflowers, olives and vegetables are produced every month just for their oils. The incredibly complex procedures required to industrially refine the oil into an efficient fuel requires huge factories, which provide thousands of jobs across the continent.

Because of the constant demand for vegetable oil, hydroponics and other forms of plant research are key to the economy.

The hydrocarbons and petrocarbons extracted from fossil fuels, used in many other industrial procedures, are replaced by similar polymers and chemicals created by vegetable starch, minerals etc. Certain types of plastic are rare, for example, and instead a lot of packaging is produced using spun corn starch.

Due to the lack of fossil fuel consumption, the environmental problems which exist in our world are greatly reduced, but they still exist. Extensive farming and chemical refinements still cause green house emissions, and the chlorofluorocarbons are still depleting the ozone layer.