Posted on 06/22/2022 8:57:49 PM PDT by george76
That’s sad. My cousin has bought the spin. I was just talking to him and he said “if the republicans didn block build back better gas would be cheap.” Ech....
Unfortunately boosting oil won’t help much. Refineries are running flat out at 98~% capacity. The current issue is lack of refinery capacity relative to demand. The USA lost over a million bbl per day of refinery capacity during the rona that’s never coming back. We have a expanded monetary supply chasing too few goods combined with a critical loss in capacity to produce those goods. More gasoline is not coming from USA sources we are maxed out. Any additional supply must be imported now and this will be the case for the rest of the era of oil as no new refineries will be built in the USA the fiscal policy is not there nor is the environmental protection agency going to ever issue permits for it. It takes nearly a decade to build out a massive refinery and two decades to pay it off. Wall Street is never going to fund a capital expenditure like that when there will only be less demand going forward via EVs and demand destruction via world carbon policy that is not in the power for the USA to stop. The era of cheap fuel ended with the rona rapid adaptation to the new reality will be the only way forward. The rest of the world has some refinery capacity being built but that is to service the fast growing global middle classes in Africa,China and India they will compete with us on the fungible global distillate fuel market’s when the EU is willing to pay $3+ per litre of fuel and it only costs a few cents per litre to ship diesel to the EU is why it’s being shipped from the east and Gulf Coast to European markets they are out pricing us and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future until a new market equilibrium is reached somewhere around $7 per US gallon I would expect. Those are still $2 less than the EU but the profit motive to ship at those prices here is vastly diminished.
It would be nearly impossible for an individual to drill, dewater and separate, ththen refine,hydrocrack,desulfur,remove the benzene and other cyclohydrocarbons that are all carcinogens and illegal in gasoline now. Then distill the cleaned fuel into at least 87 RON/M2.
You can however turn virtually anything sweet or starchy into 190 proof hydrous ethanol and run a properly tuned engine on it. All you need is a column still and some sour mash starter cultures. Henry Ford designed his first cars including the Model T to run on hydrous ethanol because at the time gasoline was a specialty product considered waste by standard oil who dumped it literally into the ditch. Only once standard oil realised it could be used in the Model T and Model A and Fordson tractors did they then set out on a campaign to crush small distilleries making ethanol. Guess who was a key player in prohibition you standard oil funded it BIG TIME. Prior to prohibition farmers distilled ethanol for lighting,cooking, fuels for tractors which were high technology at the time. The Fordson being a breakthrough just like the Model T and both could run on ethanol,kerosene made from coal not oil at the time or naptha solvent which is what gasoline eventually became. Spend some time reading about Henry Ford and his genius. He also proved that even in his day a single acre of potatoes could make enough alcohol to plow 100 additional acres of crops and harvest them too. Using of course his Fordson tractor machines. He had no idea that cellulose ethanol would become possible which quadruples the yields of ethanol per acre using the stalks and leaves and roots of a plant in addition to the starches. He would be flabbergasted by the numbers possible today.
I didn't do that!
Or even easier...
Oil is not that fungible as far as pricing. The oil price in the US would go way down if we were fracking to the maximum and if we limited crude oil exports. My guess is $80 per barrel crude. Maybe 75
We have the Ethyl Palpitate skills in our family.
We could supply our whole extended family.
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