$.75/gallon gas? Wait for it... /EDIT: COLLAPSE of global oil industry

[Craig234]

we have had so much cheap energy, we have used it to not only to sustain our needs, but to create vast amounts of technology and knowledge.

Define "cheap". Cheap in all the pollution it's caused?

 

[Craig234]

Really maybe this is a wake up call that we need to change the economy and stop making it be based on something as volatile as oil. Not to mention burning oil for energy is barbaric and destroying the planet. It needs to stop, and we need to move to 100% green energy. We can already see positive effects on the environment from a few months of simply slowing down the world, imagine if burning oil stopped completely. We still would need oil for things like plastic and rubber, but the amount needed would basically make it equivalent to any other resource like steel or wood.

I have a wild idea. Since we see the need for the public benefit to green energy, and how our country makes decisions based only on interests of people who profit from NOT green energy, while China runs away as the global leader in developing green energy technology, let's try a new system where the public gets to make the choice.

We could call it "democracy". Ya, I know, wild.

 

[Red Squirrel]

lulz again.

oil and gas are one of the only sources of energy that are hugely net positive over the long term on a pure btu in/out measure. An oil well produces a huge amount of useful energy for every unit of energy it took to drill, complete and maintain it. oil truly has built society as we know it today.

If you consider the amount of work that goes into oil to get it turned into useful energy, it's not even sustainable. Get rid of all the government subsidies and the entire industry would crumble. Imagine if we burned (let's just pretend it was possible) copper or other metals for energy instead of using it in products. It would not be sustainable to mine it in such amounts, but because it is used in products and can be recycled it's viable. We need to bring oil to that sort of state. Stop using it for energy, use it only for items. Basically, you only need to mine it once for the life of a specific item (ex: a tire, or a plastic box).

With renewable energy you only need to put effort towards something once and get virtually unlimited energy out of it. It's a no brainer to move to 100% renewable. The only barrier right now tech wise is storage, because renewable is not constant or predictable. Take all the money and effort that goes into oil, and put it towards mass storage. Once that tech is figured out and implemented it's set and forget except for normal maintenance. There's a reason people who live off grid go with solar and wind, and don't drill their own wells and refine their own oil. The solar and wind is way simpler and easier to setup and costs less.

 

[brianmanahan]

we have had so much cheap energy, we have used it to not only to sustain our needs, but to create vast amounts of technology and knowledge.

my hypothesis on why there isn't contact with advanced lifeforms is that no civs ever find anything better than oil, and when it's gone, they go back to hunting-gathering

 

[gill77]

This reminds me of the "man on the street" interviews you would see on TV. "Can you explain to us how the petroleum industry works?" The answers can be hilarious and sometimes scary.

I wonder if there is anyone posting here who actually worked in the oil industry.

 

[herm0016]

If you consider the amount of work that goes into oil to get it turned into useful energy, it's not even sustainable. Get rid of all the government subsidies and the entire industry would crumble. Imagine if we burned (let's just pretend it was possible) copper or other metals for energy instead of using it in products. It would not be sustainable to mine it in such amounts, but because it is used in products and can be recycled it's viable. We need to bring oil to that sort of state. Stop using it for energy, use it only for items. Basically, you only need to mine it once for the life of a specific item (ex: a tire, or a plastic box).

With renewable energy you only need to put effort towards something once and get virtually unlimited energy out of it. It's a no brainer to move to 100% renewable. The only barrier right now tech wise is storage, because renewable is not constant or predictable. Take all the money and effort that goes into oil, and put it towards mass storage. Once that tech is figured out and implemented it's set and forget except for normal maintenance. There's a reason people who live off grid go with solar and wind, and don't drill their own wells and refine their own oil. The solar and wind is way simpler and easier to setup and costs less.

Energy Return over investment (EROI)
we are talking about BTU, aka the amount of "work" you can do from the source. I would like to see the wind turbine or solar panel that lasts forever and requires no energy to produce. . .

yes, burning metal would not work, and oil is not metal. good job.

you are working down from an untrue statement. your first sentience is false. actually, the first sentence of both paragraphs is false.

lets look at solar:

a solar panel over its 25 year life is still not far from 1 when all of the energy to produce and install it is considered. many studies to verify this. some as recent at 2017.
total generation by solar energy on earth just reached parity with use of energy by the solar industry. yes its positive. but not by much.

EROI for solar is between 1 and 2 currently. it is going up slowly.

EROI for oil and gas is about 20.

coal is around 45!

 

[herm0016]

This reminds me of the "man on the street" interviews you would see on TV. "Can you explain to us how the petroleum industry works?" The answers can be hilarious and sometimes scary.

I wonder if there is anyone posting here who actually worked in the oil industry.

indeed. i have 11 years in. well completions in the western USA and overseas at the start, now i make sure our customers are getting the service they need from us.

My wife is on the other side helping very large and complex companies measure, set science based targets and reduce their environmental impact. we keep each other grounded. haha.

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

As a poster pointed out already, the highest state/fed tax is .80/gal
Of course its the oil companies making money at 3.00 a gallon..

