About thirty years ago, I was given a personal tour of an oil refinery in Yokohama, Japan. I was doing freelance translation then for a Japanese oil company. I mentioned to one of my contacts there that I would be interested in actually seeing the sort of equipment I was translating documents about, and they arranged a visit for me.
Two things stand out in my memory:
Even though the refinery was in full operation, we saw no other people as we walked and drove around the facility. The only staff we saw were in the control room, and they didn’t seem very busy.
The other was the almost complete lack of odors. That particular refinery is close to an upscale residential area, and the company had to be careful to keep sulfurous and other gases from escaping in order to avoid complaints and possibly fines. Some of the documentation I was translating then was about their system for detecting and preventing odor releases. As I recall, they had people walk around the perimeter and local neighborhoods regularly, just sniffing for smells from the plant. On the day we were there, I noticed petroleum odors only when we were close to one of the refining towers; otherwise, the only smell was from the nearby Tokyo Bay.
Sounds about right. I work in the field contracting to a lot of plants and once they are built they don’t need a ton of people there. It’s really if they are doing shutdowns that there are a lot of people.
My father actually works at the Jamnagar refinery. I was bought up in there seeing and visiting the refinery as families are allowed for some trips every now and then. I learnt a lot of this process of refining out of curiosity of what my father did and it was just so cool. The refinery in context is the world's largest since more than a decade and seeing it with your own eyes, it feels like a wonder of the world for real. Truly marvellous outcome of perseverance and engineering. Loved to see this blog on the HN homepage, its very well written
My father worked in the HPCL refinery in Chembur. I got to go visit on Republic day when I was a kid, but they stopped doing visits. He worked in the distillation tower at first, but then moved into diesel desulphurization. I wish it wasn't but its a dangerous job, and he narrowly escaped several accidents, including a horrible naphta fire that took many lives.
Wow, I contracted in Jamnagar for Reliance building software back in 1999-2000. It was fun building a web interface to report on their IoT (not called IoT back then) devices - sensors, meters and whatnots through a CORBA/C++ interface. That was very advanced for those days.
Would love to hear stories about it. Reliance is working on replicating the Jamnagar refinery approach in America [0] now as well.
It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain as well as see an industry that the US used to lead in increasingly become dependent those partners.
Not really a big deal. The numbers are cumulative. The Reliance Brownsville Texas facility will only process 60 million barrels per year. That's 1% of annual US refining capacity.
> It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain
You really don't want downstream in your backyard, though. The environmental oversight in these countries is...less. Meanwhile, it's a hyper competitive industry with low margins so adding new capacity only works in places with cheap labor and less red tape.
The article is quick to point out the huge role of oil in the modern energy mix. It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat. The so called "Primary energy fallacy". Other than that, it's a great read.
To me (as someone who has worked on oil rigs, oil pipelines, oil refineries, and chemical plants), crude oil seems far more valuable as a material than as an energy source. It feels like a damned shame that we're still combusting so much of it for heat rather than reserving it for physical materials.
I understand the ways that economics are very important, and that the economics still currently favor burning a large fraction of the crude oil. But I also know that the right kinds of investments and a bit of luck can often change those economics, and that would be nice to see.
There is way more carbon in the ground as rocks than as oil. If you have plenty of energy, the difference is quite manageable.
Besides, as somebody already pointed out, there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of. It's nothing compared to the rocks, and a little harder to get, but getting it first would improve things a lot.
The carbon isn’t valuable elementally as much as it is structurally and molecularly. I mean that as aromatic rings and other ready made building blocks that conveniently can be fractionally separated with pressure and temperature conditions in a column as a gross generalization. All of this is energy intensive but much less so than building up from three atom molecules with strong bonds. And much much less energy intensive than separating a trace % molecule from the atmosphere at low atmospheric pressure and translating that to complex molecules.
There needs to be more appreciation for the laws of thermodynamics when discussing technology. Everything is not a 1-dimensional reduced abstraction.
We can always make polymers and HydroCarbons in general from other sources if we have energy abundance. We literally can just capture the CO2 we emitted from burning fossil and make it plastics.
Of course this does not make sense in a world where we do not have enough energy to even keep datacenters open.
Edit: To clarify, I do not propose burning fossils to capture CO2 and make plastics. I am a Thermo Laws believer.
Methane >> carbon dioxide as a polyethylene/linear polymers feed stock. Double bonded oxygens are hella higher affinity than four loose hydrogens. Also as pointed out, even in a concentrated combustion effluent stack CO2 is low concentration at atmospheric pressure.
I don’t know about methane as an aromatic/hybridized ring building block. Anything is possible with chemical synthesis but is it energy feasible.
There’s always plant hydrocarbon feed stocks but I think using arable land to make plastics is dumb and also carbon intensive. (I do wear cotton clothing tho because you need to make trade offs).
Siemens has a collaboration with Porsche are piloting already eFuel production. Cost is super high (think like $10/liter). But thermodynamically feasible.
The problem with carbon capture from air is the low carbon concentration. Try to do the math for how much air you need to process to get even one barrel of oil worth of hydrocarbons from a DAC process.
The answer to this problem as it's currently being pursued is renewable carbon feedstocks. Growing things like canola on marginal land, harvesting it and turning it into biofuels and LCLFs (low carbon liquid fuels) using renewable solar/wind energy.
It's not a solved problem, though. Truly renewable carbon feedstocks have to source their carbon from the air, not the soil, which has to be continually measured. Land selection for carbon feedstock projects has to ensure it doesn't induce land-use change in other locations due to displacing other things like food production, etc. Otherwise the emissions and environmental harm from those downstream effects have to be included in the carbon positive/negative calculations for the project.
That sounds like a hack from late-game Factorio: pollute enough that you can just pull iron filings right out of the air. Everyone wins! Except the meatbags who need to breathe the air …
> It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat.
I've heard the statistic that 40% of the total oil pumped out of the ground just to transporting oil. We use almost half just to move it to and fro before even using it.
Let's say a barrel of oil travels 15,000 km from Saudi Arabia to Texas, gets refined, gets shipped another 10,000 km to Europe, then the last 1,000 km overland by truck.
This reasonably well sourced Reddit post [0] says big oil tankers burn 0.1% of their fuel per 1,000 km, smaller ones a bit more. Say 0.2% on aggregate, that's 5% for the whole journey, 10% because the ship is empty half the time.
From the same source, a truck burns about 3% per 1,000 km. This seems too high: for a 40,000 kg loaded truck that's less than 1 kmpl or 2.5 mpg. But let's believe it, double it for empty journeys, and we still only get 16%.
I used very conservative estimates here: surely most oil doesn't travel anywhere near that far.
Alternative thought experiment: look at the traffic on the highway. If this were true, even neglecting oil burnt for heating or electricity or aviation, you'd expect 40% of the vehicles to be tanker trucks.
> Say 0.2% on aggregate, that's 5% for the whole journey, 10% because the ship is empty half the time.
Fuel saves from slow steaming and being empty are massive.
> If this were true, even neglecting oil burnt for heating or electricity or aviation, you'd expect 40% of the vehicles to be tanker trucks.
The US has a lot of domestic pipelines [1], and a lot of the remainder is done by train [2] because trains are the most efficient way to transport bulk goods over extremely long distances.
Say a tanker truck has a roughly 300 gallon fuel tank and a 10,000 gallon payload tank (per google). Thats roughly 3% loss to cross a lot of the US, which is by no means insignificant but assuming ships are not any worse and the pipeline to the ship is minimal, around a manageable 6% loss.
I also don’t have a source, but I have heard that 15% of global energy is dedicated to handling petroleum (extracting, transporting, refining) which feels like a plausible number.
i.e. A friend that works on rigs is flown to and from rigs from anywhere on earth every month, then choppers out to the rig and back. Same for everyone that works on the rigs.
As someone with no real-world petrochemistry experience, but much gaming experience, I was very surprised how familiar the crude oil processing diagram looks. Factorio and GregTech are two prime examples of fairly realistic oil processing lines (probably as accurate as any game would reasonably try to be).
