This article is pure bullcrap with whipped cream on top.
No oil or gas, no plastics, fertilizers, lubricants, many medicines, pipes for irrigation (not iron ones), many boats, car parts, housing items including siding, furniture, etc.
Some people are just born stupid including the writer.
Don’t worry there will still be Lego to play with.
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/3/2/17070454/lego-bricks-sustainable-plastic-toys
But seriously polymers can be made from a number of sources oil is only one of them. Methane and ethane is actually the source for most modern plastics specifically from wet shale gas condensate streams. PolyETHYLENE is polarized ethane stripped of two hydrogen atoms and double bonded on a C=C bond. HDPE and LDPE are the two most common plastics high density polyethylene being what pipes, bottles, clothes, food wrap & containers & packaging....
Plastics can be made from ethanol which is dehydrated to yup ethene then polymerized just like any ethene would be.
Methanol, butanol, propanol alcohols can all be dehydrated to their corresponding alkenes and polymerized to plastics.
Ethanol from corn, methanol from wood
ABE fermentation of cellulose read wood,corn Stover, rice straw, anything that grows and is grass or wood to acetone, butanol, and ethanol was done in the USA in massive amounts during WWII for the acetone for smokeless powder making, butanol for polybutol rubbers the first synthetic rubbers Google WWII synthetic rubber it’s the material that won the war for us. Every military machine has hundreds of lbs of rubber on them. Fuel lines, engine seals, every single wire made had rubber insulation the use of butanol for rubber won the war for us. To this day most tyre rubbers are butalstyrene synthetics made from the butane/ butene streams of shale gas condensate.
You can also get butene from cellulose
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3275743/
It’s not about technology there are plenty of alternatives chemically to oil and now largely gas its economic shale gas is $3 ish a mmbtu which is ruffly 1000 cubic feet worth fermentation even of wastes can’t compete with that. If gas was $15 like it was 13 years ago then it makes sense to look at ethanol or ABE or one of the other pathways to alkanes or alkenes but humans will never be without plastics again it’s all a matter of price per kg