to be perfectly clear, this probably wouldn’t help much, since we would likely just move to shipping something like hydrogen across the ocean anyway…
Won’t someone think of the seamen?
I’m constantly thinking of seamen
Capt’n Pugwash and Seaman Stains will both be out of jobs.
correct me if I’m wrong, but the United States doesn’t even have oil refineries that are capable of making gasoline out of American oil? like we need the type of oil that the middle East has, so we’re constantly trading oil back and forth even though we have plenty of it
I think I’ve heard this is true. something about politicians wanting to look environmentalist and therefore preventing the building of any more refineries
it’s also to do with prices. There is a certain amount of this that is true, but the primary reason is oil prices.
yeah from what people are telling me, we have the capability of processing lower quality crude oil so it makes more sense to export our high quality stuff, then buy the cheap stuff since we can already refine it.
No, there’s a significant amount of oil infrastructure locally. They’ve even got a colonialist extension with Canada: crude oil crosses over to be refined and sold back to Canada
No, it is true. It is not the quantity of oil infrastructure, but the grades and types they are. The US crude is mostly light sweet crude after the shift to oil shale. The refinery infrastructure was originally built for heavy crude with high sulfur content. Thus the US imports the type of oil our refineries were built to handle, and exports the portion of the oil that is domestically produced, but the wrong type.
The lack of investment in the types of oil refineries to refine US oil domestically isn’t as much for optics purposes. But that relative to the amount of investment required to build new refineries to compete with the current foreign ones isn’t a good return on investment relative to the up front cost and the existing profits of the current arrangement.
the government should at least subsidize a couple so in the event of an apocalypse we can make our own gasoline.
Offhand I believe we have a few that can do light oil, but most of ours wouldn’t want to change over even if offered to do so for free. Rather the reason is the US has a lot of chemical engineers and capital and so is good at refining the more challenging to deal with and cheaper to get heavy oils while selling the easy to refine and therefore more valuable light oil we dig up down in Texas to places that have more primitive refineries.
While we could retrofit all of our our refining capacity to use our oil, it doesn’t make financial sense because your spending a lot of money to switch to an more expensive input, so companies arn’t going to want to do it unless the government forces them to, and the government would only force them to if it wanted to spite everyone else and raise domestic gas prices.
US gasoline production was around 1.4 million barrels/day last year. Large amounts are exported and imported though, so there was a grain of truth to your claim.
yes but how much of that gasoline was made from American crude oil? America has plenty of refineries, just none of them designed for American oil
U.S. refineries generally focus on producing gasoline to meet U.S. market demand, and they produce nearly all of the gasoline sold in the United States.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/gasoline/where-our-gasoline-comes-from.phpSupply chain wise it would be absolute lunacy to build processing systems which can only handle foreign materials, not your abundant national supply.
Besides, crude oil us primarily classified based on density and sulphur content. It’s all hydrocarbons and a portion of all of it can be turned into gasoline. Light low sulphur (sweet) is preferred, but that is strictly due to yield and profit margins.dude. we are not talking about the gasoline. we are talking about the oil being used to make the gasoline. what percentage of the crude oil being refined into American gasoline is American produced crude oil?
And they burn the worst kind of residual bunker oil because it’s the cheapest option and regulations don’t exist.
And destroyed the Baltimore bridge because their backup engines were split between legal fuel and international-waters fuel.
What’s with the math in the middle of your comment?
hyphen became a plus? Dalí didn’t have a spare engine because their working spare engine wasn’t purged of fuel that wouldn’t be legal to burn in US coastal waters.
It was that in combination with the “engine-generators” yes. Made it unclear.
this is arguably fine, because this way ships make clouds of sulfate aerosols, which have slight cooling effect and no one is bothered by it when it’s released over sea
It’s only fine until those sulfates react with water vapor in the atmosphere to form sulphuric acid. That stuff rains back down and contributes to ocean acidification which is causing serious harm to all sorts of marine ecosystems.
Good thing humans are the only life on earth.
Some of these ships would carry green hydrogen and new lithium batteries and old lithium batteries (to be recycled) and whatnot. Also at least some oil would be still needed for fine chemicals like meds or (idk what’s proper english term for that) large scale organic synthesis like plastics, or even straight distillates like hexane (for edible oil extraction) or lubricants. Some of usual non-energy uses of oil can be easily substituted with enough energy like with nitrogen fertilizers but some can’t
We aren’t consuming batteries anywhere near the rate we consume oil and coal. Hydrogen even less than batteries.
So the amount of ships needed would still be a fraction of what we use now.
not now, but if hydrogen were to be used as an energy source/storage, then it’d be used plenty. same with batteries
We can make hydrogen everywhere, we can’t ‘make oil’.
you really think this is going to stop the globalism aspect from happening? If you can ship something, and get better market rates on it, you’re going to do it. Economics follows the cheapest route, not the most efficient.
It also just makes sense if you think about it. Places like alaska are going to struggle to generate green energy compared to another place like, texas for example. If you can ship in green hydrogen much cheaper than you can locally produce energy, why wouldn’t you? It’s a reasonable solution to the problem of supply and demand scaling.
