Some of these ships would carry green hydrogen and new lithium batteries and old lithium batteries (to be recycled) and whatnot. Also at least some oil would be still needed for fine chemicals like meds or (idk what's proper english term for that) large scale organic synthesis like plastics, or even straight distillates like hexane (for edible oil extraction) or lubricants. Some of usual non-energy uses of oil can be easily substituted with enough energy like with nitrogen fertilizers but some can't
the argument for renewable energy isnt that we should stop using oil, its that we shouldnt burn it. why turn our limited supply of oil into CO2 and water when we can turn it into plastics, medicine, solvents, etc? around 3/4 of crude oil is used as fuel, but if renewable energy was used, the number of oil tankers would decrease by more than 75% bc local supplies would generally be sufficient for industrial, non-fuel uses
ikr, but that tweet implies that all of oil/gas/coal ships would be unnecessary
bc local supplies would generally be sufficient for industrial, non-fuel uses
this is assuming that its not just cheaper to import that needed oil? This is always going to be a fundamental problem, though maybe we already happen to produce plastic with native oil idk.
Once you realize the byproducts of oil and how essential some are and the fact that rich countries aren't going to change their way of life and the fact that developing countries will industrialize in the same way western countries have and will start to produce similar environmental emissions things look pretty bleak in terms of that average temperature rise.
correct me if I'm wrong, but the United States doesn't even have oil refineries that are capable of making gasoline out of American oil? like we need the type of oil that the middle East has, so we're constantly trading oil back and forth even though we have plenty of it
I think I've heard this is true. something about politicians wanting to look environmentalist and therefore preventing the building of any more refineries
No, there's a significant amount of oil infrastructure locally. They've even got a colonialist extension with Canada: crude oil crosses over to be refined and sold back to Canada
No, it is true. It is not the quantity of oil infrastructure, but the grades and types they are. The US crude is mostly light sweet crude after the shift to oil shale. The refinery infrastructure was originally built for heavy crude with high sulfur content. Thus the US imports the type of oil our refineries were built to handle, and exports the portion of the oil that is domestically produced, but the wrong type.
The lack of investment in the types of oil refineries to refine US oil domestically isn't as much for optics purposes. But that relative to the amount of investment required to build new refineries to compete with the current foreign ones isn't a good return on investment relative to the up front cost and the existing profits of the current arrangement.
the government should at least subsidize a couple so in the event of an apocalypse we can make our own gasoline.
it's also to do with prices. There is a certain amount of this that is true, but the primary reason is oil prices.
yeah from what people are telling me, we have the capability of processing lower quality crude oil so it makes more sense to export our high quality stuff, then buy the cheap stuff since we can already refine it.
yeah thats pretty much the TL;DR here. It's complicated since oil is complicated and there isn't really a "insert oil" oil to talk about, there are a lot of variations of it, and a lot of ways to refine it, and a lot of different resultant products from it as well.
The fact that the modern petro industry even works is kind of insane.
yeah it's wild to me that petroleum jelly and kerosene come from the same thing
gotta burn fuel just to get more fuel. Zeno’s paradox but capitalistic economic collapse
to be perfectly clear, this probably wouldn't help much, since we would likely just move to shipping something like hydrogen across the ocean anyway...
