Quote:
Originally Posted by ladyofnorth
Where does the oil go that BP is drilling off the coast off USA???
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What oil?
Do you realize that you answered your own question?
The operand is "drilling."
"Drilling" and "pumping" are not the same thing.
Those are test wells out in the Gulf. If they hadn't blowed up and killed all them guys, they still wouldn't be pumping oil, because they have to do the assays first.
You know what cut points are, right? If you know something the oil companies don't, give me you e-mail address and I'll be your agent. I'll be a billionaire, so that would make you a $100 Billionaire (I'm a nice agent -- I'd only take 2.5%).
I'll take you out to the various oil fields and you can do whatever it is that you do and tell the oil companies the sulfur content, how much nickel, vanadium, mercury, arsenic, uranium and other metals are in the oil, and give all the cut-points plus the chemical formulas.
If you can't do that, then the oil companies will have to use the old-fashioned method and sent barrels up to the lab for testing. They'll take a few hundred barrels and burn them with a catalyst, then another few hundred and burn them with another catalyst, and so on for all the different catalysts they have, and the products that come off during the refining, they'll have to send that to the lab and study for its chemical properties and exact formula.
By the way, that takes about 2-3 years, because they'll run the catalyst tests a number of times for statistical average.
See, oil isn't like water, it's more like wine. Is all wine red? Nope. Is all wine sweet? Nope. Does all wine have the same alcohol content? Nope. Oils come in all different kinds, and they have different uses and purposes. You want to drill in ANWAR? Why? That's heavy oil. You can't refine the heavy oil you got so you export it. And a paltry 9 gallons of gasoline per barrel of heavy oil, yeah that will really cause the gasoline supply to increase and lower gasoline prices. Not.
You want to drill in the Gulf? That's a roll of the die. Maybe you get light sweet or sweet intermediate crude, then again maybe it's high-sulfur. If you find a field of 2 Billion barrels of sour intermediate, it might as well be 2 Billion barrels of goat's urine.
If that oil BP was drilling to get to is high-sulfur, it is totally useless to you. No such thing as "high-sulfur gasoline."
They do have high-sulfur diesel, but you can only use it in dirt bikes, off-road vehicles like tractors, combines and harvesters, ATVs, boats and such. Can't use high-sulfur diesel in trains, trucks or cars, because everyone complained that it was stinky, and the EPA said it was stinky and so it was banned.
Tell the EPA to change the law? Okay. You got enough money to buy a new car? Because that's what you'll have to do if you want to use high-sulfur gasoline. Your emission system, fuel injectors, the computer brain that mixes that all up and controls/monitors the fuel process is for low-sulfur gasoline. You'd either have to spend $1000s to replace the engine or buy a new car.
It would probably be cheaper to pay the extra buck per gallon than to buy a new car.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ladyofnorth
Does anyone in WASHINGTON CARE????
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No, why should they? You're the one who wants to drive and live way out in Sprawlville where you have to drive 20 miles just to get to anywhere, and only pay $0.50 per gallon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by markg91359
Oil prices are high because the American people made a deliberate decision decades ago to forgo mass transit and trains in favor of private passenger cars and interstate freeways.
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No, they didn't.
General Motors purchased all of the
private mass transit systems in the US and ran them into the ground (for a nice tax dodge) in order to force Americans to purchase cars. That is not a conspiracy theory, that is a documentary video (which has aired repeatedly on PBS and other networks for more than 2 decades) in which the GM vice-president in charge of the "screwing Americans project" confesses in front of god, country and his own mother.
Quote:
Originally Posted by markg91359
You might as well blame all the Presidents (or none of them) for our current energy predicament.
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Sure, you can do that. That's a lot of tax payer dollars thrown away, and even more thrown away on what has become near perennial re-surfacing projects.
Quote:
Originally Posted by markg91359
However, the only longterm solution to this policy is alternative fuels that will free us from dependence on oil from other countries.