I was thinking the same thing! Having played through Factorio and a fair amount of GregTech really reframed my viewpoint on energy production that a huge part of the benefit of fossil fuels is the byproducts, not just raw energy output.
I remember driving by a refinery years ago and it had two or three towers with big flames that were just burning off waste gas. This seemed wasteful to me. If it can burn, then it seems like it could be used for something productive.
Usually, when refineries flare something like that it's because what they are burning is not suitable for use, and making it suitable would cost more than the product would sell for.
Often methane as a by-product of oil production is flared, because the amount is small enough that it's not worth setting up processing plants and supply chains for. Other times, the fluid is heavily contaminated by e.g. sulfur compounds, and would be costly to purify. Still other times the production of the fluid is unreliable or intermittent, and cannot sustain a continuous production process.
Although, flare gas recovery systems exist nowadays to make use of these waste gases, commonly for local power production for the refinery itself.
Yea while $ viability is true, it's better to think of as
1) using some potentially useful products as fuel to burning off things you don't want and
2) the buffer to keep non-steady inflows in a suitable ready condition for steady-state processing. (When real world steady-state is less than ideal.)
Number 2 is really what dominates the equation, as shutting in gas sources or even just turning off pipelines is incredibly more complicated than just an 'off' switch.
And turning back on is even more complicated. In the case of wells, once you shut in, turning back on may never result in the same level of production as before.
It's usually a small amount of waste, and handling gas is very different from distillate.
You'd need to either liquify that gas or collect it to a pipeline in order to make it useful. I remember reading that modern refineries make use of the gases instead of flaring them though I'm not sure how.
the way it was explained to me is if you see the flares then something is wrong. It may not be catastrophic or anything serious but something isn't going according to plan. Because you're right, why burn it off when you can sell it?
The article does a good job of showing how a typical barrel of oil is converted into a dozen or more distinct usable products.
It would be helpful to also have a chart that shows how much gasoline or diesel as a percentage of each barrel is produced. It would be a bit variable, since not all crude oil is the same, but I think it would be close for most of it.
Some people think when diesel and regular gas prices diverge, that they should just be able to produce one at the expense of the other; but the distillation process shows that they are fundamentally different.
You can to vary the split of the output by cracking heavier hydrocarbons into lighter. So it's not a fixed fraction, but driven by both demand and cost of processing.
He's not whining, he's saying that the people who insist on using Fahrenheit are oblivious, ignorant, backwards, uneducated, closed minded, conservative morons and since no one like that would understand, let alone appreciate, the article then why bother using antiquated units of measure that the other 8 billion people besides Americans have abandoned decades ago. The use of imperial units degrades from the overall quality of the article and limits its audience for no reason.
This is a really good overview of oil refining. I'll add a few things.
1. The light and heavy distinction is covered by a measure called API gravity [1]. The higher the API gravity, the lighter the crude;
2. Refiners mix different crude types depending on what kind of refined products they want to produce;
3. Heavy crude tends to be less valuable although it's essential for some applications. Lighter crude produces generally more valuable products like gasoline, diesel and avgas. But heavy crude goes into construction (eg roads) and fuel for ships (ie bunkers));
4. Most refineries in the US are very old and are very polluting. They don't need to be this way. A new refiner would produce vastly less pollution but they're almost impossible to get permission to build now. One exception is the Southern Rock refinery currently being built in Oklahoma [2], which will be powered by largely renewable energy and produce a lot less emissions than an equivalent older refinery with the same capacity;
5. There are different blends of gasoline that the US produces. The biggest is so-called summer and winter blends. What's the differene? Additives are added to summer blends (in particular) to increase the boiling point so less of the gasoline is in gas form because that produces more smog;
6. California uses their own blends so in 2021-2022 when CA gas went to $8+, it wasn't just "gouging". It doesn't really work that way. CA requires a particular blend that only CA refineries produce so it's simple supply and demand as no new capacity gets added to CA refineries and demand goes up with population growth.
The reason for the CA blend goes back to the 80s and 90s when smog was a much bigger problem. Better vehicle emissions standards since then as well as improvements in the blends the rest of the country uses have largely made the CA blend obsolete so CA is really paying $1+/gallon more for literally no reason; and
7. California doesn't build pipelines so is entirely dependent on seaborne oil imports (~75%) despite the US being a net energy exporter. Last I checked, ~20% of that foreign oil comes through the Strait (from Iraq, mostly) so, interestingly, CA is more vulnerable to the Strait of Hormuz closure than the rest of the country.
I guess I'll add a disclaimer: I'm very much pro-renewables, particular solar. I think solar is the future. But we currently live in a world that has huge demand for oil and no alternatives for many of those uses (eg diesel, plastics, construction, industrial, avgas) so we should at least be smart about how we go forward.
A few corrections. Credentials: I am a Chemical Engineer in a Senior Tecnical Leadership position at a refinery with over thirty years of experience.
1) API gravity is the density of the crude oil. Higher API = lower density. We use this unit of measure because it magnifies the differences in densities vs. using conventional units of measure.
2) Refiners in the US mix different crude types to maximize the objective function ($) of a set of constraints including crude grade pricing and availability, product demand volume and pricing, refinery unit constraints and product quality specifications. This is done using a linear program model.
3) light and heavy crude contain the same molecules but in different ratios. For example they all contain gasoline, jet fuel, diesel boiling range material and all contain some amount of material that could be turned into ship fuel or asphalt for paving roads. Heavy crude tends to sell at a discount to light crude because of the laws of supply and demand - refiners will buy a mix of whatever makes them the most money.
4) “Most refineries in the US are very old and are very polluting”While US refineries sites are old - some site have been in operation for over 100 year, the units and configuration of the refineries has evolved continuously over the years. The technology used in the refining units has evolved as well - this is not a static industry. The pollution standard for refinery operations and fuel emissions have been raised multiple times. So “Very Polluting” vs. new refineries does not pass muster. US refineries have been retrofitting wet gas scrubbers and selective catalytic reduction units to reduce emissions of SOx and NOx for decades. These technologies reduce emissions of both pollutants by over 90%. Most of the emissions come from burning the fuel that refineries produce and both legacy US refineries and new ones have to meet the same fuel quality specifications and hence produce equivalent emissions.
5. “There are different blends of gasoline that the US produces. The biggest is so-called summer and winter blends. What's the differene? Additives are added to summer blends (in particular) to increase the boiling point so less of the gasoline is in gas form because that produces more smog;”
Summer gasoline contains less butane than winter gasoline. That is the main difference. Butane is added to winter gasoline so cars start in cold weather. There are no additives added to raise the boiling point in summer - just less volatile light material added.
As an aside, Mvodern gasoline vehicles have carbon canisters to capture vapors (such as butane) from the gas tank when not in service. These are then regenerated by sweeping air through them when the vehicles are running.
6. “ California uses their own blends so in 2021-2022 when CA gas went to $8+, it wasn't just "gouging". It doesn't really work that way. CA requires a particular blend that only CA refineries produce so it's simple supply and demand as no new capacity gets added to CA refineries and demand goes up with population growth.
The reason for the CA blend goes back to the 80s and 90s when smog was a much bigger problem. Better vehicle emissions standards since then as well as improvements in the blends the rest of the country uses have largely made the CA blend obsolete so CA is really paying $1+/gallon more for literally no reason;”
There is some out of date information here. California is a net importer of gasoline since refinery closures in California have outpaced reduced demand from increased fleet fuel efficiency / BEV adoption. There are refineries in Asia that export California and some other US refineries can also make California grade gasoline but this requires shipping via the Panama Canal on Jones act ships that are scarce and expensive.
P66 / Kinder Morgan are planning a pipeline / pipeline reversal that would bring refined product into California including California gasoline.
[off topic] Given your background,I was wondering if you could offer some clarification if I'd read some Bs or just misunderstood. Long ago I had read something in a petrochemical book, maybe I got wrong, but one little section I skimmed over seemed to point out a modern refinery cracking plant could use vegetable input stock with I think was a caveat in regard to cleaning or addition by-products. Is this feasible or done, or was I reading a fluffy passage that wasn't fact checked properly?
