Economy

[TGHusker]

6 hours ago, funhusker said:

I’m just spitballing and I’m sure there is a whole lot wrong with this, and I know it won’t help the current situation.  But what’s stopping the govt from drilling and refining oil?  I’m aware of how expensive it is, but it appears to be a solid investment looking at oil companies.

 

They already have the land and could operate on a “break even” mentality.  Kind of like the Post Office to all the other private delivery services.

I don't think it is a far out idea.  Let's face it - petroleum is basically a 'utility'.  Like electricity, it is needed to run our country and our economy.  There are many govt and quasi govt electric cooperatives as well as govt water/waste water depts.  Do we have to nationalize the oil industry?  No, as you mentioned we have the Post Office but we also have private companies doing post office like work.   As a Reagan supporter, I may have just caused him to roll in his grave.  Different times we are living in now.  

As a corp finance guy, one of my worse  customers over the past 16 years was PDVSA (Venezuelan govt owned oil company).  Of course, due to sanctions, we aren't selling to them.  Put the issue with them isn't so much that they are govt owned but that the govt is corrupt and communistic. Thus mismanagement abounds. We sell to oil companies owned by Middle East govts and have no issues.     Even a public/private partnership might work  on govt land to lower the price.   Disclaimer: I'm not an oil accountant so I don't know the financials behind it all. 

[knapplc]

Even if the US Govt decided to get into the oil business, drilling and refining their own oil and selling discount gas, that would take how long to ramp up? A decade? More? Refineries are difficult to build and require billions in capital. 

 

Even if Biden got that passed through congress somehow, at some point in the next ten years we'll have a Republican president who will just shoot the idea down.

[TGHusker]

11 minutes ago, knapplc said:

Even if the US Govt decided to get into the oil business, drilling and refining their own oil and selling discount gas, that would take how long to ramp up? A decade? More? Refineries are difficult to build and require billions in capital. 

 

Even if Biden got that passed through congress somehow, at some point in the next ten years we'll have a Republican president who will just shoot the idea down.

I wonder if there are many 'mothballed' refineries out there that just need some updating.  In Oklahoma, there seemed to be a refinery in just about every mid size city in the state - mostly independent producers/refiners.  They couldn't keep up wt the regulations like the Exxons of the world could.  Many shut down. 

 

But to your point - a decade is about right from what I've heard in building one from scratch.  We'll get the GOP congress to go on record - Drill Baby Drill, Refine Baby Refine. Force the vote and call their bluff.  If they support it, then it would be hard for a GOP president to later retract it.  Of course all of this would seem hypocritical in the eyes of many Dems who would say: We need clean energy (Green New Deal) and we can't get behind gov't oil.  The progressives may be more of an obstacle than the GOPer (except those in the pocket of Big  Oil perhaps).  

 

But a Public/Private partnership may work.  We have NASA working with Space X.  We have the military working jointly with defense contractors.  Smart people could get it done.

 

 

[BigRedBuster]

I've said for a long time, that we need to be "drill baby drill" as long as we are developing renewable energies as fast as possible.  That's the only way I can see we get off of depending on countries like the middle east and Russia for our energy.  We need to drill now, because we need the energy.  We need to develop renewables, because eventually, we won't have oil.  Even if that's many many years down the road, you still need to develop it now.  The best case scenario would be that we would develop the renewables long before our oil resources in the ground are used up.  If needed at some point in time in the future, the oil would still be there.

 

But, just like so many issues, public opinion thinks it needs to be one or the other.

[TGHusker]

4 minutes ago, BigRedBuster said:

I've said for a long time, that we need to be "drill baby drill" as long as we are developing renewable energies as fast as possible.  That's the only way I can see we get off of depending on countries like the middle east and Russia for our energy.  We need to drill now, because we need the energy.  We need to develop renewables, because eventually, we won't have oil.  Even if that's many many years down the road, you still need to develop it now.  The best case scenario would be that we would develop the renewables long before our oil resources in the ground are used up.  If needed at some point in time in the future, the oil would still be there.

 

But, just like so many issues, public opinion thinks it needs to be one or the other.

Has to be both because we will always need oil - the world's economy  and our societies are built around it.  Oil for asphalt, oil for plastics, oil for clothing fiber.  Oil products are in almost everything we touch in our world. So we will always need it unless we come up wt some other man made concoction that can replace it.  So, the sooner we have renewable take care of transportation and heating and cooling our buildings then we can save oil products for all of the other items we need it for. 

