Life Without Oil?
February 18, 2024
By Paul Homewood
64 Comments
Comments are closed.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. – J Robert Oppenheimer.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Notalotofpeople in Parliament know that and frankly they consider you reminding people of it is hate speach and should be banned.
PPEs should be the first to be banned from parliament (together with all career politicians).
Along with anyone whose income came from taxes.
Ha ha ha! You nailed that with a rare 6 Incher! Can they unpick that one?
Oh But! but but but but but ( all the way back home (down the hill) ) we won’t NEED any of that in the future: We’ll be ever so absolutely incredibly healthy with all that wonderful ink-ready Bull Sht food they want to feed us. off the backs of Children aka slave labour ( who / what is going to till the soil and reap the benefits ?) . ….
Life without Oil?
Can you go a day without fossil fuels?
Watch this —
Excellent! And I’ve always wondered how anti-plastic loons will fetch shampoo, washing up liquid, margarine and ice cream from the supermarket; in a wicker basket??
Surely we can do without plastic, we can just go back to making things out of turtles.
Might be better than the ‘compostable bags’ that seem to fall apart quite quickly.
I hear that in California since they banned ‘single use’ bags and moved to the stronger ‘bags for life’ people have adapted and now use the ‘bags for life’ just once which results in more plastic waste than before.
Exactly – and encapsuled in the saying “Nothing Green Ever Works”.
I like to point out to JSO folk that they want presumably to restart whaling to get their oil.
The right whale is under attack by the development of offshore wind inches US Eastern seaboard. David Wojick, who posts here sometimes, is running a campaign to protect the whales. Perhaps JSO have their eyes on the lamp oil.
It is good that Philip, yourself and others have shone a light on the situation which I don’t recall Etherington mentioning in his book exposing lots of other problems with wind. As offshore wind is totally uneconomic, this further adds to the nonsense.
And so are Barclays Bank – looking to go woke, whilst others – Blackrock etc. – are [apparently] backing off a little bit.
Barclays Bank are taking over many of the Tesco Bank services and accounts; they may find others, too, will seek alternative homes for their hard-earned.
Save the Whales – drill, baby, drill!
Auto
There isn’t…..
Next
This is what they want, to shut down everything and turn everyone into slaves.
I see that the sainted Greta is starting to lose traction and is looking for another cause to pursue. What I read suggested that the Saturday demonstrations on behalf of Hamas have caught her eye.
No passing bandwagon should ever be ignored:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmcgowan/2023/10/25/greta-thunbergs-stand-with-gaza-is-a-problem-for-the-climate-change-movement/#
https://i.postimg.cc/ZRq1L3H7/temp-Image-H6-HLPh.avif
Winston Churchill apparently once remarked “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” That sums up JSO perfectly.
‘Everyday Green’ says:
Oil: Wind turbines use about 2 gallons of oil per megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity generated, compared to about 4 gallons for natural gas and 8 gallons for coal.
https://www.windturbinemagazine.com/how-much-oil-do-wind-turbines-use/
So no oil = no wind turbines?
See also
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-wind-farms-patricia-pitsel-ph-d-
Perhaps the origin of the proverb ” It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good”. Of course the book to read on that subject was by John Etherington.
All will not be lost. All the chemicals made from oil can also be derived from coal which is still abundant all over the place, if a little unpopular for some reasons. There was a paper written, I think, in the early 1970s on the notion of a Coalplex. It was given in Mexico to ILAFA.
The Germans had to do this during the war as they had no oil wells but I would assume it comes at a greater cost than using crude oil.
The answer depends on what you want to make staring from oil or coal. I agree that for most of the chemicals mentioned starting from coal would be more expensive basically because of the need for hydrogenation as coal is much richer in carbon than oil. However, expense is relative. Anyone support in the delusion idea of NetZero would of course not understand my last comment.