Yes, Hydroprocessing units at refineries can either co-process vegetable oil with hydrocarbons or run 100% on vegetable oil after some modifications.
Vegetable oils are tri-glycerides. These molecules can be cracked into three long chain paraffins and a propane molecule by reacting them with hydrogen at high temperature and pressure over a catalyst. This makes a raw diesel fuel that then needs to be isomerized to lower the cloud point (basically when it begins to freeze). The end result is a drop in replacement for fossil diesel fuel that burns smoother and cleaner.
Two refineries in the SF Bay Area have converted from fossil fuel operation to manufacturing this renewable diesel.
Fun fact: over 70% of diesel sold in California is now renewable or bio diesel. Both types start with tri glycerides - either vegetable oil, waste cooking oil or animal fats.
Started my career working in AI for a company that had a couple large refineries (I didnt dare refer to what we were doing as statistics because those guys had all been fired a decade before after attempting to perform some back magic they called six sigma), pipelines, a fleet of ethanol plants (at the time) and a couple biodiesel bets, including one that attempted to convert corn oil into biodiesel.
I was blessed to have a leader who wanted us to spend a lot of time on the field, working turnarounds doing, whatever I could to be helpful, etc. to learn the business and build relationships.
Working around the refineries, especially during turnaround, was a crash course in constraint theory and economics.
Good times.
At any rate, all of that was to qualify that most people would not believe how much time and money has been wasted trying to find innovative new ways to serve and capitalize on the CA biodiesel market.
Thank you so much for that. I had tried searches various times and got little information.
Bio fuel is what most people think of when it comes to renewable - though by way of proper refinery processes, none of the issues or perceived issues would exist especially for more modern fuel injection pumps.
I believe that it's a physical plant thing. We have spent over a hundred years building hydrocarbon-based energy infrastructure. Much of that is still out there. Wind and solar have made a ton of progress in the last 15 years or so, but it's only really become substantially better financially in the last 5 or so years maybe. It's still going to take decades to actually replace most of that stuff, just as a matter of how fast we can build and install hardware.
Note also that it's a worldwide chart, so it includes developing countries that may not be so quick to jump on projects that are expensive right now even though they'll save a bunch of money in the long term. Though to be fair, some may have a leapfrog effect when it comes to building brand new infrastructure.
I would like to think that the switch to renewables is inevitable, but could a continuous series of administrations similar to the current US admin be enough to curtail it?
Coal is dirt cheap, to the point where most of the cost is in transporting it and the infrastructure to convert it to power is simple and not very capital intensive to it’s the first thing developing countries reach for when they don’t have strict environmental regulations. It also doesn’t require as much precision manufacturing so a lot can be done domestically even in less developed industries, which is important when foreign currencies are in short supply.
The problem is where it's measuring joules of energy. To use cars as an example:
It measures joules of energy as in "how much heat the gasoline we burn produces", some of which we convert to mechanical energy to drive the car, but the majority is just waste heat going out the tailpipe.
By comparison an electric car powered by solar has no tailpipe. There's still a bit of waste heat from electrical resistance, but nowhere near as much.
If we measure like this, by converting a gasoline car to electric (powered by solar for the sake of ignoring some complexity), and driving the same distance, we somehow managed to cut our "energy demand" in half. Despite the fact that we're demanding the exact same thing from the system.
If we measured "joules delivered to the tires of the car" we wouldn't have the same issue. At least until someone starts arguing about how their car is more aerodynamic so joules delivered to the tires should count for more in it.
Edit: We could also go in the other direction. Instead of reporting it as 1kw of solar energy (electricity) it could be 4kw of solar energy (the amount of sunlight shining on the solar panels)... No one does this for obvious reasons, but it's more similar to that primary energy number for fuel in many ways.
The total energy supply figure is a primary energy mix - for the fossil fuels it represents the thermal energy of the fuel. You can look at the final energy consumption section a bit lower to get a different picture taking into account conversion losses.
That is still subject to the primary energy fallacy. Those reports are in terms of primary energy, i.e. how much heat is released by combustion of fossil gas. But in order to replace fossil gas in a chemical plant, you need much less electricity than the primary energy of the fossil gas suggests.
> For all energy sources, the IEA clearly defines energy production at the point where the energy source becomes a “marketable product” (and not before).
Doesn't that mean if you are burning coal to make electricity, you wouldn't count the heat output because the generated heat is not a marketable product.
Looking at the chart for TFC, the wind and solar case looks even worse. Wind and solar supplies 2 million TJ compared to 36 million for coal.
All I was really trying to say from the outset is that I'm surprised at how important coal still is and how little we use renewables. I see articles here all the time about the massive advancements in solar (and wind to a lesser degree) and I had it in my head that renewables were a much larger part of the energy mix than they are.
> they're almost impossible to get permission to build now
While I do agree there's a ton of regulatory hurdle to cross to build a new refinery, lots of interviews with oil executives have stated the economics of building a new refinery aren't always great. The reasons why they aren't building isn't necessarily because the regulatory hurdles are too high, its that they don't think they'll end up making any money building them. The future demand of many refined products are uncertain, adding a lot of new capacity is quite a capital risk.
I'd love to see a lot of our ancient refineries shut down and replaced with far more modern designs, but the oil industry isn't going to do it because it probably won't be profitable.
It will be interesting to see the economics of these few new refineries coming online actually play out in the coming years.
Well-meaning legislation (eg CEQA in CA) is effectively weaponized by NIMBYs who have outsized power to add years if not a decade or more to something getting built. There is also an overly naive, even performative opposition to anything fossil fuel related without having a substitute (again, I say this as a particularly pro-solar person). This adds significantly to costs.
I'm also anti-nuclear because it's too expensive, not as safe as advocates make out and the waste problem is not even remotely solved despites all the claims to the contrary. But it's also true that the same kind of anti-development tactics used against refineries are effectively used against nuclear plants such that it takes 15+ years to build a nuclear plant and the costs balloon as a result.
But there's also strong direct evidence contrary to your claim: the new refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. Why are they getting built if "the oil industry isn't going to do it"?
I'll go even further than this: if private industry won't build new refineries, the government should. In fact, that's my preferred outcome anyway.
> if private industry won't build new refineries, the government should. In fact, that's my preferred outcome anyway.
maybe in some non-literal sense of financing them, which is what the government can (or will) offer to energy development generally. also there are numerous credits and tax favors for energy concerns.
on the flip side, how much demand for oil products is driven by ordinary consumers? some estimates say about 40% of extracted oil - it all eventually get refined, right? so the refining distinction is meaningless - in the US is refined into gasoline that goes directly into light duty vehicles (90% of all gas is light duty!), i.e., joe schmo public driving around.
if you are looking for government levers, your instincts seem right to reach for CEQA and NIMBYs. in the sense that you are looking at the bigger picture at A level of abstraction, but i disagree it is the right level of abstraction. fundamentally US oil consumption (and therefore refining) is about the car lifestyle, which is intimately intertwined with interest rates, because interest rates decide, essentially, how many americans live in urban sprawl and are obligated to use the car lifestyle as opposed to being able to choose.
so your preferred outcome, if we take it to its logical conclusion is, a non-independent fed. and look, you are already saying some stuff that sounds crank, so go all the way. the US president is saying a non-independent fed! it's not a fringe opinion anymore. but this is what it is really about. the system has organized itself around the interest rate lever specifically because it is independent, so be careful what you wish for.
Two truly new refineries in 50 years despite lots of growth of demand throughout most of those decades. The fact there's only been two in fifty years and neither is anywhere near operational is proving my point. These are largely aberrations compared to the last fifty years, and its extremely notable the larger one is being built largely by a foreign oil company wanting to diversify internationally. It hasn't even broken ground yet and you're acting like its already here.
> if private industry won't build new refineries, the government should.
Personally I'd prefer our tax dollars to be spent feeding our kids and providing healthcare instead of continuing to give handouts to billionaires, but hey lots of people have different opinions.
You ignore all the upgrades existing refineries have had. They pollute much less these days than when built. In 10 years your new refinery will also be old and not up to modern standards. It too will need upgrades.
