The U.S. Diesel Shortage Is Worsening
oilprice.com
oilprice.com
Perhaps the diesel is not ULSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-low-sulfur_diesel
Is it? I thought the whole deal with dieselgate was that they couldn't get it to be more efficient and comply with emissions regulations, so they ended up cheating.
I have a few acquaintances that are ripping diesel motors out of their boats due to the cost of operation and going electric -- problem is that many of the motor controllers used are back ordered due to the supply issues that are all over the transistor/electronics markets already that haven't been remediated.
well, at least battery prices are dropping with the market volumes.
Of course there are practical obstacles in terms of safety and charging with high-voltage electrical systems and battery charging in a marine environment. Everything is constantly corroding.
Heat pumps are in vogue now but usually they are supplemented with fireplaces, wood stoves or pellet stoves.
[1] https://www.mass.gov/service-details/how-massachusetts-house...
I suppose the question that I have is what has modernity done to us? Are people just used to a comfort standard that is getting less achievable (I'd be pretty miserable in summer without HVAC myself), or is this a life and death issue that people are no longer able live in warm enough shelter to survive?
Propping up artificially cheap fuel prices, hides the true cost of things and messes up our decision making.
I argue our stability, happiness and well-being would be improved by drastically higher diesel prices. Bring it.
When the UK electrified a lot of its railways in the 1970s, some diesel locomotives were converted so they could run on diesel or electric. If they really wanted, US railroad companies could electrify their tracks in stages, and continue to use their existing rolling stock.
But yes; unfortunately the Germans keep shutting down their nuclear reactors. There's a lot of education that needs to happen.
France on the other hand is almost completely (80% or so?) nuclear and the Swiss have hydro and wind. So there's some wins there.
They elected a gas stooge who sabotaged wind development. Then went even further right wing.
> France on the other hand is almost completely (80% or so?) nuclear
70% and not this year. Over half of it is offline.
They at least had the sense to build about 20% renewables which is working fine.
Currently, electricity generation in the UK is 43% renewable (I'm including hydro and "bio-energy"), 16% nuclear, and 40% fossil fuels.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#E...
The climate is breaking down and people are cruising around in trucks like that? I don’t know…
"5-10%" works out to once every 1-2 weeks. That seems like a pretty good reason to have such a truck, considering that if you actually needed it it would be a huge hassle to rent one. I haven't done the math on this, but I imagine that if you used it even once every 3-4 weeks you'd come out ahead on time/money.
Never-mind that if they were using the vehicle (sedan, pickup or otherwise) right up to the limit of it's capacity the majority of the time many here would be hand wringing about how they really should be using something with more spare capacity. This is fundamentally a societal expectations problem. People expect you to have more vehicle than you need. If you are maxing out what you have regularly you are "doing it wrong".
While true, when you need them, there is no substitute. So the answer is to have two vehicles, which may not be economically viable.
Also, everybody has really strong opinions on the legitimacy of owning a truck until they need help moving.
If I'm moving, I can rent a truck from Home Depot which has a considerably larger bed for well under one percent of the extra cost of buying a super-sized truck. If I move less frequently than every day for a year, I'm still ahead by tens of thousands of dollars even before you consider how much extra I'd be paying to burn more fuel, which costs more per gallon, for every trip where I'm not doing something which needs that much towing capacity. You can pay a moving company to move your stuff multiple times a year, save tens of thousands of dollars, and not even have to pack your stuff.
It’s often difficult to sell a base-model truck, and you won’t get much for it.
Ours is a 2001 F350 Lariat Super Duty. Even at two decades old, we could sell it in hours for $25k+.
This is definitely true, but as a former truck owner, I can tell you that's not how it works at all.
"Hey, man, I really need some help moving, can you bring your truck over, I'll have pizza and beer!"
Not to mention the rent-a-truck is pretty new. Yes, UHaul and the others exist, but they don't compete with "oh yeah, I know a guy with a truck."