“…no oil wells…”
Germany did have some oil wells, but they produced a waxy sort of crude, which was could not be refined into aviation fuel. However, this indigenous crude did provide all the lubricating oil they needed.
“…greater cost…”
At the start of WW2, the cost of synthetic oil in Germany was, in modern money, something like $300 a barrel.
The summer campaign of 1942 in Russia was strategically warped by the aim of capturing the oil fields in the Caucasus. And everybody knows how that ended – with a terribly exposed and stretched line of communication, the defeat at Stalingrad, and the end of the German chance of victory in the War.
Germany ran on coal, basically; 270 million tons of it in 1944.
SASOL are the modern experts in Fischer-Tropf processes.
We were in the process of developing new prosess to F-T in the 1960s to 1980s which worried the Saudis. Hence the taps opened and the oil price went from circa $30 down to $8 per bbl and this ended the coal to oil work. It didn’t work on the USA shale revolution but was again tried!
Well oil be blowed…! (I’ll get me coat)
Actually, johnfromvalencia, the author of the paper I mentioned was one Peter F Gill who at the time was sponsored by the Deputy Chair of the NCB and Joe Gibson, the Main Board Member for Science. Tar for the mention!
The question arises that if there is no demand – or very little – for petrol or diesel, what does that do for the cost of the other products?
Which other products? If you are talking about products derived from petroleum, say plastics, it gets real complicated real fast.
Fractional distillation of petroleum is going to give you the same stuff it always has. They can tweak the process to vary the output a little, but they are still going to get 75% petrol, diesel, fuel oil, and kerosene-type jet fuel. Only 2% is petrochemical feedstock. Only 3% is asphalt.
How do you dispose of mass quantities of “fuel?” . . . in an environmentally friendly way?
You can’t just use part of the petroleum.
In truth, and given time, the Chemical Industry would probably be able to reconfigure the “unwanted” fractions into suitable feedstocks, but that neatly illustrates the fatuity of the slogan, “Just Stop Oil”. No-one seems to want to ask the protesters how the world will function the day after they achieve their goal.
It’s the same absence of joined-up thinking that allows the Labour Party to pledge that they will Decarbonise Electricity Generation in the UK by 2030.
Not so, Steve. They’ve been at it for 175 years. No big discoveries pending.
You don’t get gasoline by simple distillation. In fact, the first fraction after the propane and butane gases is naphtha, with most of it in modern refineries fed to reformers that use platinum zeolite catalysts to convert naphthenes to branched alkanes, more of which are produced by alkylation of butane and butene. Hydrocrackers can be tuned to produce either naphtha or kerosene as their main product. Cat crackers which take higher boiling fractions as feedstocks also produce gasoline components, but these are lower octane than reformate.
Gasoline is blended from components to meet specification, including some liquid butane which improves startability and higher speed performance.
The refinery process is mostly just separating the fractions, not creating them. I.e., they already exist in the petroleum.
So the task becomes, “How do you make petrochemical feedstock from petrol? Or diesel? Or kerosene? Or heavy fuel oil?
Almost all the output from distillation in a modern refinery undergoes further refinery processing that alters it chemically. These days, everything other than gases has to be hydrotreated to remove sulphur – it’s the biggest chemical use of hydrogen, outdoing ammonia manufacture. In addition to reforming of the naphtha fraction, cracking of long residues and gas oils in hydrocrackers and cat crackers are also chemical processes, as is calcining of short residue to make petroleum coke (best grades are for carbon anodes in aluminium smelters), and the blowing of short residue to make assorted grades of asphalt/bitumen. Hydrogen is a byproduct of naphtha reforming, as well as being made by steam reforming of light hydrocarbons.
Many years ago I did an oil boiling course where we started with crude oil and ran most of the various refinery processes at lab scale, and then blended up the outputs to make products to market specification including doing all the necessary quality testing of the blending components and the finished products. Interspersed with lectures on the chemistry, engineering and rationale of the tests. We had to produce a complete mass balance to show what we had done too.