I fully see the improvements and say awe to the incredible achievements they've done. I live with the people who work such plants, I know what they do. I also see the ancient plants that live with such outdated designs and and overall suck environmentally. I see there's been a lot of improvement to many plants, don't get me wrong. There's far more to know than when the plant was first established, I agree.
All of my life has been around the oil industry, I'm well bathed in it.
>While I do agree there's a ton of regulatory hurdle to cross to build a new refinery, lots of interviews with oil executives have stated the economics of building a new refinery aren't always great. The reasons why they aren't building isn't necessarily because the regulatory hurdles are too high, its that they don't think they'll end up making any money building them. The future demand of many refined products are uncertain, adding a lot of new capacity is quite a capital risk.
This is a circular statement.
The regulatory hurdles are a large part of what drive cost.
I know a venue that wants to pave a dirt lot so they can better use it for stuff. It doesn't pencil out because of stupid stormwater permitting crap that'll add $250k to the project. It'd never pay off in a reasonable timeframe. So it just continues to exist in its current grandfathered in capacity when even the most unfavorable napkin math shows that what they want is an improvement.
A few weeks ago I was party to the installation of a perimeter railing on a flat commercial roof. The railing cost more than the rest of the job it was there for. Something tells me they won't be pulling permits for petty electrical work ever again.
Oil and most other heavy industry is faced with the same sort of problems with more digits in front of the decimal.
> The regulatory hurdles are a large part of what drive cost
I agree, they are a large part. The things they have to do to meet the standards are expensive.
The claim was "impossible to get permission to build now". As in, the government won't let them build it. That the standards are just technically impossible to meet. They can get the permission to build it any day. Its possible to meet these standards. They just don't think it'll be worth it when they have to do it right.
"It's impossible to get permission to build something with specifications that is financially viable."
There, better?
These agencies have all sorts of discretion to waive this or enforce that or interpret some third thing and yet they leverage all of it in a manner that stalls progress.
I know a guy who has a textbook perfect situation for a septic in MN. MN won't permit it not because of some law or rule or code, but because the agency has decided that they just don't do septics anymore, mounds only and are exercising their discretion to only permit those. The cost difference is a lot, but less than suing them so guess what got installed?
Commercial permitting of every kind is like that but worse because the public will tolerate way more abuse of business than abuse of homeowners.
You mean to tell me the land of 10,000 lakes might have a shallow water table that might require mounds more often to prevent people poisoning groundwater with their literal shit? The horror. Without hard data about the site I'm probably going to side with the county on that one.
As for your friend wanting to improve the lot but needs to do a lot of drainage fixes, he should lobby his community for property tax abatement to support the drainage improvements. If the people really want the improvement they'll be willing to help pay for the drainage. But things like failures to account for drainage leads to massive floods hurting everyone in the community. It's something we've ignored in a lot of our planning for a long time.
Both of your major examples are probably selfish takes that harm their neighbors to save someone some money.
This sort of surface level ivory tower "nothing that proclaims to be positive for the environment" attitude underpins so, so much of the bullshit that makes us all poorer and worse off.
>You mean to tell me the land of 10,000 lakes might have a shallow water table that might require mounds more often to prevent people poisoning groundwater with their literal shit? The horror.
The "land of 10k lakes" doesn't get it's water from the ground like a desert municipality. They have surface reservoirs and protected watershed areas to keep those clean enough.
The "ground" is effectively the filter. You want it to be full of shit. That's how a septic works. That's how basically all runoff cleansing measures (sand traps, grass buffers, etc, etc) work. You're basically using "nature" as the settling tanks of a water treatment plant. A septic is the same but underground.
The problem is high water table. But as long as the water table permits a septic is great.
>Without hard data about the site I'm probably going to side with the county on that one.
Did you ever think that maybe the reason the dude applied for the septic was because the engineer said "this property is great for a septic, let's do a septic"
Surely this government you think so highly of is capable of exercising judgement.
If not then why give them discretion in the first place?
What about the licensed engineer that must stamp the plans? Surely he is trustworthy? If not then why does the government enforce his license monopoly and force people to do business with him?
>As for your friend wanting to improve the lot but needs to do a lot of drainage fixes, he should lobby his community for property tax abatement to support the drainage improvements
Are you insane or just lying through your teeth. Nobody is gonna add a political advocacy side quest to an already overpriced minor improvement. They'll just bend over and take it and hope to make it up rent or resale.
>It's something we've ignored in a lot of our planning for a long time.
This used to be municipally managed. Landowners built drainage as they saw fit. Municipalities managed stuff like streams and culverts and ditches and whatnot, build flood control dams and holding ponds and the like.
Making it part of the permitting/development process is mostly an exercise in financial engineering (gets the obligation off the municipality) and is worse because you get patchwork of minimum viable solutions (that work poorly) instead of systems that are planned at the municipal or higher level to work well.
>Both of your major examples are probably selfish takes that harm their neighbors to save someone some money.
And peddling things that drive up the viability floor of development so you can feel good about saving the environment isn't.
Enjoy your $3k rent for a 500ft slum. Make sure you complain about "landlords" while you're at it.
You're competing with the person who isn't renting my buddy's ADU because the ADU never happened because the septic upgrade killed it, the minimum viable mound system got put in to save $$ and it has the capacity for the house and nothing more Y'all really served the public interest on that one.
Sure sounds like potential issues for septic systems
> protected watershed areas
And they're protected by things like being choosy about approving septic systems I'd imagine
> The "ground" is effectively the filter.
And it requires so much "ground" to properly "filter", hence the mounds.
> The problem is high water table
So we both agree there's a high water table, and high water tables can give challenges for properly operating a septic system without poisoning your neighbor's water and lands
> why does the government enforce his license monopoly and force people to do business with him?
Because your runoff poisons the ground of the people around you. I'm sure they'd be singing a far different tune if their neighbors were dumping cancer causing chemicals on the ground right against their property line. Oh but this is their right to dump their wastes...
> Nobody is gonna add a political advocacy side quest to an already overpriced minor improvement
Sounds like nobody really cares about that overpriced minor improvement.
> This used to be municipally managed. Landowners built drainage as they saw fit. Municipalities managed stuff like streams and culverts and ditches and whatnot, build flood control dams and holding ponds and the like
And then we've realized after 100 years of this its led to extremely bad outcomes of nobody actually paying attention to flooding issues and we get children washed down rivers and billions of dollars of damages on random thunderstorms.
> it has the capacity for the house and nothing more
Probably true, and should probably be connected to proper sewer systems to expand and have more density instead of just poisoning their neighbors.
>And it requires so much "ground" to properly "filter", hence the mounds.
There is no point in building up if the ground is sufficient.
MN has basically decided they're not gonna bother considering what that means and just make everyone do mounds at great expense.
>So we both agree there's a high water table, and high water tables can give challenges for properly operating a septic system without poisoning your neighbor's water and lands
That's tangential. Go tee up your dishonest strawman somewhere else.
>Because your runoff poisons the ground of the people around you. I'm sure they'd be singing a far different tune if their neighbors were dumping cancer causing chemicals on the ground right against their property line. Oh but this is their right to dump their wastes...
If people are dumping cancer causing chemicals on the ground that's a separate problem than organic waste.
Forcing everyone to manage runoff (which is a seperate issue from septics) like it's a problem by default when 99% of it is clean (seriously, how dirty is the average concrete sidewalk or shed roof or whatever other impermeable surface) wastes money.
Resources are not infinite. If you actually gave a shit about the environment you'd understand that there's other more effective stuff that money could be spent on.
>Probably true, and should probably be connected to proper sewer systems
At.
What.
Cost.
> to expand and have more density instead of just poisoning their neighbors.
Once again you don't get how it works. The whole point of a septic is that it's fine as long as you don't sink your well pipe through the leech field.
I'm not gonna bother picking your comment apart any further. It's a waste of my time.
I hope someday you buy property and seek to further develop it so that you may reap what you have sown in ignorance.
> There is no point in building up if the ground is sufficient.
