US oil lobby launches ad campaign to promote oil as 'vital' to global security
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
We need a withdraw plan. Where we shift usage from fossil fuel to other energies (hopefully less damaging for environment, and more sustainable).
People asking to cut the production without a plan are as dangerous than people who are asking to keep using fossil fuel.
I can imagine year 2060 when there is a magnetic rail link between Asia and Europe. Only some commodities like wheat go through Suez.
I know almost nothing about these places, despite an Azerbaijani coworker, so this may be unrealistic for other reasons.
Think how far along we would have been had Reagan not been a contrarian asshole who took brand new solar panels off the whitehouse just because. The man signed off on he SuperConducting-SuperCollider because he understood how valuable science investment was, then promptly ignored that for national energy policy because his friends preferred to get rich.
people really don't get it.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to replace it, but if we had easy replacement we wouldn't have these problems in the first place.
Then shipped to Malaysia as concentrate for cracking & leaching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oij3c8GGWmw
Other similar stories exist in the supply chain, but that's one high volume link.
Not hippies of the 1960s San Francisco Haight-Ashbury ilk, but certainly regular people about the globe.
See the IEA: Global Supply Chains of EV Batteries (2022) - https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/4eb8c252-76b1-4710-...
Most key minerals are mined in resource-rich countries such as Australia, Chile and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and handled by a few major companies.
Governments in Europe and the United States have bold public sector initiatives to develop domestic battery supply chains, but the majority of the supply chain is likely to remain Chinese through 2030.
For example, 70% of battery production capacity announced for the period to 2030 is in China.
Similar arguments also apply to PV cells and wind turbines.
And change tautologically does endanger the status quo. So proceeding with business as usual with perhaps a slow gradual shift would always be seen as the safe choice, and rapidly abandoning oil would be perceived as dangerous, no matter what harm or risks oil is causing.
It’s going to happen though. Even if climate change and pollution and all other ill effects didn’t exist we’d run out at some point and be in the same place.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PETR.RT.ZS?locat...
Saudi Arabia is at ~24% for comparison.
The question is what happens if you remove those 16%, how much other GDP is tied to it, more or less indirectly.
Wholesale ammonia prices are about $0.30/kg.
A lot of that wholesale price is natural gas. You can see the relation here.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=52358
If you dig at industry press releases you see a lot of interest in using renewables to generate hydrogen to make ammonia. Which says the above is on track that it's economic. And also shields manufacturers from natural gas price swings. Not to mention you can locate plants anywhere.
Tractors run on diesel fuel, the trucks that move the grain run on diesel, the trains typically run on diesel, the ships typically run on diesel. The plant that processes it into food runs on coal or natural gas, or possibly some hydro power or nuclear. The bag that stores the food comes from natural gas (sometimes oil). Then that package is shipped to a store using diesel. The store powers its lights (also made from a polymer from natural gas) via natural gas generators.
One of fertilizers you point out is ammonia comes as a product from natural gas & it's the only current viable way to do it commercially, at scale.
Sure one day, we may replace all these components, but in-reality it's not anywhere close to being replaced.
I don't think it makes sense intentionally suppressing fossil fuels production. The way renewables are developing now, they'll start seriously displacing fossil fuels by themselves. The green mania must be over, renewables are at a point they can survive and grow by themselves without being artificially propped and prioritised.
>“Renewable sources have a role to play, but oil and natural gas will be needed for decades,”
Which is true. Coal won't. It's time to end coal. It is possible and beneficial both economically and politically. Oil will stay around for decades no matter what; natural gas for the time being is even beneficial for energy transition and suppressing it is the last thing we need to do.
>“But [the industry] is trying to expand the fossil fuel system, expand pipelines, expand fracking, and make more of our economy and our existence dependent on fossil fuels, even though clean energy is advancing at a rapid rate.”
So good, let them both advance at a rapid rate and see who wins.
Yet oil was at that phase over a hundred years ago.....and we still to this day prop up O&G companies with massive tax breaks and other benefits.
I'm all for cutting resources to Green Energy to make it more able to stand on its own economically. But we MUST do that for Oil as well, and thinking that we don't spend insane amounts of money securing oil (think wars) and developing its efficiency is just crazy. I'm all for spending the same amount $$-wise on Green energy as we have oil.
Oil was given plenty of time and money to develop into the industry it is. Green energy should be given the same.
Fossil fuels will die a lot quicker if we stop subsiding them to the tune of 7% of global GDP, i.e. 7% of all economic activity globally is redirected to make fossil fuels cheaper. To put it yet another way, if you work 250 days/year (50 weeks, 5 days/week), then 17.5 days of your work is redirected to make fossil fuels cheaper.
[1] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2023/08/22/IMF...
Nearly all of that "subsidy" is the lack of taxation of the negative externalities of fossil fuels. Even fossil fuel propaganda isn't this disingenuous with the way it frames things. That's like saying that fossil fuels are under-subsidized by trillions of dollars because they are used to power hospitals and can be used to power hospitals in Africa.
> fossil fuels are under-subsidized by trillions of dollars because they are used to power hospitals
Nope. Governments/patients pay hospitals for their services, then hospitals pay power companies the market price for their services.
After all, horseshoers still exist, but that career path was mostly obliterated by the automobile.
Which is probably why Biden, (who signed the Paris agreement again and supported COP28) has the US is producing more oil than any other country on the planet.