Yeah, but Alaska uses dramatically less energy than… like, everywhere. Given that there are no people and the only industries are either oil or resources.
no we can’t make hydrogen everywhere, there will be regions with large excess of renewable energy compared to population. these places could export hydrogen. you also don’t need a lot of transport if crude is extracted near place where it’s used, like for example heavy crude from alberta
The problem with the comparison is hydrocarbons are the energy source, hydrogen is no it’s just the energy carrier. It is very inefficient to convert energy to hydrogen then convert it back again. Something like 60% round trip efficiency. Not to mention the cost and loss in loading into containers and shipping it around the world. It’s also not a very dense fuel per volume especially compared to oil. It’s just way easier and cheaper to have cables that run from one place to another. They are already building one from Australia to Singapore and if it’s successful that will probably open the floodgates. There aren’t many places that are more than 2000 miles away from large sources of renewable energy even if your thinking places like Alaska which could do hydro if there ever was dense enough populations anywhere that would consume it.
We absolutely can ‘make oil’. Been doing it since world war II. Synthetic oil is extremely common.
I mean, yeah, but also, that’s not really efficient or effective for burning.
Neither is hydrogen.
I’m not disagreeing, but if the energy is surplus, might as well make hydrogen, at least we don’t end up with pollution.
Yeah, there’s no reason to be transporting hydrogen long distances. You can make it anywhere that has water and electricity. And if you’ve transitioned to a hydrogen based economy (which is a big if), ships wouldn’t run on oil any more anyway, so there’s no problem there.
there absolutely is? What if i can buy hydrogen at 1$ per ton, from the hydrogen production empire, meanwhile in the manufacturing empire hydrogen is produced at 2$ per ton. Economically, it would make sense to buy that hydrogen from the hydrogen production empire.
It’s not going to be as significant as a trade as something like coal and LNG obviously, but the market IS going to do this in some capacity. And it’s a beneficial thing for everybody.
Yeah but your electricity also needs to be produced by reusable manners, which commonly results in solar power. And since the intensity of solar rays and the amount of sunny hours per day vary on the global scale there are some countries which are capable of producing more hydrogen and cheaper than producing locally. I know that the German government is looking at Marocco to establish a hydrogen production and import.
the argument for renewable energy isnt that we should stop using oil, its that we shouldnt burn it. why turn our limited supply of oil into CO2 and water when we can turn it into plastics, medicine, solvents, etc? around 3/4 of crude oil is used as fuel, but if renewable energy was used, the number of oil tankers would decrease by more than 75% bc local supplies would generally be sufficient for industrial, non-fuel uses
bc local supplies would generally be sufficient for industrial, non-fuel uses
this is assuming that its not just cheaper to import that needed oil? This is always going to be a fundamental problem, though maybe we already happen to produce plastic with native oil idk.
ikr, but that tweet implies that all of oil/gas/coal ships would be unnecessary
That is true, but part of improving our environmental impact will be decreasing that transport of raw materials, localizing chemical industries near the sources of their raw materials.
That wouldn’t really need to be shipped around though, domestic supply can cover those needs almost everywhere.
And oil for Styrofoam. And met coal for steel.
There’s alternative processes, and if you avoid burning oil and coal for fuel you can basically do all that with the amount of oil that’s in easy reach instead of using tar sands or drilling into even more difficult to reach places.
the problem with tar sands is a fundamental energy conversion issue. It’s really hard to refine because you don’t get nearly as much energy out as you put in, compared to something like fracking.
It may become reasonable in the future with really cheap renewable energy and higher oil prices for example, but as of right now, it’s economically unviable.
You have to be careful when talking about steel because coal is both an ingredient (steel is iron + carbon) and used for heating afaik. You can take coal out of the heating step (confusingly called steel making) but not out of the ingredient step, unless you want to find a different carbon source.
There’s (admittedly comparatively expensive) alternative processes, and even if you stick to the old process and just stop using coal for electricity generation you’d cut coal use by 75%.
Not to mention, the carbon that stays in the steel doesn’t actually go into the atmosphere, so there’s less CO2 emissions for that specific use if you can substitute the fuel used for heating.
That’s why I said met coal for steel.
you’re probably talking about direct reduced iron and it’s really a problem that can be dealt with easily, just chuck a piece of coke when it’s molten for the second time in electric arc furnace (and maybe electrodes introduce enough carbon). substituting coke with hydrogen works also on “ingredient step” if you mean by that fuel needed to reduce iron ore to iron
maybe there’s a way to make electrowinning iron economical, and it’d be pretty green too, but i don’t know if it is workable
e: you can also avoid need for met coal if you use methane or syngas for direct reduced iron process
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coal can be substituted to some degree with processes like direct reduction. hydrogen works but syngas from biomass or trash also works
file styrofoam under plastics
Now I’m waiting for the news report,
“Green Energy will cost jobs!”
yeah, free market economies baby, making everything more efficient!
So what you’re saying is the companies that own those boats will lobby the government so that this never happens? Sweet.
actually, it’s already happening, why do you think LNG is such a massive export from the US right now?
Christ.
I think he just walks rather than being shipped.
Anyone know how much of the oil transported is actually used for plastic, percentage wise?
≈15%
gotta burn fuel just to get more fuel. Zeno’s paradox but capitalistic economic collapse
Yeah but if I’m not mistaken, emissions from shipping are quite low anyways. It’s something like 2-5℅ of all our emissions, so it’s pretty low priority.
all freight traffic is a pretty significant dent, i think the net total for all of transport is something like 15-20% of total emissions, so.
Idk man 5% sure sounds a hell of a lot better than 0%
Ships need gas inside to keep the dihydrogen monoxide at safe levels
Once you realize the byproducts of oil and how essential some are and the fact that rich countries aren’t going to change their way of life and the fact that developing countries will industrialize in the same way western countries have and will start to produce similar environmental emissions things look pretty bleak in terms of that average temperature rise.