Sure sounds like it isn't, at least according to the county.
> we both agree there's a high water table
> That's tangential
Its fundamental to the decision of septic design, not tangential. Its not a dishonest strawman to bring up the core, fundamental concept at issue here.
> dumping cancer causing chemicals on the ground that's a separate problem than organic waste
Yeah that's right, my waste is fine, their waste is a problem. Who cares if my neighbors have to drink my shit?
> you don't get how it works.
I sure do.
> The whole point of a septic is that it's fine as long as you don't sink your well pipe through the leech field.
If the ground water is too high, you'll have more problems. Like, say, potentially some random property in the land of 10,000 lakes.
> I hope someday you buy property and seek to further develop it
I already have, and I haven't purposefully flooded out or poisoned my neighbors to do it.
> I'm not gonna bother picking your comment apart any further.
I'd potentially have a different opinion if I actually had some real facts about the property other than just some random property in a place known to have a high water table having an issue getting septic permitted. You even said yourself its got a high water table at the property! It honestly doesn't seem surprising to me to see a place like that having an issue with septic systems. But just a "trust me bro gubmit bad" attitude doesn't really change my opinion.
> Most refineries in the US are very old and are very polluting
India's Reliance is also investing $300B [0] in a Texas megarefinery [1] in specifically for cleaner and more efficient shale refining.
This is deeply technical and complex but low margins work (semiconductor fabrication falls in the same boat) which saw this industry leave for abroad in the 2000s and 2010s when other states like China and India subsidized their refinery industries to build domestic capacity for a number of petroleum byproducts with industrial applications.
This is the same strategy Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan used in the 1960s-90s as well.
> an astounding 90% of chemical feedstocks are derived from oil or gas
What I often wonder is, as the demand for oil declines, the economies of scale in oil production should, too. If that is the case, will not the price of everything with oil byproduct inputs go up? In other words, will the transition to other energy sources actually be highly inflationary?
This doesn't explain anything, but it's a drive-around tour of a now-demolished refinery in Lockport IL in 1989 that operated for 80 years. It's also interesting because it's vintage VHS footage with a quirky French soundtrack. To me it scratches the itch of found footage and backrooms (sorta), plus shows just how massive these operations are.
Cars are the most familiar to the everyday user, which is why it's the most common in perception. It's also actually one of the easier ones to solve (ie it's basically done).
Trucking is technically not to hard but logistically difficult. Aviation is extremely technically challenging. Shipping is economically difficult. Electricity generation has lots of factors, there's a lot of generation that can and has been changed easily, but some generation which is harder to switch.
If you get outside of oil into CO2 generally, there's even thornier issues. Concrete production, for example.
Oil is cooked. BYD is filing 52 patents every single day and has a 700 km in 9 minutes vehicle available TODAY ! Charging by Solar is going to be the norm. Watch : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgCYYrhL-kE
You seem to be copy-pasting this around this thread a lot, what's the deal with that?
I would agree that electric is the future, but even if all that works as advertised and we keep making more progress, it's still going to take decades to manufacture the billions of them that will be needed to seriously displace oil. I believe oil will continue to be necessary and relevant for the lifetime of everybody old enough to write posts on this thread.
Because airplanes are also a type of vehicles. So are container ships. Neither of which are very practicable with pure electric AFAICT, and are integral to modern life. (Though more marine hybrid could be practical.)
I think there should be more of a push for BEV/hybrid cars (and transport trucks), and think more home electrification would be good (though air sealing and insulation are more important, relatively speaking). But let us set reasonable expectations of what is possible at various timeframes (and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good/better).
I'm not against hoping that things will improve, but there's a lot of handwaving here, and an indeterminate path to "oil is cooked".
Remember that oil/petroleum is used in things like plastics, fertilizer, lubrication, non-natural-rubber seals/gaskets, LNG extraction has helium extraction has a by-product.
Reduction in oil-for-transportation can be reduced (thus reducing climate change effects), with oil-for-other-things still being a thing.
Two things stand out in my memory:
Even though the refinery was in full operation, we saw no other people as we walked and drove around the facility. The only staff we saw were in the control room, and they didn’t seem very busy.
The other was the almost complete lack of odors. That particular refinery is close to an upscale residential area, and the company had to be careful to keep sulfurous and other gases from escaping in order to avoid complaints and possibly fines. Some of the documentation I was translating then was about their system for detecting and preventing odor releases. As I recall, they had people walk around the perimeter and local neighborhoods regularly, just sniffing for smells from the plant. On the day we were there, I noticed petroleum odors only when we were close to one of the refining towers; otherwise, the only smell was from the nearby Tokyo Bay.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43761572
https://archive.is/kLFxg
Which leads to "Planet Money Buys Oil"
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/plan...
It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain as well as see an industry that the US used to lead in increasingly become dependent those partners.
What a massive shift in just 25 years.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-...
> It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain
You really don't want downstream in your backyard, though. The environmental oversight in these countries is...less. Meanwhile, it's a hyper competitive industry with low margins so adding new capacity only works in places with cheap labor and less red tape.
And the manual: https://archive.org/details/sim-refinery-tour-book_202006/mo...
I understand the ways that economics are very important, and that the economics still currently favor burning a large fraction of the crude oil. But I also know that the right kinds of investments and a bit of luck can often change those economics, and that would be nice to see.
Besides, as somebody already pointed out, there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of. It's nothing compared to the rocks, and a little harder to get, but getting it first would improve things a lot.
There needs to be more appreciation for the laws of thermodynamics when discussing technology. Everything is not a 1-dimensional reduced abstraction.
Of course this does not make sense in a world where we do not have enough energy to even keep datacenters open.
Edit: To clarify, I do not propose burning fossils to capture CO2 and make plastics. I am a Thermo Laws believer.
I don’t know about methane as an aromatic/hybridized ring building block. Anything is possible with chemical synthesis but is it energy feasible.
There’s always plant hydrocarbon feed stocks but I think using arable land to make plastics is dumb and also carbon intensive. (I do wear cotton clothing tho because you need to make trade offs).
https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/press-releases...
It's not a solved problem, though. Truly renewable carbon feedstocks have to source their carbon from the air, not the soil, which has to be continually measured. Land selection for carbon feedstock projects has to ensure it doesn't induce land-use change in other locations due to displacing other things like food production, etc. Otherwise the emissions and environmental harm from those downstream effects have to be included in the carbon positive/negative calculations for the project.
I've heard the statistic that 40% of the total oil pumped out of the ground just to transporting oil. We use almost half just to move it to and fro before even using it.
Is this accurate?
Let's say a barrel of oil travels 15,000 km from Saudi Arabia to Texas, gets refined, gets shipped another 10,000 km to Europe, then the last 1,000 km overland by truck.
This reasonably well sourced Reddit post [0] says big oil tankers burn 0.1% of their fuel per 1,000 km, smaller ones a bit more. Say 0.2% on aggregate, that's 5% for the whole journey, 10% because the ship is empty half the time.
From the same source, a truck burns about 3% per 1,000 km. This seems too high: for a 40,000 kg loaded truck that's less than 1 kmpl or 2.5 mpg. But let's believe it, double it for empty journeys, and we still only get 16%.
I used very conservative estimates here: surely most oil doesn't travel anywhere near that far.
Alternative thought experiment: look at the traffic on the highway. If this were true, even neglecting oil burnt for heating or electricity or aviation, you'd expect 40% of the vehicles to be tanker trucks.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jozd7/e...
I’d expect tanker trucks to carry far more fuel than the typical vehicle.
Fuel saves from slow steaming and being empty are massive.
> If this were true, even neglecting oil burnt for heating or electricity or aviation, you'd expect 40% of the vehicles to be tanker trucks.
The US has a lot of domestic pipelines [1], and a lot of the remainder is done by train [2] because trains are the most efficient way to transport bulk goods over extremely long distances.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/geography/geospatial-portal/us-petroleum...
[2] https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/AAR-US-Rail-C...
https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c...
I would not believe it at all without source.
Maybe someone got confused by "transportation" altogether being major consumer?
i.e. A friend that works on rigs is flown to and from rigs from anywhere on earth every month, then choppers out to the rig and back. Same for everyone that works on the rigs.