Best not toworry about this. There will be a demand for high energy density fuels as long as there are sane people on Earth.
Image in Paul’s post doesn’t display for me. The entire post is just the word ‘image.’
Link, please?
If you have an ad-blocker, turn it off to see the image.
That image has a subheading, namely …
“Not as simple as you may think”
Who thought it would be simple or even possible? Not me. Such people are not thinkers and should be removed from the gene pool.
Breakthru:
I copied and pasted text from title to ‘Share this’ to show what I was getting. When I clicked on ‘Image,’ a bubble popped up around it. Looking at edit bar – trial and error – I clicked on ‘replace,’ and it showed ‘current url.’ Clicked on it and got the image.
Image is half-hearted junk science. No mention of diesel and jet fuel, the 2nd and 3rd largest products from petroleum.
Image:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGjaOZna0AAJgB6?format=jpg&name=large
Welcome to the new Stone Age!
Slightly different situation. We moved on from the stone age not because we ran out of stones but because we found something better. In this case fools want us to move on to stuff that is worse. We need to resist and if moving on in many years time to something better again.
You’ve picked up on Sheik Yamani’s statement (50 years ago!) that the stone age didn’t come to an end because we ran out of stones and the parallel argument will apply to the “oil age”.
But you are wrong in the argument that the fools want us to move on by other means. What they want is for us to move back. Or in some instances (“we can’t afford to have another United States; we have to stop those third world countries right where they are.”).
Which is the same as moving back. Stagnation is just as fatal. And none of them has a solution. Not one of the Just Stop Oil protests would have been possible without oil. They cannot deface works of art, or glue themselves to the highway, or use plastic ties to attach themselves to goalposts, or even get to where they want to carry out these protests without currently “using” oil. And that situation will pertain for many years yet.
Their implied (though not specifically stated) aim is what I have previously described as “unpicking the Industrial Revolution”. They fondly imagine that life will be better if we have less efficient means of heating, clothing and feeding ourselves even though their parallel hope, that the world will not get any warmer than it is, would almost certainly negate that ambition.
You are right on all counts but missed that electric cars were developed in the 1800s so moving back there too.
Helpful video: https://youtu.be/winJj-1Q3uk?si=JDSH0dXiyXvN9gr6
I think I recognised the voice over! Good for him and good to hear a Welchman talking sense.
That was my impression, wonder what was cooking, liver and fava beans?
Almost certainly with a nice Chianti!
Octopus borrows £550m to accelerate electric car leasing
Energy company to double fleet size in rare vote of confidence in EV market
Daily Telegraph
It is difficult to legislate for stupidity. At best Octopus may lose a number of tentacles as a result.
Who are their bankers? Big loan write-offs ahead…
“… drivers are leasing EVs through salary sacrifice schemes. These result in tax savings running into hundreds of pounds per month.
At the moment, around 4,000 workplaces including Dyson, McLaren and Innocent Drinks have partnered with Octopus EV to offer these schemes.
Further growth of the company’s fleet is being financed by a £550m credit line secured from Lloyds Bank in December. “
stop press, I see there a lithium battery storage depot gone up in smoke in France, 900 tons of them waiting to be recycled. The footage is impressive, Sadiq would be beside himself in his ULEZ.
Lithium battery warehouse goes up in flames (yahoo.com)
I thought battery lithium couldn’t be recycled.
There are a number of inaccuracies in the replies. I have worked in oil and petrochemicals for 45 years.
Firstly, crude oil is not homogenous and the yield of light (naphtha 0-180 C), middle (jet, diesel/ gas oil 180-365) and heavy distillates (vacuum gas oil (VGO) and vacuum residue) varies widely form crude to crude.
