An Essay On Oil

[ttogreh]

Oil.

The first working oil derrick in North America was erected in 1858 in Oil Springs, Ontario. 12 years earlier, Nova Scotian Abraham Pineo Gesner discovered how to refine kerosene from coal. Ignacy Lucasiewicz improved Gesner's method in 1852 to use more plentiful rock oil (petr-oleum). In short, the petroleum economy has existed for the last 150 years.

150 years is a long, long time. That is two 75 year lifetimes. The equivalent of Thirty seven Olympic summer games. The Civil War, The Mexican American War, The Spanish American war, The First World War, The Second World War, The Korean War, The Viet Nam War, The Grenada Intervention, The First Gulf War, The Afghanistan Intervention, and the Second Gulf War have all happened in that time.

What I am trying to get at, is that while the usage and refinement of petroleum has become ever more complex over the last 150 years, the base material, that has not changed. It's still oil, and it is still underground, undersea, trapped in tar sands, or some other media. Moreover, we are running out of it.

Mexico is going to reduce its oil shipments to the United States by an average of 184,000 barrels per day throughout 2008. Now, why would our southern neighbors REDUCE shipments of oil to the largest economy on earth? Oil shipments to Asia wouldn't be nearly as profitable, because of shipping costs.

The reason they are reducing oil shipments, is because they are faced with declining production. Read all about it right here.

The fact of the matter is, China and India are going to have their industrial revolutions mostly oil-free. Now, understand that oil-free does not mean "clean". China will produce 2.76 BILLION TONS of coal in 2008. India is no slouch when it comes to mining coal, either. Of course, coal is not predestined to be dirty, and petroleum can be used cleanly too.

However, coal has one thing going for it that makes it different from petroleum. It is solid. This means that it cannot be shipped by pipelines, and that it cannot spill out of pipelines. What am I getting at?

The world will not stop running when oil starts running out.

First off, there are renewable alternatives to gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel. For gasoline, the most promising but least talked about alternative is butanol. Indeed, Firefox just put a red line underneath "butanol", indicating that it is a misspelled word. What exactly is butanol? Well, it is an alcohol that can either be created from petroleum, natural gas, or from fermentation. Moreover, butanol, unlike ethanol, has pretty much the same amount of energy as 87 octane.

Moreover, butanol is 6 times less evaporative than ethanol, and 13.5 times less evaporative than gasoline, making it an excellent candidate for an oxygenate RIGHT NOW. An oxygenate helps to abate smog.

Check it out here.

As for diesel and aviation fuel, there is a little process called thermal deploymerization. Basically, any carbonaceous feed stock can be turned into No. 4 diesel fuel, and further refined from there. With zero sulfur.

Check it out here.

Finally, both coal and natural gas can be converted into liquid fuels. Petroleum, the hubbert peak, and wars over oil fields will all be history in the next ten years.

Just like those crap SUVs, Marc.

[Rev.Reverence]

I knew there was a REASON I have not been really worried about this...

Thanx for the reassurance...

:bow

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

Another light on the horizen... Brazil. A nice ally of ours that just found an oil field with 8 Billion barrles of oil... and another one with about 33 Billion....

if it gets real bad... there is that 10.4 billion under ANWAR...

and if we get the Tech do it.. there is always the largest oil field in the world... Nevada. There is a field there with more oil in it than all of the middle east... it's just deep.. really really deep and close to fault lines.. w dont kno what would happen if we released the pressure by letting the oil out.