I thought that's when it was.

If it was a focal point of a chapter then you might want to try going to Spark notes or a website that breaks down the chapters by themes. You could then point us to the right chapter if you don’t find your way from there.

Making oil from polymeric materials is possible, but not from inorganic materials like sand or glass.

you need to talk with jbrenner=instinct isn't part of being a human being. you are using your mind

thanks solitude

Hank talking to his mother who is asking for a job for Phillip.
"Don't you ever think of people and of your moral duties?"
"I don't know what it is that you choose to call morality. No, I don't think of people—except that if I gave a job to Philip, I wouldn't be able to face any competent man who needed work and deserved it."
She got up. Her head was drawn into her shoulders, and the righteous bitterness of her voice seemed to push the words upward at his tall, straight figure: "That's your cruelty, that's what's mean and selfish about you. If you loved your brother, you'd give him a job he didn't deserve, precisely because he didn't deserve it—that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood. Else what's love for? If a man deserves a job, there's no virtue in giving it to him. Virtue is the giving of the undeserved."

no he was talking in passing to someone i forget. its really along the lines of the man who can do the job doesnt need it, and the man who needs the job cant do it. it was not a focal point of a chapter

i am by no means a scientist, im just a kid really, but do i think synthisizing oil from materials is possible? yes.

and i think those materials would be along the lines of sand and glass. but this is just an instinct.

LOL, sorry. Posted and then saw your post. Great minds think alike.

Was he talking to the Rearden family at the time?
I think he was talking to Lillian and Philip
I think I found a line from Lillian that relates.

“That's your cruelty, that's what's mean and selfish about you. If you loved your brother, you'd give him a job he didn't deserve, precisely because he didn't deserve it--that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood. Else what's love for? If a man deserves a job, there's no virtue in giving it to him. Virtue is the giving tothe undeserved.”

thank you for your time, but this is not what i am looking for

"...There's no such thing as a lousy job—only lousy men who don't care to do it."
Ellis Wyatt

"You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you're incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others -- that you're unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler -- that you're unable to earn your living by use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser."
John Galt

"You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you're incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others -- that you're unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler -- that you're unable to earn your living by use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser."
John Galt

Best I can do