Hate to say it, but we need to increase oil and gas output immediately
nitter.net
nitter.net
> Yeah i don't think the common American household can handle $5-6 gal
Interesting how incentives work. Elsewhere countries are seeing $8/gal, had $6/gal before this all happened. But you consequently have more fuel efficient vehicles[1] & people reducing miles driven[2]
(& don't tell me the US is big; Canada is bigger. There's plenty room for improvement)
1: https://morningconsult.com/2019/07/31/united-states-risks-la...
2: https://internationalcomparisons.org/environmental/transport...
I would be highly in favor of completely overhauling US infrastructure into medium density walkable towns and cities and switching the ~300 million cars on the road to more fuel efficient models, but jacking up the price of gas by 3x in 18 months will just impoverish and immiserate millions of Americans who will have to choose between paying for gas vs. food, rent, health care.
It's like saying this gym rat can squat 450 lbs and is much healthier for it, so you ought to get off the couch and squat 450 lbs tomorrow.
https://www.thecivilengineer.org/news-center/latest-news/ite...
If one picks where they live carefully, I think most people could go car-free much easier than they believe.
I have never owned a car and mostly ride a bike for transportation. I have lived in rural Maryland, the DC suburbs, Austin, Baltimore, and Buffalo. Of those places the only one where I found a car was necessary was rural Maryland. I would use a ride-sharing service periodically in the worse cities like Buffalo.
Yes, the particular neighborhood may be more expensive, but in my experience having a car costs a fair bit more than the increase in rent from living in a more expensive neighborhood.
(Note that I'm saying that a small number of individuals can go car-free more easily than they believe. Once a huge number of people start doing this, however, I'm sure it would run into problems.)
You lived in a big European city. Feel free to tell someone living in rural France, or Ireland, that they must live without an automobile.
Well, I didn't.
I lived in European towns/cities from ~10k to 350k people. Rural areas exist obviously but compared to US suburbs or even most US urban areas we're talking far far smaller % of people who need a car for most aspects of day-to-day life in Europe.
Yes, if you don't mind crushing the economic lower classes.
Inflation in general, and gas prices in particular, are devastating to the lower rungs of the economic ladder. They shouldn't have to pay for economic policies implemented by the yacht class.
Increasing production might be an option. Loosening sanctions on Venezuela and/or Iran might be another. We may have to pick our battles.
Russian gas is still flowing to Europe, despite the brutal sanctions. Once those pipes stop pumping it, how long until Russia itself collapses on its own? No need to engage in direct confrontation with them.
I have seen so much misunderstanding of how oil works online this week.
1) You don’t just “open a valve” to increase oil production.
It is extremely capital & time-intensive to extract hydrocarbons.
You have to get permits approved, construct locations, drill the well, frac the well, build production infrastructure etc.
You are talking a 6-month cycle at best.
Then you layer other constraints on top of that:
-labor shortages cause a limited supply of oilfield services so you can’t bring wells on as quickly
-steel shortages make sourcing pipe difficult
2) Now you’re asking O&G companies to ramp up capex to increase production.
It’s a very tough ask when the feds have created so much uncertainty from a regulatory perspective with rhetoric and actions such as banning drilling on federal lands, pulling pipeline permits, etc.
Essentially the message is:
“There isn’t a place for oil and gas in this world, you’re being phased out.”
It’s hard to make investments with those headwinds, but now that’s what’s being asked.
3) Americans have become addicted to cheap oil and gas.
That was enabled by investors subsidizing the costs over the last decade and incinerating their capital.
Now investors want O&G companies to focus on sustainable free cashflow and return capital.
Shocker.
This has caused O&G companies to go into maintenance mode and limit production growth.
4) Activists have been pushing for the divestment of fossil fuels.
Countless endowment funds, institutions, banks and other entities have announced their withdrawal from O&G.
(Preventing the ability to finance energy and support humans isn’t looking so noble now)
5) Now oil and gas companies are being painted as the bad guys for not producing enough oil.
Despite years of capital being sucked out of the space, increasing hurdles to build infrastructure and activists attacking the industry, it’s now the O&G companies who are at fault.
They are at fault for something that they can not physically do in such a short amount of time.
They operate at low prices and give Americans an extremely prosperous life, the response:
“You’re killing the planet, we’re going to end you, leave it in the ground”
They stop chasing production growth and leave it in the ground, the response:
“Greedy oil companies only care about profits, they don’t care about human suffering or else they would increase production”
People in the O&G industry have every right to be upset right now.
They wake up and work hard to power the world and support human flourishing, just to be told by critics on twitter that they’re evil.
Now those critics are in desperate need of help and the only people that can save them are the ones they have been demonizing for the last 10 years.
Bad energy policy and misguided activists have led to this problem.
Full stop.
People are getting a hard dose of reality on energy production and realizing how critical it is to society.
The oil companies didn’t cause this.
Which still absolutely has to be true! We can talk all we want about energy production being critical to society, but so is a functioning planet!
Personally, I've long seen nuclear energy as the least-bad way out of this, but that can hardly be done with the flip of a switch either...
> “You’re killing the planet,
These are both true. We absolutely need to move in the short medium and long term away from oil and gas, for climate and geopolitical reasons, but oil and gas have underpinned the global rise in living standards.
The difference that is we now have the technology to maintain that standard of living without burning fossil fuels to propel our cars or heat out homes. Fossil fuel extraction based economies and companies are painfully aware of that, and that's a factor in what is happening now.
We should transition toward using petroleum and gas mostly as an industrial feedstock (plastics, fertilizer) and limit it to use cases that are hard to move to renewables (aviation).
None of the above requires incredible new inventions, just the will to switch to less carbon intensive energy production and storage technologies.
Of course there will be the need to adjust supply up and down in the short term. That's what the strategic petroleum reserves are for. Perhaps we should increase the capacity of those for these situations.
Hard to say if the current situation will cause a reversal of that policy, but it will be used mercilessly by the political opposition in the upcoming elections.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/climate/carbon-biden-dril...
I think the biggest motivational issue will be expectations for the duration of any oil sanctions. If producers think it is likely to only be short-term, there won't be as much motivation to bring extra production online.
They should also be questioned as to why they have so many leases they haven't used and why the active wells in the Permian Basis are not running at their max safe rate of extraction currently.
Now it turns out that both oil and wheat output were quite crucial. Too bad it did not impact the prosperity and political stability of neither Russia nor Ukraine.
We did not get the "better peace" even as the rest of world relied on our commodities.