In a world without fossil fuels, could a pseudo industrial revolution occur, based on some other technology? How would it differ from ours, both technologically and sociologically?

[Partially a question, partially a short essay]

The industrial revolution happened the way it did because of a confluence of extremely specific factors that are not guaranteed to happen in an alternate world. The first was an agricultural revolution that caused a noticable increase in population, and with it an increase in demand for manufactured goods and a glut of cheap labor. Colonial ventures in the Americas gave Europe access to cheap raw materials that needed to be processed into finished goods. Military competition between superpowers drove many technological innovations. And so on. Dozens of contributing factors, any each of which could potentially be either critical or incidental to the whole.

The one I am concerned with is hydrocarbon fossil fuels- initially coal, and later oil. Coal-powered engines became popular because shallow coal was so abundant that a kind of crappy steam engine was 'good enough' for certain uses, allowing a better one to be invented later and be used for a much wider variety. Oil, which is more powerful but harder to extract, came later.

Now, heres the rub. IRL, 90% of all coal formed during 2% of the world history. Oil is harder to pin down, but it also seems to have formed from very specific factors. What this means is that, for many otherwise earth like planets, hydrocarbon fossil fuels would not form in nearly the quantities our world did. And the ones that did are not guaranteed to form large amounts of shallow deposits.

The question is, ignoring magic or other exotic processes, what technologies, if any, could fill a similar role?

Energy before the industrial revolution.

Prior to the proliferation of steam engines, many of the machines that drove the early industrial revolution- chiefly, textiles and machining tools- had been run, on smaller scales, by watermills and windmills. Given demand, could these simply be scaled up?

Watermills can only be be built at rivers, and you can only put so many on a given river before you cause issues. Not ideal. Windmills are a better candidate, by a bit. You can theoretically build as many windmills as you want, and can also build individual windmills as big as you want, within the limits of the building materials, both of which achieve the same effect.

A large enough water/windmill could turn a shaft at least as fast as a steam engine, and pure enough charcoal with a mill-pumped bellow could burn at least as hot as a coal furnace (though it would burn through fuel absurdly fast).

The disadvantage of those is that they are obviously not mobile.

Mobile energy candidate A. Biofuel.

"Biofuel" in this case, is a catch-all term for wood, charcoal, ethanol, biodiesel, whale-oil, and anything else obscure enough I have not heard of it. These are mobile, combustible substances derived from living creatures.

These could be used more-or-less the same as fossil fuels, but the fact that they have to be grown and refined instead of dug out of the ground has Consequences. First, it would take a great deal of land and water that could otherwise be used for growing crops, and second, nearly all IRL bio-fuels also use a great deal of energy in the refining process. You have to burn a lot of wood to distill corn-ethanol to the point it can be used as fuel. Same, to varying degrees, for any of the other ones that are powerfull enough. You are effectively spending a huge amount of stationary energy for a small amount of portable energy.

In a vacuum, the overall best one seems to be bio-diesel. Raw materials are ancient and common, the process is simple, and relatively energy efficient in terms of input-to-output. The one big drawback: The first forms of bio-diesel was not discovered until well into the industrial revolution, after industrial coal had been in use for over a century and coal-powered trains for a generation. While the process is not hard to do, in the DIY sense, it is very hard to invent. It is extremely unlikely that someone would simply discover both the fuel and the engine without already having fossil fuel engines to inspire it.

Leading me to the exciting, exotic part:

Mobile energy canddiate B. Compressed air.

This section is hevily inspired by this article. Basically, there are a lot of industrial, mechanical processes that work fine off of pneumatics and compressed air. Air compression is fairly easy technology to build- the trompe, for example, contains no moving parts except for flowing water, was was used to power ore-refineries since at least the 17th century, roughly on par with the first steam engines. And basically any water-pump can also be made into an air-compressor if you are determined enough, even if it means a screw pump and a really tall water tower. It is also relatively easy to store large ammounts in a semi-portable fashion- not something you could carry around in your pocket, but potentially enough to power a vehicle of some kind with only a little bit of hand-waving.

And best of all, it is trivially easy to build a windmill/watermill into an air compressor.

Imagine an alternate line of technological development based on this.

Imagine a city, built on the cliffs above the sea, relentlessly blasted by powerful sea-winds. Hundreds upon hundreds of windmills turn, driving hundreds of compressors. The same way we have power lines, they have pipes carrying, not water, but compressed air, used to power the great factories of the city. With a jet of compressed air, mere charcoal can burn as hot as a blast furnace, able to melt steel at an industrial scale. Yet more machines press and hammer the steel into armor, tools, cutlery. Spinning-jennies and Jacquard-looms whir with only the hissing of air, spinning raw fiber into fine cloth.

A fully industrialized, city, with windmills instead of smoke-stacks.

Any other interesting possibilities and limitations this route offers? I am not sure that we could ever get to pseudo-trains, much less cars, powered by compressed air without either a massive change in design or bringing in an explicitly unreal element (I have a few min mind, but I have refrained from mentioning them here for the purposes of the thought experiment.)

Any other major routes that I have missed?

Did I come up with something interesting here?