Well - just to clarify...

It's the Local Tax Man (State - and often City/County/District/Parish)
It's the Federal Tax Man
It's the Downstream Oil Company
It's the Midstream Oil Company
It's the Upstream Oil Company

It's not that simple

 

[Red Squirrel]

Energy Return over investment (EROI)
we are talking about BTU, aka the amount of "work" you can do from the source. I would like to see the wind turbine or solar panel that lasts forever and requires no energy to produce. . .

yes, burning metal would not work, and oil is not metal. good job.

you are working down from an untrue statement. your first sentience is false. actually, the first sentence of both paragraphs is false.

lets look at solar:

a solar panel over its 25 year life is still not far from 1 when all of the energy to produce and install it is considered. many studies to verify this. some as recent at 2017.
total generation by solar energy on earth just reached parity with use of energy by the solar industry. yes its positive. but not by much.

EROI for solar is between 1 and 2 currently. it is going up slowly.

EROI for oil and gas is about 20.

coal is around 45!

There is no way solar is that low, considering it does not actually require anything for it to run once it's built. Just standard maintenance. Fossil fuel power plants require maintenance too. It's practically free to run once it's been built. It does not use any form of consumable. It's a no brainer to convert everything to solar and wind. There must be some fudging somehow going on to come up with those numbers. Part of the issue is that solar panels are made in China using lot of oil then shipped on boats that use tons of oil so that probably drops the numbers quite a lot. Get rid of all of that, and use green energy to make them locally and that number probably goes way up.

The real challenge is storage but even then once you build those storage systems they can keep storing over and over. Everything requires maintenance including fossil fuel based power plants.

My example with metal was to show how ridiculous it would be if we mined metal only for it to be used for a very short period (burned) like oil. Lot of work goes into it but at least once a metal product is made it is useful for a long time, and on top of that it can be recycled. The amount of work that goes into harvesting oil is similar as what goes into harvesting metal. Mining, refining etc. If you consider the amount of work in harvesting and refining oil, only for that oil to be burned off and have a super short life it just makes no practical sense that we're still using it. Get rid of all the government subsidies and funding and the whole system just falls apart.

Oil is basically stored solar energy. Skip the whole process, and just use solar directly, but also find a more efficient way to store it. Wind turbines also make sense in right location. Essentially what needs to happen is we need to over provision green energy and find a way to mass store it. Nuclear also makes sense in the meantime until storage becomes more efficient. There are many things that can be done, it just needs to actually be done. Politics are the issue, not technology.

There are many reasons to get off burning oil. #1 though is the environment and it needs to be taken seriously. What we are doing to the earth right now is the same as running your car inside the garage, except the garage is just bigger.


As a side note, from a end user cost perspective only, solar makes even more sense. You buy it, install it, and it cost nothing to run. If I was living off grid it would be WAY cheaper for me to run solar than a generator, because once the solar is setup and paid for, it will continue to generate power.

 

[herm0016]

your facts and science does not fit my world view therefore you must be wrong

FIFY

Sorry to burst your bubble. But you are wrong and no amount of "it must be" will change that.

 

[Red Squirrel]

NASA has plenty of science on why we need to get off fossil fuel but since you're a big oil shill you probably don't believe NASA is a credible source.

Home – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. Current news and data streams about global warming and climate change from NASA.

climate.nasa.gov

 

[sao123]

You need to think this through some more.

I did think it through... I hope every petroleum speculator who is not an actual refining/fuel company go dead bankrupt.
They leach off the system and provide nothing, but keep oil prices high for general consumers and small business.
Fuck them all.

 

[herm0016]

NASA has plenty of science on why we need to get off fossil fuel but since you're a big oil shill you probably don't believe NASA is a credible source.

Home – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. Current news and data streams about global warming and climate change from NASA.

climate.nasa.gov

my numbers are facts. look them up. study. a good place to start is the term EROI ill even get you started. though, some of these values are skewed high. i have seen recent studies on solar that seem pretty comprehensive at roughly 2 to 1 I don't think i have seen anything that says more than 4 with more limited boundaries. similar skew for other renewables. have not seen the hydro at 45 or whatever either. lots of variation on methodology. O and G is probably higher as we have become quite a bit more efficient in the last 10 years or so. Fracking uses less energy per BBL produced and less water per BBL oil produced than conventional production. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513003856#f0010

we drive an electric car and plan on solar when this is all over. 9.9 kw, have the drawings and plans for ground mount. i'm all about renewable energy, but you have to know the facts of the hurdles we face for the goal. LCA is an important tool to focus our energy on things that are doing the most good in the fight. banning plastic straws does very little to help the environment as a whole for instance. there are much lower hanging fruit to be had, but its not consumer facing or sexy like banning plastic bags or straws.

just because you don't want something to be true does not make it so red.

 

[ponyo]

I did think it through... I hope every petroleum speculator who is not an actual refining/fuel company go dead bankrupt.
They leach off the system and provide nothing, but keep oil prices high for general consumers and small business.
Fuck them all.