The problem with the pizza and beer approach is that it only works for short moves - if you have anything like a substantial drive it’s a lot easier to rent a U-Haul so you can make one trip rather than multiplying time in traffic by half a dozen trips.
Ideally there'd be better systems for outright collective ownership, that would make sense & have some safeguards against potentially less than good co-owners. Alas most collective ownership propositions come with a tragedy of the commons, an inability to assess who are the good & bad players & ways for the good to hold.
Same practical purpose as all the 4Runners that HNers with 2-kid households own, fulfilling societal expectations for amount of excess vehicle that is required at that point on the socio-economic ladder.
The only reason you'd get hammered for that question is the implicit assumption that nobody who owns an HD truck needs it.
You might see me drive to the store once in a while in my F250. So you'd probably wonder why I needed such a massive gas guzzling grocery getter? Well, because that day my wife took the Bolt and I had no other option. People fall for this fallacy all the time, assuming that if you see someone underutilizing their truck, they must always be underutilizing it.
But I only drive mine a thousand miles a year, and except for rare occasions only when a travel tailer is attached behind it. The rest of the time we drive my wife's Bolt, and I'll wager that my average fuel consumption is lower than most people who only have an economy car.
Buy a smaller car?
Walk?
With that set up a situation can arise where the one efficient car is in use while the other driver needs to be somewhere. It is completely irrational to expect them to maintain a 3rd vehicle for this rare case.
So your solution to the incremental pollution caused by driving “too much vehicle”… is to mine, refine, and manufacture a second vehicle?
Or just walking to get groceries.
When you rent a car, it has to sit in the rental car parking lot. They have to build the facility. An employee has to drive there to do all your paperwork and rent it to you. The rental gets fully cleaned and inspected after a day of use by another set of employees. They all have to eat to work and a lot of energy is used to produce that food. All of this and more is encapsulated in the price.
LOL, no. It can sit in my garage getting used every couple weeks for the next 10 years. That's what I do with trucks. They are utility vehicles.
Smaller than a Bolt? The HD truck is my tow pig. And please don't suggest renting one as an alternative, that is a non-starter. I'll just assume you're unfamiliar with the mechanics of towing an RV.
F350 are rare in Europe, which does not mean that they (or similar vehicles) are not available, but they are also not as practical to use as in the US.
Good context here!
Our truck has a listed towing capacity of 12,500# - 5,670 kg.
My dad and I are driving ~90mi tomorrow each way to pick up an inline bale trailer he just bought. We checked hay prices in that area, and they're cheaper than what we can buy locally - enough cheaper that we bought eight bales to bring back with us. Each bale is ~1,200# (+/- ~200#), for a combined load weight of 9,600#. The trailer weighs 2,700#, so we'll be towing ~12,300#. The truck itself is another ~7,000#, and by the time you figure in fuel and occupants, we'll have a GCWR of right at 20,000#.
In short, tomorrow I'll be driving that truck and responsible for TEN TONS going down the road.
The BMW X3 would have to make four trips hauling two bales each: 2,400 kg = 5,290#; the trailer weighs 2,700#, two bales weigh 2,400#, leaving only 190# of excess capacity. Even then, there's no way I'd be comfortable driving an X3 with that much weigh, that distance - and that's not even considering that the trailer is a gooseneck.
I think of the truck as ~1/4 of a semi tractor. We can haul most things ourselves, more cheaply and with less environmental impact than hiring a professional hauler.
Ah, a city dweller. Let me put it this way: in the part of the country where your food comes from, walking to the store would take hours one way along two lane roads with no sidewalks.
Nope.
I could walk, but that would take a nice chunk of the afternoon for multiple trips.
Because we’re able to afford multiple vehicles, it spends most of its life sitting in my parents’ driveway. They drive it once a month or so to avoid the issues that come with a vehicle not being used at all, but otherwise it makes little sense to drive it when both I and my parents have more efficient vehicle for day-to-day stuff.