Currently about 12% of the crude supply is used of petrochemicals. Very little naphtha is blended into gasoline due to it poor octane number. The primary components in gasoline are FCC gasoline (produced from VGO) and reformate (produced from heavy naphtha. Other components in gasoline include alkylate, isomerate, fuel ethers and small amounts of light naphtha and n-butane.
Fluid catalytic crackers(FCC) are a key process in gasoline production and produce a gasoline with a typical RON of about 91. Reformate is another key process that cyclises heavy naphtha (first step) to naphthenes and then dehydrogenate naphthenes to aromatics. Depending on the severity of operation the RON will be about 94-100. EN 228 places restrictions on the olefines and aromatic content of gasoline. The reformer is a major source of hydrogen in the refinery.
There are 5 main base petrochemicals and some important but smaller others
Ammonia – mainly from natural gas
Methanol – mainly from natural gas
Ethylene – from gas (ethane, propane, butane) and naphtha steam cracking
Propylene – co-product form steam cracking, FCC’s and propane dehydrogenation units
BTX – from steam cracker pygas and naphtha reforming
Butadiene is an important precursor for synthetic rubber and is produced from the steam cracker C4 cut
Irrespective of what you might read the refining sector will be around for a long time. To date there are few scaleable technologies that can produce synthetic fuels especially the important middle distillates.
FT chemistry has been around for 9 decades or more and the combined capacity of all the plants is less than one large refinery. All are currently fed with natural gas. Sasol converted their facilities to natural gas years ago. The idea that we could produce a significant supply of fuels and petrochemicals using FT technology is wishful thinking, especially that based on coal.
The possibility of supply side issues with oil in the future are very real. China is the No2 oil consumer and will probably overtake the US within 2-4 years. It is now the biggest oil importer. and growing demand at about 1 million barrels/day per year. Much of the Chinese oil demand is for petrochemicals. Thanks to the likes of JSO and ESG investors there has been a lack of investment in future oil resources, which are becoming more complex and expensive to produce. US shale oil has not been particularly profitable; many investors lost their shirts. Recovery factors of shale oil are low <10%.
Thanks for the details.
Do you know
. . . is my general premise correct, that you can’t just get petrochemicals – for example – from petroleum without having a great deal of other material that you must deal with? We get a great deal of ‘fossil-fuel’ from it, and if we stopped that usage, would we not have a problem?
“The farmer uses every part of a hog.”
Must we not use all parts of the petroleum?
Technically it would be possible to convert all the barrel to petrochemicals, at a huge cost. Some crude types are better for deep conversion.
There are several integrated refining /petchem sites in the EU that can produce up to about 25% petchems. The Hengli refinery in China can do about 45-50 % petchems.
Aramco has plans to build a high conversion refinery that will produce about 70% petchems – the remaining 30% will be fuel to power all the intensive conversion processes, which are in the main hydrocracking.
At the present time my own analysis does not support high rates of conversion, in which the middle distillate is hydrocracked to produce lower value petchem feed; essentially converting jet and diesel into naphtha. Refineries make the most money out of middle distillates and lubes.
Irrespective, there is no doubt that were the current transport fuels to be replaced by “something else” many of the existing refining assetts would be redundant. But that is unlikely to happen any time soon. Carbon recycling, CCUS, hydrogen, SAF are in my opinion another fusion power boondoggle. The energy inputs are simply so great that it makes no sense.
Thanks Carnot for your explanatory details.
Thanks Carnot and others for the informative comments.
Some years ago I read that China has put significant effort into Coal-to-Gas and Coal-to-Liquids projects – about a dozen, iirc. Not seen any mention of that since so maybe it hasn’t gone any further.
A couple of other products to add to the list which may not be widely known:
Sulphur: virtually all of the world’s supply is a byproduct of refining/cleaning oil and gas. Sulphur is an essential chemical – as sulphuric acid – in a myriad of chemical processes. Without the refining industry it would have to be mined.
Synthetic Graphite: produced from petcoke, one of the main uses is in the manufacture of anodes for EV batteries.