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I think this may cause a lot of other petroleum products to become more expensive, perhaps even uneconomical. Take bitumen. It hos already gotten progressively
by audunw 1y ago
I think this may cause a lot of other petroleum products to become more expensive, perhaps even uneconomical.
Take bitumen. It hos already gotten progressively more expensive over the last few decades. It makes sense: car fuel economy has gotten better. So for every mile we drive we need to refine less fuel, which means we get less bitumen as a byproduct. So the amount of bitumen available per vehicle-mile is progressively less over time.
This effect will become exponentially worse as EVs cause fuel consumption to fall off a cliff.
It’s not just gonna be bitumen. The effect may be less pronounced for the lighter fractions, but in general we will have to do more processing, and the oil industry will lose a lot of its “economies of scale”. Fuels are a huge share of the output of oil distillation.
- aurareturn 1y agoYes, I too wonder how declining car fuel consumption will affect petroleum by products. A lot of our things are made from petroleum including nearly all plastic.
- kjellsbells 1y agoNot a chemist, but iirc plastic isnt made from gasoline but via LPG > olefins > plastic. But even if it was, isn't that just the magic of fractional distillation? You can stop cracking anywhere on the spectrum between asphalt sludge and gasoline so if the demand for gasoline dropped off, you would still be able to produce other products.
- adammarples 1y agoI'm not sure I buy this analysis, because world crude production just seems to climb. I would hazard a guess that a huge amount of roads have been built over the last few decades (in China)