Hurry up and become crude oil.
EDIT: oh and it comes from Akkadian! how many Akkadian words do you know?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_distillation
Fractionating column
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractionating_column
Do they still just burn off that gas?
Often methane as a by-product of oil production is flared, because the amount is small enough that it's not worth setting up processing plants and supply chains for. Other times, the fluid is heavily contaminated by e.g. sulfur compounds, and would be costly to purify. Still other times the production of the fluid is unreliable or intermittent, and cannot sustain a continuous production process.
Although, flare gas recovery systems exist nowadays to make use of these waste gases, commonly for local power production for the refinery itself.
But the burned up ethanol would be perfectly suitable for products.
Nowadays there are some regulations to prevent that, so they may sell up ethanol at negative prices sometimes.
UPDATE: Ethene, not ethanol.
Like here is a good review https://youtu.be/325HdQe4WM4
1) using some potentially useful products as fuel to burning off things you don't want and
2) the buffer to keep non-steady inflows in a suitable ready condition for steady-state processing. (When real world steady-state is less than ideal.)
Number 2 is really what dominates the equation, as shutting in gas sources or even just turning off pipelines is incredibly more complicated than just an 'off' switch.
And turning back on is even more complicated. In the case of wells, once you shut in, turning back on may never result in the same level of production as before.
You'd need to either liquify that gas or collect it to a pipeline in order to make it useful. I remember reading that modern refineries make use of the gases instead of flaring them though I'm not sure how.
But if something is wrong, yea you can bet they will be burning off with big flares.
Also the fact that that oil is different colors (green, red, etc) and not black is always amusing.
Thankfully, the top consumer China, is building nuclear reactors at an unfathomable rate.
It would be helpful to also have a chart that shows how much gasoline or diesel as a percentage of each barrel is produced. It would be a bit variable, since not all crude oil is the same, but I think it would be close for most of it.
Some people think when diesel and regular gas prices diverge, that they should just be able to produce one at the expense of the other; but the distillation process shows that they are fundamentally different.
~50% gasoline, ~25-30% diesel.
Have Claude make you a browser plugin that does the conversion and quit whining.
He's not whining, he's saying that the people who insist on using Fahrenheit are oblivious, ignorant, backwards, uneducated, closed minded, conservative morons and since no one like that would understand, let alone appreciate, the article then why bother using antiquated units of measure that the other 8 billion people besides Americans have abandoned decades ago. The use of imperial units degrades from the overall quality of the article and limits its audience for no reason.
some people start at freezing, some people added 32 * 1.8 for some odd reason. great now chill out
1. The light and heavy distinction is covered by a measure called API gravity [1]. The higher the API gravity, the lighter the crude;
2. Refiners mix different crude types depending on what kind of refined products they want to produce;
3. Heavy crude tends to be less valuable although it's essential for some applications. Lighter crude produces generally more valuable products like gasoline, diesel and avgas. But heavy crude goes into construction (eg roads) and fuel for ships (ie bunkers));
4. Most refineries in the US are very old and are very polluting. They don't need to be this way. A new refiner would produce vastly less pollution but they're almost impossible to get permission to build now. One exception is the Southern Rock refinery currently being built in Oklahoma [2], which will be powered by largely renewable energy and produce a lot less emissions than an equivalent older refinery with the same capacity;
5. There are different blends of gasoline that the US produces. The biggest is so-called summer and winter blends. What's the differene? Additives are added to summer blends (in particular) to increase the boiling point so less of the gasoline is in gas form because that produces more smog;
6. California uses their own blends so in 2021-2022 when CA gas went to $8+, it wasn't just "gouging". It doesn't really work that way. CA requires a particular blend that only CA refineries produce so it's simple supply and demand as no new capacity gets added to CA refineries and demand goes up with population growth.
The reason for the CA blend goes back to the 80s and 90s when smog was a much bigger problem. Better vehicle emissions standards since then as well as improvements in the blends the rest of the country uses have largely made the CA blend obsolete so CA is really paying $1+/gallon more for literally no reason; and
7. California doesn't build pipelines so is entirely dependent on seaborne oil imports (~75%) despite the US being a net energy exporter. Last I checked, ~20% of that foreign oil comes through the Strait (from Iraq, mostly) so, interestingly, CA is more vulnerable to the Strait of Hormuz closure than the rest of the country.
I guess I'll add a disclaimer: I'm very much pro-renewables, particular solar. I think solar is the future. But we currently live in a world that has huge demand for oil and no alternatives for many of those uses (eg diesel, plastics, construction, industrial, avgas) so we should at least be smart about how we go forward.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API_gravity
[2]: https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2023/05/24/5-6-billion-...
1) API gravity is the density of the crude oil. Higher API = lower density. We use this unit of measure because it magnifies the differences in densities vs. using conventional units of measure.
2) Refiners in the US mix different crude types to maximize the objective function ($) of a set of constraints including crude grade pricing and availability, product demand volume and pricing, refinery unit constraints and product quality specifications. This is done using a linear program model.
3) light and heavy crude contain the same molecules but in different ratios. For example they all contain gasoline, jet fuel, diesel boiling range material and all contain some amount of material that could be turned into ship fuel or asphalt for paving roads. Heavy crude tends to sell at a discount to light crude because of the laws of supply and demand - refiners will buy a mix of whatever makes them the most money.
4) “Most refineries in the US are very old and are very polluting”While US refineries sites are old - some site have been in operation for over 100 year, the units and configuration of the refineries has evolved continuously over the years. The technology used in the refining units has evolved as well - this is not a static industry. The pollution standard for refinery operations and fuel emissions have been raised multiple times. So “Very Polluting” vs. new refineries does not pass muster. US refineries have been retrofitting wet gas scrubbers and selective catalytic reduction units to reduce emissions of SOx and NOx for decades. These technologies reduce emissions of both pollutants by over 90%. Most of the emissions come from burning the fuel that refineries produce and both legacy US refineries and new ones have to meet the same fuel quality specifications and hence produce equivalent emissions.
5. “There are different blends of gasoline that the US produces. The biggest is so-called summer and winter blends. What's the differene? Additives are added to summer blends (in particular) to increase the boiling point so less of the gasoline is in gas form because that produces more smog;”
Summer gasoline contains less butane than winter gasoline. That is the main difference. Butane is added to winter gasoline so cars start in cold weather. There are no additives added to raise the boiling point in summer - just less volatile light material added.
As an aside, Mvodern gasoline vehicles have carbon canisters to capture vapors (such as butane) from the gas tank when not in service. These are then regenerated by sweeping air through them when the vehicles are running.
6. “ California uses their own blends so in 2021-2022 when CA gas went to $8+, it wasn't just "gouging". It doesn't really work that way. CA requires a particular blend that only CA refineries produce so it's simple supply and demand as no new capacity gets added to CA refineries and demand goes up with population growth. The reason for the CA blend goes back to the 80s and 90s when smog was a much bigger problem. Better vehicle emissions standards since then as well as improvements in the blends the rest of the country uses have largely made the CA blend obsolete so CA is really paying $1+/gallon more for literally no reason;”
There is some out of date information here. California is a net importer of gasoline since refinery closures in California have outpaced reduced demand from increased fleet fuel efficiency / BEV adoption. There are refineries in Asia that export California and some other US refineries can also make California grade gasoline but this requires shipping via the Panama Canal on Jones act ships that are scarce and expensive.
P66 / Kinder Morgan are planning a pipeline / pipeline reversal that would bring refined product into California including California gasoline.
Vegetable oils are tri-glycerides. These molecules can be cracked into three long chain paraffins and a propane molecule by reacting them with hydrogen at high temperature and pressure over a catalyst. This makes a raw diesel fuel that then needs to be isomerized to lower the cloud point (basically when it begins to freeze). The end result is a drop in replacement for fossil diesel fuel that burns smoother and cleaner.
Two refineries in the SF Bay Area have converted from fossil fuel operation to manufacturing this renewable diesel.