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Alternative fuels is a total failure and will not create any cost savings. What alternative fuels will do is suck even more food crops off of the market to be used as fuels and cause food prices to rise offsetting any potential cost-savings. In fact, you could end up paying more for the alternative fuels than for gasoline, even if gasoline was a constant $5/gallon.
You need a cogent coherent unified fuel policy for the combustion engine, and the best thing going now is natural gas, until you can find an alternative to the combustion engine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by markg91359
If Americans really want a way out of foreign oil dependence, there is a way out...
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There is no way out.
You are dependent on foreign oil. Period.
Even if you cut off foreign imports tomorrow, the only thing that would happen is you would start importing chemical feed-stocks from foreign oil refined in foreign countries.
If you banned the import of chemical feed-stocks from foreign oil refined in foreign countries, then you will have to start importing pharmaceuticals from foreign countries.
A lot of you are under the mistaken impression that you import foreign oil for gasoline. You did. Back in the 1970s.
In the late 1960s it was realized that the only way to meet America's future demand for gasoline was to import foreign light oil. Heavy oil only yields 6 gallons per 42 gallon barrel. Heavy oil refining capacity in the US was maxed out. Those refineries were built between the 1880s and 1920s and they were old and decrepit, despite having been upgraded and modernized where possible, and being built in urban areas because no yet understood the dangers of chemical contamination, they could not be expanded.
No matter what, new refineries had to be built. You can build more heavy oil refineries putting out 6 gallons per barrel, or you could build light oil refineries putting out 22 gallons per barrel.
6 gallons heavy oil versus 22 gallons light oil. Which will meet America's needs? Common sense says you import light oil.
Yes, intermediate grade oils were yielding 11-13 gallons per barrel, but those refineries were also maxed out, and old, and 22 gallons per barrel is still the most common sense economical way to go.
Later, in the 1990s, better catalysts, better cracking still designs and better refining methods allowed better yields of gasoline, so you can now get 9 gallons from heavy oil and 16-19 gallons from intermediate grade oil, but you only have two sweet intermediate fields, West Texas Intermediate and Illinois Intermediate (which is just about depleted).
Something else happened in the 1990s. Better laboratory processes, better chemical processes with robust catalysts, and better industrial (that is computerized) processes allowed you to produce and use chemical feed stocks.
And that is why you import foreign oil now, not for the gasoline, but for the feed stocks that make your standard of living "superior."
Cut off foreign oil, and you just killed 10 Million Americans. Plavix and all those drugs made since 1994 are made using organic alcohols and other chemical compounds derived solely and exclusively from foreign light oil. There is no substitute. You cannot get those chemical feed-stocks from heavy or intermediate grade oils. It's a matter of chemistry. So all those people with heart conditions and strokes and many other life threatening illnesses will die if they can't get those drugs.
Sure, you can make birth control pills from heavy oil. That's where your first birth control pills came from. But the birth control pills on the market recently, and the "patch" are made solely, exclusively, from foreign light oil.
You would also put 20 Million people out of work. Givaudan and Wild Flavors make artificial colorings and flavorings for the foods that you would never eat without those artificial flavorings and colorings that are made solely, exclusively, from foreign light oil. All the frozen food manufacturers in the US go out of business if there's no foreign light oil. Hormel and Bob Evans that make those ready to eat foods, they have to stop production.
No more Tide liquid laundry detergent. You'll have to go back to using powdered detergent. All those super-sized grocery stores? Not any more. They'll be full of empty shelves without the products that are made from foreign light oil.
You're married to foreign oil.
You might not like the marriage, but ain't no judge gonna grant a divorce, and if a judge does, it will be just like a real divorce. Your standard of living will decline and slide all the way back to the 1970s.
You want to see what your life would be like, go get a JC Penny, Sears, Montgomery Ward and an Avon Cosmetics catalog from 1970.
I'm serious. Go look at those catalogs and compare them to catalogs today so you can see all the things you won't have anymore.
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