Given that 2/3 of the oil production in the US comes from fracking it is one of the worst ways to produce oil that is in current use. If not the worst.
"No more drilling no more on federal land" Except when there is money to be made.
https://www.statista.com/chart/16274/oil-productin-countries... https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-oil-is-produced-in-th... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/16/public-lands...
https://old.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/18jeumy/do_gen_z_guys...
Unfortunately some people will fight for these things to just watch the world burn.
But fossil fuel has 2 main drawbacks:
1. Contribute to global warming
2. It takes millions of years to produce, and few days to consume (aka limited resource)
So, we need to adapt the economy to those 2 drawbacks. Even if one thinks that global warming is not an issue, then the fact that it is a limited resource is going to eventually kick in (coal, oil and gas peak).
In the current economy, any drastic change of fossil fuel price would end in chaos. That is the threat. The sooner we minimize our dependance on fossil fuel, the better.
In some industries, we would need fossil fuels for a long time as it is difficult to replace them (e.g. fertilizers, plastics). in some other industries (transportation, heating), we can substitute fossile fuels with other energies (e.g electricity generated using renewable or nuclear).
So, yes it is a matter of national security, and that is why we need to adapt our economy to use less fossil fuel. And obviously we need to extract fossil fuel, as long as we can, during that transition.
I would be less optimistic as 80% of the energy used is fossil fuel (source: https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...).
Everything that we wear (plastic) or eat (fertilizers, and farming, trucking) comes from fossil fuel. Oil is everywhere. It is going to take a while to withdraw from our addiction.
> We should have been off oil in the 80s or 90s after the crisis in the 70s...
Oil is a fr(e)aking miracle. It is virtually free (just drill), it is energy dense, easy to transport, it makes fertilizers which allowed to fed the planet with less fields, it makes plastic, etc.
The countries fortunate enough to have some in their underground, have a natural printing money machine.
But, it is a limited resource, and using it at the scale we have been doing in the past 100 years, is impacting the environment.
> but instead we just paid off powerful men in the Middle East with weapons and kicked the can.
I agree that we kept kicking the can. But fortunately (or unfortunately if we are not prepared) it will eventually come to an end. It takes million of years to produce oil, and we consume it faster and faster. There will a time, where we would not find the easy oil, and it would become more and more expensive to find. If we are not prepared, then chaos will follow (wars as the last countries that have access to oil will keep it for them, economies will collapse as worldwide trade will break, etc.)
Clearly the past 100 years have been golden thanks to oil. We need to build a future where oil would be less abundant and more expensive.
Lots of countries are putting incentives to electrify their economy, which is a necessary first step to later switch to renewable and nuclear (and ditch coal or gas).
People want Green energy resources to be slashed? I'm all for it, once we spend roughly the same amount of time and money we've dedicated to developing oil.
Between wars to secure oil, excessive industry tax breaks, etc, I wouldn't doubt the cost to get oil to where it is today is in the tens (if not hundreds) of trillions of dollars.
- Tax credits specifically for producing oil and gas from maringal wells and oil discovery
- Tax deductions for drilling and development cost of oil and gas wells
- Passive loss exceptions for working interests in oil and gas property (think dry wells)
- Removes exceptions for tar sands and oil shale[1]
These are just some. Then there's the second order costs, like how much of our defense budget is geared toward simply protecting oil tankers[2] specifically.
[0]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/1483...
[1]: which had additional tax breaks due to land use classification
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/21/us-spends-81-billion-a-year-...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ropr.12369
> Most states have maintained methane release exemptions from these taxes through either statute or administrative discretion between 1960 and 2000, although a few have allowed some form of pricing. Two state legislatures have explored applying these taxes to methane releases on multiple occasions since 2000, amid expanded shale era output and growing public concern about climate and air quality impacts. Steadfast production industry opposition, rather than technical feasibility, emerges as the primary factor leading to rejection in these cases. Even when framing releases as a conventional air contaminant or as permanent loss of a nonrenewable natural resource, states largely continue to exempt flared or vented methane from severance taxes.
https://www.keatax.com/texas-approves-prop-7-to-support-foss...
> The Texas House of Representatives has given its approval to a new bill as a substitute for the Chapter 313 tax break. However, it explicitly excludes renewable energy companies from its provisions
Then, there's plastic. I hate the use of plastics for many things, but there are some things for which it is absolutely essential. For example, there are many medical uses of plastics that save lives and restore bodily function.
Plastics also are very useful for mundane health and safety type items, because they can be low cost, impermeable, and durable. Plastic medical equipment is often safer than glass because it can be thrown away instead of reused. It also makes the equipment more accessible in lower income areas.
Eliminating all oil is just as silly of an idea as using oil for everything. There are some things it does well and some things that we can do better a different way.
Cheap and abundant energy is strongly correlated with prosperity. Every barrel of oil produces roughly 1,700 kWh of thermal energy. In countries with low cost of oil production like Saudi Arabia and Iran, that means electricity generation for less than $0.01/kWh. The only viable technology to compete with oil and gas over the long term is Nuclear.
(If the slogan was 'Gradually Replace Oil', almost everybody would agree, there'd be no excuse to block roads, throw paint around though, and earn attention and social media cred, though)
No, there wouldn’t be the oil excuse, there would be something else that riles people up to create chaos