Fun fact: over 70% of diesel sold in California is now renewable or bio diesel. Both types start with tri glycerides - either vegetable oil, waste cooking oil or animal fats.
I was blessed to have a leader who wanted us to spend a lot of time on the field, working turnarounds doing, whatever I could to be helpful, etc. to learn the business and build relationships.
Working around the refineries, especially during turnaround, was a crash course in constraint theory and economics.
Good times.
At any rate, all of that was to qualify that most people would not believe how much time and money has been wasted trying to find innovative new ways to serve and capitalize on the CA biodiesel market.
Bio fuel is what most people think of when it comes to renewable - though by way of proper refinery processes, none of the issues or perceived issues would exist especially for more modern fuel injection pumps.
Note also that it's a worldwide chart, so it includes developing countries that may not be so quick to jump on projects that are expensive right now even though they'll save a bunch of money in the long term. Though to be fair, some may have a leapfrog effect when it comes to building brand new infrastructure.
TL;DR: the efficiency of converting fossil energy resources into something useful is poor.
Coal provides 175,000,000 TJ of energy. Solar and wind provide 21,000,000 TJ.
I was mostly surprised at how critical coal still is.
https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix
It measures joules of energy as in "how much heat the gasoline we burn produces", some of which we convert to mechanical energy to drive the car, but the majority is just waste heat going out the tailpipe.
By comparison an electric car powered by solar has no tailpipe. There's still a bit of waste heat from electrical resistance, but nowhere near as much.
If we measure like this, by converting a gasoline car to electric (powered by solar for the sake of ignoring some complexity), and driving the same distance, we somehow managed to cut our "energy demand" in half. Despite the fact that we're demanding the exact same thing from the system.
If we measured "joules delivered to the tires of the car" we wouldn't have the same issue. At least until someone starts arguing about how their car is more aerodynamic so joules delivered to the tires should count for more in it.
Edit: We could also go in the other direction. Instead of reporting it as 1kw of solar energy (electricity) it could be 4kw of solar energy (the amount of sunlight shining on the solar panels)... No one does this for obvious reasons, but it's more similar to that primary energy number for fuel in many ways.
> For all energy sources, the IEA clearly defines energy production at the point where the energy source becomes a “marketable product” (and not before).
Doesn't that mean if you are burning coal to make electricity, you wouldn't count the heat output because the generated heat is not a marketable product.
[1] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/understanding-and-using-the...
> [Total Final Consumption] shows the energy that is actually used by final consumers – the energy used in homes, transportation and businesses.
I'm not buying coal at the terminal to power my television.
Looking at the chart for TFC, the wind and solar case looks even worse. Wind and solar supplies 2 million TJ compared to 36 million for coal.
All I was really trying to say from the outset is that I'm surprised at how important coal still is and how little we use renewables. I see articles here all the time about the massive advancements in solar (and wind to a lesser degree) and I had it in my head that renewables were a much larger part of the energy mix than they are.
While I do agree there's a ton of regulatory hurdle to cross to build a new refinery, lots of interviews with oil executives have stated the economics of building a new refinery aren't always great. The reasons why they aren't building isn't necessarily because the regulatory hurdles are too high, its that they don't think they'll end up making any money building them. The future demand of many refined products are uncertain, adding a lot of new capacity is quite a capital risk.
I'd love to see a lot of our ancient refineries shut down and replaced with far more modern designs, but the oil industry isn't going to do it because it probably won't be profitable.
It will be interesting to see the economics of these few new refineries coming online actually play out in the coming years.
I'm also anti-nuclear because it's too expensive, not as safe as advocates make out and the waste problem is not even remotely solved despites all the claims to the contrary. But it's also true that the same kind of anti-development tactics used against refineries are effectively used against nuclear plants such that it takes 15+ years to build a nuclear plant and the costs balloon as a result.
But there's also strong direct evidence contrary to your claim: the new refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. Why are they getting built if "the oil industry isn't going to do it"?
I'll go even further than this: if private industry won't build new refineries, the government should. In fact, that's my preferred outcome anyway.
maybe in some non-literal sense of financing them, which is what the government can (or will) offer to energy development generally. also there are numerous credits and tax favors for energy concerns.
on the flip side, how much demand for oil products is driven by ordinary consumers? some estimates say about 40% of extracted oil - it all eventually get refined, right? so the refining distinction is meaningless - in the US is refined into gasoline that goes directly into light duty vehicles (90% of all gas is light duty!), i.e., joe schmo public driving around.
if you are looking for government levers, your instincts seem right to reach for CEQA and NIMBYs. in the sense that you are looking at the bigger picture at A level of abstraction, but i disagree it is the right level of abstraction. fundamentally US oil consumption (and therefore refining) is about the car lifestyle, which is intimately intertwined with interest rates, because interest rates decide, essentially, how many americans live in urban sprawl and are obligated to use the car lifestyle as opposed to being able to choose.
so your preferred outcome, if we take it to its logical conclusion is, a non-independent fed. and look, you are already saying some stuff that sounds crank, so go all the way. the US president is saying a non-independent fed! it's not a fringe opinion anymore. but this is what it is really about. the system has organized itself around the interest rate lever specifically because it is independent, so be careful what you wish for.
Two truly new refineries in 50 years despite lots of growth of demand throughout most of those decades. The fact there's only been two in fifty years and neither is anywhere near operational is proving my point. These are largely aberrations compared to the last fifty years, and its extremely notable the larger one is being built largely by a foreign oil company wanting to diversify internationally. It hasn't even broken ground yet and you're acting like its already here.
> if private industry won't build new refineries, the government should.
Personally I'd prefer our tax dollars to be spent feeding our kids and providing healthcare instead of continuing to give handouts to billionaires, but hey lots of people have different opinions.
All of my life has been around the oil industry, I'm well bathed in it.
This is a circular statement.
The regulatory hurdles are a large part of what drive cost.
I know a venue that wants to pave a dirt lot so they can better use it for stuff. It doesn't pencil out because of stupid stormwater permitting crap that'll add $250k to the project. It'd never pay off in a reasonable timeframe. So it just continues to exist in its current grandfathered in capacity when even the most unfavorable napkin math shows that what they want is an improvement.
A few weeks ago I was party to the installation of a perimeter railing on a flat commercial roof. The railing cost more than the rest of the job it was there for. Something tells me they won't be pulling permits for petty electrical work ever again.
Oil and most other heavy industry is faced with the same sort of problems with more digits in front of the decimal.
Its not if you get the context.
> The regulatory hurdles are a large part of what drive cost
I agree, they are a large part. The things they have to do to meet the standards are expensive.
The claim was "impossible to get permission to build now". As in, the government won't let them build it. That the standards are just technically impossible to meet. They can get the permission to build it any day. Its possible to meet these standards. They just don't think it'll be worth it when they have to do it right.
There, better?
These agencies have all sorts of discretion to waive this or enforce that or interpret some third thing and yet they leverage all of it in a manner that stalls progress.
I know a guy who has a textbook perfect situation for a septic in MN. MN won't permit it not because of some law or rule or code, but because the agency has decided that they just don't do septics anymore, mounds only and are exercising their discretion to only permit those. The cost difference is a lot, but less than suing them so guess what got installed?
Commercial permitting of every kind is like that but worse because the public will tolerate way more abuse of business than abuse of homeowners.
As for your friend wanting to improve the lot but needs to do a lot of drainage fixes, he should lobby his community for property tax abatement to support the drainage improvements. If the people really want the improvement they'll be willing to help pay for the drainage. But things like failures to account for drainage leads to massive floods hurting everyone in the community. It's something we've ignored in a lot of our planning for a long time.
Both of your major examples are probably selfish takes that harm their neighbors to save someone some money.
>You mean to tell me the land of 10,000 lakes might have a shallow water table that might require mounds more often to prevent people poisoning groundwater with their literal shit? The horror.
The "land of 10k lakes" doesn't get it's water from the ground like a desert municipality. They have surface reservoirs and protected watershed areas to keep those clean enough.
