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Oil isn't a binary for energy though. There's a growing need for it in other industries, from plastics to pharma to fertilizers. Moreover, oil production is cur
by fakedang 1y ago
Oil isn't a binary for energy though. There's a growing need for it in other industries, from plastics to pharma to fertilizers. Moreover, oil production is currently staying high because the OPEC cartel can't simply afford to shut down well production - only scale it down very gradually and pray that no one finds out (which is impossible given that oil is sold on the spot market). On the other hand, American Big Oil is dependent on global prices - too low and drilling deep or fracking becomes infeasible for them, while high prices mean economic slowdown (due to domino effects on other industries) until OPEC bandies together to stabilize prices to reasonable levels (which is $65-75 per barrel).
Currently we're in a situation where OPEC, remembering 2014 and hell bent on diversification, is offloading record quantities of crude into the market, to ensure that American production stays infeasible.
- nonethewiser 1y agoYes, hence more demand for oil
- metalman 1y agoless d3mand for oil, more demand for energy, much more to the point is the endless potential of abundent solar energy and the comming crisis caused by the end of scarcity your grandkids will dealing meems of archiologists finding fossil fossil fuel cars
- fpoling 1y agoAnything that needs oil can be produced from coal. There are estimates that liquid fuel produced from coal can compete with oil when oil cost is 80-100 USD/barrel. The catch is that making coal liquid requires a lot of energy. If that energy comes from coal itself it is a very dirty process. But if energy comes from renewables or nuclear, it is not an issue. In fact with renewables and storage leading to cheaper electricity, the price competitiveness of coal-based liquid fuels will only get better.
- elzbardico 1y agoWhy would you extract those things from coal, when right now there's plenty of oil?
- kragen 1y agoCoal is enormously more abundant.
- fakedang 1y agoYet more costly and injurious to extract.
- defrost 1y agoThat's highly variable - a significantly large volume of coal mined globally is via bucket-wheel excavators / mobile strip mining machines. That's overburden removal followed by near surface bed extraction with machines - no underground mining, underground being the mining domain that sees high injury and death rates. Regardless, fuel from oil or fuel from coal is still fuel from dead and buried organics, from resurfaced long buried carbon products, and still introducing more CO2 into the atmosphere which is counter productive toward any goal of reducing the insulation factor of the atmosphere.
- fpoling 1y agoLong term if people would really like to do something with CO2 emissions then CO2 captured from atmosphere can be used for chemical processes instead of coal/oil.
- defrost 1y agoGot a link to a Technical Economical Feasibility Report on this? As in, what can practically be achieved in the real world at large within the next 25 years that can be immediately funded with a forward capital loan to break ground on a plant within 12 to 18 months and start operating within five years? How does actual atmospheric carbon capture scale out within a useful time frame?