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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

I think the opposite -- that oil is one of the larger factors that endangers global security.

The global economy is addict to fossil fuel. So fossil fuel like any powerful drugs that is in limited supply (limited resource), it is threatening the global economy, if we continue to use it OR if we stop to use it.

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.

Yes. Without oil dependence, the US can let the Middle East sink back into the sand. That's going to happen eventually anyway.

So long as the EU is more or less aligned with the US and the Suez Canal exists, the Middle East as a flashpoint is not going anywhere.

Right now, most container sea traffic is going around Cape Horn rather than risking the Red Sea. China is working on the Belt and Road scheme to move container traffic from China to Europe to rail.

Isn't rail shipping far more expensive than, er, ships? Also, good luck getting anything from China to Europe via rail without going through either Iran (the Middle East) or Russia (not exactly on friendly terms with Europe at the moment, to put it lightly).

I was thinking that, but on the map at least there's the possibility of Turkmenistan-Caspian-Azerbaijan.

I know almost nothing about these places, despite an Azerbaijani coworker, so this may be unrealistic for other reasons.

Georgia has its frozen conflict with Russia and the Azeris have had recent on-and-off war with the Armenians, so it's not a great route either.

it's more expensive, but they are getting closer. 30+ days by ship vs 10 days by rail, insurance, inflation and other risks. It could be just 2x more expensive. For high and mid added value product it doesn't matter much.

I can imagine year 2060 when there is a magnetic rail link between Asia and Europe. Only some commodities like wheat go through Suez.

Right, because it's a flashpoint at this very moment.

*Cape of Good Hope, they are going around Africa

Right, right. Cape Horn is the southern tip of South America.

The Belt and Road maps I've seen are pretty low resolution, are they still going through Iran? Because I'd think that counts as "middle east", even if it's not the Suez.

The US hasn't been dependent on Middle East crude oil for some years. We still maintain security guarantees there to support key allies, and contain hostile foreign powers, but that will gradually fade away as part of the foreign policy pivot to Asia. European countries need to get moving on rebuilding expeditionary military forces in order to ensure reliable energy supplies (the notion that they can quickly transition to green energy is a total fantasy).

and frankly the more poorly informed western elites try to protest and prevent extraction and distribution of western (i.e. Canada, USA) oil and gas, the more dependent we will all be on oil from places like Saudi and Russia.

people really don't get it.

We are dependent in as much as gas prices going up 50 cents would cause widespread riots apparently. So yes, we are no longer getting 70% of our oil from Saudi Arabia so they can quite simply hold us by the balls, but we are still desperate to keep the rest of the world's oil supply flowing regularly so that we can keep our own internal prices "American friendly".

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.

US gasoline prices are only somewhat linked to global crude oil prices because we lifted the export ban in 2015. If domestic prices get high enough to cause major political problems then the export ban can simply be reinstated.

Have you seen where materials for batteries come from? Not exactly homegrown by hippies.

Indeed (though neither is the USA itself), however you have to try quite hard to damage a battery in a way that means recycling it at end of life is harder than extracting raw elements from rocks in the ground, so a steady-state battery setup is much less vulnerable than the 20th century setup for oil… provided there's sufficient will to actually build the recycling plants and manufacturing capability in most nations, and it's much too early to see how that plays out given the current scale of operations.

Similar arguments also apply to PV cells and wind turbines.

Typically mined by (say) first nation Australians in Laverton, Western Australia from Mount Weld mine: https://youtu.be/LXEbznvl0wM?t=108

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.

Note: that's "majority owned by Chinese companies" not "entirely within the country of China".

Oil isn't easily replaced, though. It's not just energy, there are all the products derived from it. If you shut it off suddenly, things would collapse.

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.

Exactly what I was thinking when I read the headline. The oil industry has been a historic disaster for global security, including the ecosystem.

"Endangers global security" often is treated as equivalent to "endangers the status quo", especially by the organizations and people who are powerful right now and so usually benefit from whatever the current situation is, as opposed to those who feel they lack power and thus are motivated to shake things up with a hope of ending up at the top afterwards.

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.

What happens when the wealth ends for the Middle East? That could go very very badly.

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.

Depends, United Arab Emirates nowadays makes more money from tourism than oil. Oil is like 1% of their GDP. Climate change is accelerated, but it’s a natural process. We are literally still in Ice Age, just in interglacial period.

One of the things keeping Saudi Arabia together is oil welfare payments. If that ever goes away, things could unravel quickly.

From every report I have seen, oil extraction is at least 30% of the economy.

The UAE has the potential to become another Singapore if they want to. But to make that work they'll have to reach a mutual accommodation with Iran while also not pissing off their other allies too much. It's going to be difficult to thread that needle.

This says ~16% of their GDP is from oil (directly). 2021 data.

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.

... I mean to I guess that is -- without oil we'd have an order of magnitude less food and no means of waging war at scale. So the world would be more "secure" in the sense that we probably couldn't wage war across the globe. That said, we'd be starving and far more isolated.

I think I roughly guess if you're using electrolyticly generated hydrogen to make ammonia it'd take about 10kwh/kg of electricity. If you can get wholesale renuabes at $0.05/kwh that'd be about $0.50/kg energy cost.

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.

I wasn't really just talking about the ammonia.

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.

Agreed, even more so when you look at some of the countries a lot of the oil comes from...

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