Honestly, I understand what you’re getting at, but it’s a matter of perspective. Both I and my dad keep a current Class A CDL so we can drive that truck with a loaded trailer. When we need it, the alternative is hiring a semi - and it’s significantly both less expensive and less polluting per mile than a semi tractor.
If they think it’s somehow less money to buy a $80K truck than to rent a truck once a year, cool.
But to say it should somehow not be allowed on the road is absurd.
By this logic, every vehicle would have a different punishment associated with it.
For pollution, I am not aware of anything currently, but it'd be reasonable to treat that similarly (probably as a tax that funds treatment of pollution-caused health issues rather than insurance, since the harms are more distributed).
> If they have an accident and kill someone, should that be punished more harshly than regular since they chose to pick a more dangerous form of transport?
If the vehicle is not street legal, yes. If the vehicle is street legal, and the driver was insured, and otherwise not negligent, then no. Perhaps the vehicle should't be street legal, and in that case the laws should be changed moving forward (but penalties should not be applied retroactively).
Incidentally, in the US, the Department of Transportation seems better than usual for government agencies in actually doing a cost-benefit analysis where they show their work with actual numbers: see https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/2016...
B) the wear on the road is a fourth order funtion of weight. It would be fantastic if taxes were also proportional.
Having driven tractors, everything from small Renaults to large JD in tight and some larger trucks on narrow roads in EU/CH, the two aren't Comparable, one actually has utility and is needed in keeping people fed the other is just some eyesore on which to project your insecurities onto ~80% of the time.
These monstrosity should just have immense gas guzzler/taxes attached to them like in Switzerland and the Nordic countries and allow for reductions if its proven to have actual use and isn't just something that gets used to 'go to the walmart' as most are in the US.
Funny enough, gas price alone isn't deterring anyone, Hawaii has always vied with CA in as price and they are everywhere--perhaps just as many as I saw in Texas per capita.
Normally when I want to take one of our tractors somewhere… I pull it with the aforementioned truck.
This should have been widespread 15 years ago (which would have been 10 years after the introduction of the Prius).
But lets not pretend there aren't millions of trucks driven by suburbanites mesmerized by big RAM huge grill you aren't a pussy if you drive a truck advertising.
They might have cattle trucks, they might have tractors, but having a "big truck" isn't really required.
If yoi compare an average M3 owner who Flys for work or vacation every 4 months to me, who has a Diesel f250 that is driven only to tow a travel trailer RV which we use every few months for work/pleasure travel, along with the relative carbon usage for say a hotel and all its laundry vs. staying in my RV I believe it's a wash.
Many industries are "beyond a crisis", which makes many of the shortfalls in supply/production/service quality, just a lingering fact that was omnipresent prepandemic and even pre-21st century.
I can agree that diversification is a good thing.
I haven't looked into it, but this article states Henry Ford wanted hemp biofuels to run the model-T. The hemp rush would satisfy your high fructose corn syrup desires too.
The climate and terrain are different everywhere, so these changes may be regional efforts instead of global.
Its not the same old song and dance, whatever it is.
Except that it is... If there's land that you can grow food on, you'll have price competition to grow fuel on it.
Hopefully that will create some incentives to switch to electrical systems and invest in renewables.
We’ve messed ourselves up so hard relying on oil companies the way we do, how’s it’s the peasants that are paying for endless price gouging.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_unc_dcu_nus_m.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
Here’s a map of the places that create diesel from crude oil. Note the north & south east where these shortages are occurring, and limited to.
https://atlas.eia.gov/datasets/6547eda91ef84cc386e23397cf834...
It has been 45 years since a >200,000 barrel per day refinery was built in the US.
1998-2015 saw 0 upgrades to existing capacity or new builds. Since 2015, a handful of <50,000 barrel per day refineries have been built, but every single one is in Texas.