The "ground" is effectively the filter. You want it to be full of shit. That's how a septic works. That's how basically all runoff cleansing measures (sand traps, grass buffers, etc, etc) work. You're basically using "nature" as the settling tanks of a water treatment plant. A septic is the same but underground.
The problem is high water table. But as long as the water table permits a septic is great.
>Without hard data about the site I'm probably going to side with the county on that one.
Did you ever think that maybe the reason the dude applied for the septic was because the engineer said "this property is great for a septic, let's do a septic"
Surely this government you think so highly of is capable of exercising judgement.
If not then why give them discretion in the first place?
What about the licensed engineer that must stamp the plans? Surely he is trustworthy? If not then why does the government enforce his license monopoly and force people to do business with him?
>As for your friend wanting to improve the lot but needs to do a lot of drainage fixes, he should lobby his community for property tax abatement to support the drainage improvements
Are you insane or just lying through your teeth. Nobody is gonna add a political advocacy side quest to an already overpriced minor improvement. They'll just bend over and take it and hope to make it up rent or resale.
>It's something we've ignored in a lot of our planning for a long time.
This used to be municipally managed. Landowners built drainage as they saw fit. Municipalities managed stuff like streams and culverts and ditches and whatnot, build flood control dams and holding ponds and the like.
Making it part of the permitting/development process is mostly an exercise in financial engineering (gets the obligation off the municipality) and is worse because you get patchwork of minimum viable solutions (that work poorly) instead of systems that are planned at the municipal or higher level to work well.
>Both of your major examples are probably selfish takes that harm their neighbors to save someone some money.
And peddling things that drive up the viability floor of development so you can feel good about saving the environment isn't.
Enjoy your $3k rent for a 500ft slum. Make sure you complain about "landlords" while you're at it.
You're competing with the person who isn't renting my buddy's ADU because the ADU never happened because the septic upgrade killed it, the minimum viable mound system got put in to save $$ and it has the capacity for the house and nothing more Y'all really served the public interest on that one.
Sure sounds like potential issues for septic systems
> protected watershed areas
And they're protected by things like being choosy about approving septic systems I'd imagine
> The "ground" is effectively the filter.
And it requires so much "ground" to properly "filter", hence the mounds.
> The problem is high water table
So we both agree there's a high water table, and high water tables can give challenges for properly operating a septic system without poisoning your neighbor's water and lands
> why does the government enforce his license monopoly and force people to do business with him?
Because your runoff poisons the ground of the people around you. I'm sure they'd be singing a far different tune if their neighbors were dumping cancer causing chemicals on the ground right against their property line. Oh but this is their right to dump their wastes...
> Nobody is gonna add a political advocacy side quest to an already overpriced minor improvement
Sounds like nobody really cares about that overpriced minor improvement.
> This used to be municipally managed. Landowners built drainage as they saw fit. Municipalities managed stuff like streams and culverts and ditches and whatnot, build flood control dams and holding ponds and the like
And then we've realized after 100 years of this its led to extremely bad outcomes of nobody actually paying attention to flooding issues and we get children washed down rivers and billions of dollars of damages on random thunderstorms.
> it has the capacity for the house and nothing more
Probably true, and should probably be connected to proper sewer systems to expand and have more density instead of just poisoning their neighbors.
>And it requires so much "ground" to properly "filter", hence the mounds.
There is no point in building up if the ground is sufficient.
MN has basically decided they're not gonna bother considering what that means and just make everyone do mounds at great expense.
>So we both agree there's a high water table, and high water tables can give challenges for properly operating a septic system without poisoning your neighbor's water and lands
That's tangential. Go tee up your dishonest strawman somewhere else.
>Because your runoff poisons the ground of the people around you. I'm sure they'd be singing a far different tune if their neighbors were dumping cancer causing chemicals on the ground right against their property line. Oh but this is their right to dump their wastes...
If people are dumping cancer causing chemicals on the ground that's a separate problem than organic waste.
Forcing everyone to manage runoff (which is a seperate issue from septics) like it's a problem by default when 99% of it is clean (seriously, how dirty is the average concrete sidewalk or shed roof or whatever other impermeable surface) wastes money.
Resources are not infinite. If you actually gave a shit about the environment you'd understand that there's other more effective stuff that money could be spent on.
>Probably true, and should probably be connected to proper sewer systems
At. What. Cost.
> to expand and have more density instead of just poisoning their neighbors.
Once again you don't get how it works. The whole point of a septic is that it's fine as long as you don't sink your well pipe through the leech field.
I'm not gonna bother picking your comment apart any further. It's a waste of my time.
I hope someday you buy property and seek to further develop it so that you may reap what you have sown in ignorance.
Sure sounds like it isn't, at least according to the county.
> we both agree there's a high water table
> That's tangential
Its fundamental to the decision of septic design, not tangential. Its not a dishonest strawman to bring up the core, fundamental concept at issue here.
> dumping cancer causing chemicals on the ground that's a separate problem than organic waste
Yeah that's right, my waste is fine, their waste is a problem. Who cares if my neighbors have to drink my shit?
> you don't get how it works.
I sure do.
> The whole point of a septic is that it's fine as long as you don't sink your well pipe through the leech field.
If the ground water is too high, you'll have more problems. Like, say, potentially some random property in the land of 10,000 lakes.
> I hope someday you buy property and seek to further develop it
I already have, and I haven't purposefully flooded out or poisoned my neighbors to do it.
> I'm not gonna bother picking your comment apart any further.
I'd potentially have a different opinion if I actually had some real facts about the property other than just some random property in a place known to have a high water table having an issue getting septic permitted. You even said yourself its got a high water table at the property! It honestly doesn't seem surprising to me to see a place like that having an issue with septic systems. But just a "trust me bro gubmit bad" attitude doesn't really change my opinion.
Cool beans buddy. Have a good night.
India's Reliance is also investing $300B [0] in a Texas megarefinery [1] in specifically for cleaner and more efficient shale refining.
This is deeply technical and complex but low margins work (semiconductor fabrication falls in the same boat) which saw this industry leave for abroad in the 2000s and 2010s when other states like China and India subsidized their refinery industries to build domestic capacity for a number of petroleum byproducts with industrial applications.
This is the same strategy Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan used in the 1960s-90s as well.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-17/ambani...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-...
What I often wonder is, as the demand for oil declines, the economies of scale in oil production should, too. If that is the case, will not the price of everything with oil byproduct inputs go up? In other words, will the transition to other energy sources actually be highly inflationary?
https://youtu.be/QAkzUAM_ylA?si=VPQuoe7qM_XbbCTh
Trucking is technically not to hard but logistically difficult. Aviation is extremely technically challenging. Shipping is economically difficult. Electricity generation has lots of factors, there's a lot of generation that can and has been changed easily, but some generation which is harder to switch.
If you get outside of oil into CO2 generally, there's even thornier issues. Concrete production, for example.
If you are seriously interested in these issues, I highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/c/EngineeringwithRosie
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/307194/top-oil-consuming...
I would agree that electric is the future, but even if all that works as advertised and we keep making more progress, it's still going to take decades to manufacture the billions of them that will be needed to seriously displace oil. I believe oil will continue to be necessary and relevant for the lifetime of everybody old enough to write posts on this thread.
By "vehicles" do you mean "cars"?
Because airplanes are also a type of vehicles. So are container ships. Neither of which are very practicable with pure electric AFAICT, and are integral to modern life. (Though more marine hybrid could be practical.)
I think there should be more of a push for BEV/hybrid cars (and transport trucks), and think more home electrification would be good (though air sealing and insulation are more important, relatively speaking). But let us set reasonable expectations of what is possible at various timeframes (and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good/better).
Yet.
The surge in electric cars is a driving force for new tech - higher energy density batteries, faster charge rates, longer life, etc etc.
For shipping it’s only a matter of when.
Planes are harder, but just today electric choppers started flying in NYC. It’s coming.
Remember that oil/petroleum is used in things like plastics, fertilizer, lubrication, non-natural-rubber seals/gaskets, LNG extraction has helium extraction has a by-product.
Reduction in oil-for-transportation can be reduced (thus reducing climate change effects), with oil-for-other-things still being a thing.