I will not be surprised if we learn some big oil trading firm blew up today and caused this massive drop and negative oil price. It's not like majority of these firm and people who trade oil futures ever take physical delivery of the oil. Most are just speculators playing the paper market, and they just keep rolling the contracts further out so they don't have to take actual delivery. But something happened today that caused them to unable to roll today's contract into the future without taking huge losses. It's not like these storage filled up overnight and no one knew what was going on. I'm curious what really caused today's action. Someone big got trapped today on a wrong side of a bet, and they squeezed that person to death. I'm curious to see who blew up. Someone lost huge and someone scored trade of a lifetime. I want to know the winners and losers.

 

[pcgeek11]

Sigh! I remember when it was 32.9 cents a gallon.

 

[sao123]

I will not be surprised if we learn some big oil trading firm blew up today and caused this massive drop and negative oil price. It's not like majority of these firm and people who trade oil futures ever take physical delivery of the oil. Most are just speculators playing the paper market, and they just keep rolling the contracts further out so they don't have to take actual delivery. But something happened today that caused them to unable to roll today's contract into the future without taking huge losses. It's not like these storage filled up overnight and no one knew what was going on. I'm curious what really caused today's action. Someone big got trapped today on a wrong side of a bet, and they squeezed that person to death. I'm curious to see who blew up. Someone lost huge and someone scored trade of a lifetime. I want to know the winners and losers.

Repeat after me... Commodity Speculation is not Capital Investment. It provides no useful function and is a detriment to all of society. If your name is not Exxon or Shell you have 0 business buying oil in real barrels or on paper.
Anyone who does such deserves to be ground into fine powder, lose every penny, and then billions more, until they are homeless and unemployed. SO broke that someone reposesses their cardboard box on the street,

 

[Artorias]

So were likely headed for a great depression? Is it inevitable?

 

[Sonikku]

I live in Northern NY and gas prices are still over $2 a gallon. I feel like we're being ripped off!

 

[Miramonti]

I will not be surprised if we learn some big oil trading firm blew up today and caused this massive drop and negative oil price. It's not like majority of these firm and people who trade oil futures ever take physical delivery of the oil. Most are just speculators playing the paper market, and they just keep rolling the contracts further out so they don't have to take actual delivery. But something happened today that caused them to unable to roll today's contract into the future without taking huge losses. It's not like these storage filled up overnight and no one knew what was going on. I'm curious what really caused today's action. Someone big got trapped today on a wrong side of a bet, and they squeezed that person to death. I'm curious to see who blew up. Someone lost huge and someone scored trade of a lifetime. I want to know the winners and losers.

That's what I was wondering too, and if they took a bank out with it, but probably 90% of the oil volume was in the June contracts, which had already become the 'lead' trading month. Time will tell, but I absolutely wouldn't be surprised if it was a huge bet gone bad.

 

[Miramonti]

I live in Northern NY and gas prices are still over $2 a gallon. I feel like we're being ripped off!

You are! How much of that is state and local taxes tho...?

 

[njdevilsfan87]

I'm not sure oil will go back to normal any time soon. Remote work should be much more common moving forward now that everyone has had a chance to try it. Sure some for who knows whatever reason can't wait to get back into the office, but a lot us shouldn't be consuming as much fuel commuting anymore. It's really quite the waste of energy (both personal and on the environment) driving a vehicle around for remote capable work.

 

[Spacehead]

I live in Northern NY and gas prices are still over $2 a gallon. I feel like we're being ripped off!

You are! How much of that is state and local taxes tho...?

Check the link

Not in California:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_...edia/File:Fuel_taxes_in_the_united_states.png

PA taxes are 2nd highest & prices here are around $1.97 (NW PA).
Typically we're about 15-20 cents above the national average here. Not sure what that is now.

 

[feralkid]

I'll take it. I should be able to fit around 200 barrels on my property. I'll sell it when this is over.

Wait, what?

What I hate about all this is it shows how gas prices is just a huge game, it has nothing to do with the actual cost of producing it but what the game players choose to set the prices to in order to play with the world economy. It's just a huge scam. We need to get off oil for energy, for the sake of the planet, and for sake of having a more stable and self reliant system for energy and economy.

 

[Miramonti]

Wait, what?

What I hate about all this is it shows how gas prices is just a huge game, it has nothing to do with the actual cost of producing it but what the game players choose to set the prices to in order to play with the world economy. It's just a huge scam. We need to get off oil for energy, for the sake of the planet, and for sake of having a more stable and self reliant system for energy and economy.

I'm all for an economical renewable green energy source alternative, but as for commodities, they've been gamed since time began, and if it isn't oil, it will be something else (and often is.) The world economy didn't start it, it just brought it to scale.

 

[feralkid]

I'm all for an economical renewable green energy source alternative, but as for commodities, they've been gamed since time began, and if it isn't oil, it will be something else (and often is.) The world economy didn't start it, it just brought it to scale.

Agreed, I was simply chiding Red for posting the bolded, then a few posts later he's posting that he's all ready to join the "huge scam".

(I am pretty sure , however that he was just kidding around.)