Good grief, instead of spending trillions on useless wars, the world could come together as one to solve this issue.  But what do you do when you have tyrants like Putin running around and a want-to-be tyrant like Trump in our own country.  

[BigRedBuster]

28 minutes ago, TGHusker said:

Has to be both because we will always need oil - the world's economy  and our societies are built around it.  Oil for asphalt, oil for plastics, oil for clothing fiber.  Oil products are in almost everything we touch in our world. So we will always need it unless we come up wt some other man made concoction that can replace it.  So, the sooner we have renewable take care of transportation and heating and cooling our buildings then we can save oil products for all of the other items we need it for. 

Good grief, instead of spending trillions on useless wars, the world could come together as one to solve this issue.  But what do you do when you have tyrants like Putin running around and a want-to-be tyrant like Trump in our own country.  

Agree.  Petroleum products will always be needed.  Another reason to conserve it instead of using it for the items you mentioned.

[RedDenver]

13 hours ago, funhusker said:

I’m just spitballing and I’m sure there is a whole lot wrong with this, and I know it won’t help the current situation.  But what’s stopping the govt from drilling and refining oil?  I’m aware of how expensive it is, but it appears to be a solid investment looking at oil companies.

 

They already have the land and could operate on a “break even” mentality.  Kind of like the Post Office to all the other private delivery services.

If we're going to do that, why not instead invest in sustainable energy and energy storage? Current technologies can already provide more than enough energy from PV, so it's just about investing in storage - mostly lithium batteries, so we should focus on lithium mining.

 

[DevoHusker]

1 hour ago, RedDenver said:

If we're going to do that, why not instead invest in sustainable energy and energy storage? Current technologies can already provide more than enough energy from PV, so it's just about investing in storage - mostly lithium batteries, so we should focus on lithium mining.

 

Which, by some accounts, is worse for the environment than oil.

 

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/18/green-agenda-batteries-527263

[BigRedBuster]

1 hour ago, RedDenver said:

If we're going to do that, why not instead invest in sustainable energy and energy storage? Current technologies can already provide more than enough energy from PV, so it's just about investing in storage - mostly lithium batteries, so we should focus on lithium mining.

 

Ok. What is PV?

[RedDenver]

12 hours ago, DevoHusker said:

Which, by some accounts, is worse for the environment than oil.

 

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/18/green-agenda-batteries-527263

It's not worse than oil based on carbon emissions alone, but the oil companies will keep selling that line.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0032-9

Quote

For a climate protection scenario, we project life-cycle emissions from fossil fuel carbon capture and sequestration plants of 78–110 gCO2eq kWh−1, compared with 3.5–12 gCO2eq kWh−1 for nuclear, wind and solar power for 2050. Life-cycle emissions from hydropower and bioenergy are substantial (∼100 gCO2eq kWh−1), but highly uncertain.

 

Even though lithium mining is polluting, lithium is recyclable and can be reused in new batteries over and over again. Oil and other fuels cannot be recycled and must always be extracted from the ground. And that extraction from the ground comes with many issues similar to lithium mining.

 

But lithium and lithium mining is not the only way to store energy. If we invest in sustainable energy, then we can do a whole lot more R&D into areas such as graphene batteries (no lithium), solid hydrogen storage (not very efficient compared to batteries but can hold a lot of energy for months or years), liquid air energy storage (I think this one has a ton of potential as it's based on already existing technologies), etc.

12 hours ago, BigRedBuster said:

Ok. What is PV?

photovoltaics - the solar panels you see on houses

[BigRedBuster]

 

[BigRedBuster]

23 hours ago, RedDenver said:

photovoltaics - the solar panels you see on houses

I would love to see this developed even more.

 

Something like this would be awesome.  However, this cost isn't realistic.

 

https://modernize.com/roof/shingles/solar

 

I know panels are cheaper.  But, shingles would be nice.

[Moiraine]

3 hours ago, BigRedBuster said:

I would love to see this developed even more.

 

Something like this would be awesome.  However, this cost isn't realistic.

 

https://modernize.com/roof/shingles/solar

 

I know panels are cheaper.  But, shingles would be nice.

 

 

It says shingles are more cost efficient though. 

[BigRedBuster]

15 minutes ago, Moiraine said:

 

 

It says shingles are more cost efficient though. 

Yeah, but I'm not spending 60 -75,000 to put them on my house.

[BigRedBuster]