this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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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.
This sounds like a good idea. I wonder why it hasn't happened. Maybe lobbyists have prevented politicians from doing so so that the USA is dependent on countries with appropriate refineries, which protects the income and security of the other country using the USA's GDP and military.
Additionally, the push to stop depending on fossil fuels makes the investment an even riskier endeavor because the refinery might be outdated by the time it starts making a profitable return. It would be like if the entire world was highly dependent on lemons, and a farmer planting a lot of lemon trees that take 2 - 5 years to grow when half the world is insisting on switching over to limes. If the lemons were being produced right now and all that has to be paid for is the regular maintenance of the lemon trees, it would be profitable. However, the farmer has to purchase the land and seeds, prepared the land, install and acquire appropriate farming equipment, hire an entire staff that are experts in lemons, and grow the trees before even receiving a single penny in revenue, all while a good portion of the population is anti-lemon because lemons are harmful to the environment (hypothetically speaking) and wants to switch over to limes. which are less damaging. Business-wise, this would be a terrible investment. It's not that it couldn't possibly turn a profit, but when you're an investor with considerable capital, you're going to invest that in ventures that are more likely to produce a profit. It would make no sense to risk your capital on such a risky venture when there are hundreds of others that are less risky.
Offhand I believe we have a few that can do light oil, but most of ours wouldn’t want to change over even if offered to do so for free. Rather the reason is the US has a lot of chemical engineers and capital and so is good at refining the more challenging to deal with and cheaper to get heavy oils while selling the easy to refine and therefore more valuable light oil we dig up down in Texas to places that have more primitive refineries.
While we could retrofit all of our our refining capacity to use our oil, it doesn’t make financial sense because your spending a lot of money to switch to an more expensive input, so companies arn’t going to want to do it unless the government forces them to, and the government would only force them to if it wanted to spite everyone else and raise domestic gas prices.
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
that is quite simple actually.
Butter and skimmed milk also come from the same source. You have a complex mixture of stuff that is differently viscose, so in mixture it all ends up with a certain viscosity. Now you separate it and you get stuff that is almost solid and you get stuff, that is very liquid, or in the case of crude oil you get some gaseous fractions.
Only butt-munchers will reply to this comment about something vague regarding US gasoline production
yes but how much of that gasoline was made from American crude oil? America has plenty of refineries, just none of them designed for American oil
Crude oil us primarily classified based on density and sulphur content. It's all hydrocarbons and a portion of all of it can be turned into gasoline.
dude. we are not talking about the gasoline. we are talking about the oil being used to make the gasoline. what percentage of the crude oil being refined into American gasoline is American produced crude oil?