It's been fascinating to watch Saudi influence wane over the last few years as this sinks in as the new reality. We live in a completely different power structure now from 20 years ago. They're certainly still obscenely rich, but the power they had over geopolitics via OPEC is effectively gone at this point due to tar sands, renewables, and natural gas.
"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but
his son will ride a camel"
Is the $400 price when they are sold for meat or hair? Or perhaps as just raw material for a camel training pipeline.
Presumably a camel that anyone wants to ride has been raised and trained properly. That camel is ever going to be ridden, then putting down $400 for a warm body is only the beginning of the investment.
I assume it's mostly meat but have read elsewhere Australia camels are often used for breeding vigour.
On the training. I know more about horses. Where I live in Australia a typical untrained horse will go for about $2-4k and trained it will go from $3k to $10k. Obviously add zeros for special breeds or quality genetics. I cant see camels being too different in ratio of untrained to trained value, even a lower ratio given cheaper labour costs in ME.
The horse market is like the piano market. Exceptional specimens are exceedingly expensive but at the low end you can probably just find one for free that no one wants anymore.
A cursory google search seems to indicate those are prices for racing camels. In that case, not too surprising - one observes similar gaps between race horses and “every day” horses.
I lived with some bedouins in Morocco near merzouga for a few months who had about a hundred camels. I really doubt they were sitting on millions of dollars of camels.
I met a guy on a bus who was studying English in the city but heading back to his parents to bring veterinary medicine. We hit it off and he invited me back to his family's compound, and it turns out his family was super cool and invited me to stay a couple of days. I kept finding things to do to be helpful, and they were more than willing to keep feeding and housing me. I helped some of the cousins practice English, set up some radios for them, and also worked a bit to get a website up and running for a tourist business they were trying to set up(basically airbnbing their place and showing off traditional bedouin lifestyle).
Here in the U.S., my friend's perfectly capable trail horse (who also has a variety of other training and has even done a bit of dressage) was around a $1000, a few years ago.
Camels have a reputation (I'm not sure to what extent it's deserved) of being somewhat more obstreperous; nonetheless, I have a hard time extrapolating to 50K, were camels in a like position to horses in the U.S. Not for a "decent" camel.
In current Saudi Arabia, sure, maybe. But current Saudi Arabia is not what's being talked about, as being "down the line".
P.S. Just don't hook my friend's horse up to a cart or sleigh or the like. She was never trained for that, and at this point, she's not having any of it. She also doesn't think much of jumping; smart horse, her joints will last longer.
I don't remember the exact wording, but I've heard and read that alpacas are fairly nice, while llamas will wait to knife you when your back is turned.
I have a friend down under (to the right of Oz) who has the former and has some knowledge of the latter. I seem to recall her confirming this, when I mentioned it.
> They're certainly still obscenely rich, but the power they had over geopolitics via OPEC is effectively gone at this point due to tar sands, renewables, and natural gas.
You missed the other significant factor in reducing OPEC political power, horizontal drilling, IE fracking. Almost all the new oil and natural gas in the US is coming from horizontally drilled wells.
Horizontal drilling and fracking are two distinct but related techniques:
* "Horizontal drilling" refers to drilling a non-vertical
(and often curved) borehole, to reach deposits that aren't
directly beneath the wellhead.
* Hydraulic Fracturing, "fracking," is the practice of injecting
water into a well to crack the rock around the borehole,
increasing its permeability.
Each can be used independently, but it's the combination of the two that has increased US production.
I work in this industry. To answer your question, yes, there are oil and gas producers horizontally drilling wells, but not fracking them. This is actually quite common in offshore (Gulf of Mexico) environments. Your offshore pad is in a fixed location, and you often drill horizontally to get to the target.
These wells are productive enough that you don't need to hydraulically fracture them.
potentially, if it's economic enough. The typical shale wells that you see being drilled have very high initial rates, but then fall dramatically. They are a totally different well profile than the wells offshore (where shale is not being targeted).
Will shale ever be targeted offshore? Maybe, in a world where oil is $150/barrel and we're all still demanding it. A few things are holding back hydraulically fracking offshore:
1) Freshwater - The current "recipes" need freshwater, and do not work with salt water. Fracking uses a lot of water. This seems solvable, but currently not a lot of research in this area.
2) Sand - A TON of sand is required to keep these fracks open - we are talking truck load upon truck load of sand (sometimes over 100 truck loads). How does this happen in an offshore environment? The logistics would be quite tricky (and expensive).
3) Equipment - Typically, onshore drilling rigs drill the well, and then move off the location and the fracking unit comes onto the location. The fracking unit can be as big or bigger than the drilling unit spread. To translate this to an offshore environment would be logistically impossible - we would basically need specialized "fracking drill ships" to equivocate this. To date, these don't exist (but could potentially exist in the future).
4) Institutional Know-How - for how big these companies are, it's quite surprising that the big players haven't had much success fracking - ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, Total, Shell - all of these guys do some fracking, but it's not really their core business (offshore is). The fracking revolution was built on the backs of the smaller industry players (and these guys don't do offshore well). In tech parlance, this would be loosely equivalent to why Microsoft/Yahoo/Oracle have never really done startups well (just buy the ones that do well).
It's important to note that fracking we see in the news are a totally different target than conventional oil wells. So the permian basin, which is "so hot" right now, had conventional targets that were tapped out in the 1980's/1990's. The shale wells being drilled are entirely new wells at different targets, so you wouldn't use the fracking techniques that we hear about to extend the life of an existing well - you would drill a totally new well.
To give you an idea of the costs involved, an offshore deepwater drill ship in the Gulf of Mexico has a rig rate (all in) of about $500k/day. An onshore rig in the permian basin drilling shale wells is probably around $50k-$75k. It's a 10x difference (why is why countries like Brazil, Venezuela, etc. have struggled during this latest "boom").
Sure. It all depends on the geology of the particular oilfield the well is tapping, and how much money the well owner is willing to invest in increasing production. Similarly, there are vertical wells that have been fractured.
I don’t have the knowledge to get any more detailed, unfortunately — This is all secondhand from some oil industry software engineers.
Oil is not going away anytime soon. While there will be significantly more electric vehicles on the road in twenty years and gas and diesel vehicles will be much more efficient. There will still be millions and millions of vehicles burning gasoline and diesel. Plus that doesn't even factor in all the uses of oil outside of transportation and energy, for instance pharmaceuticals, plastics, nylon, polyester, asphalt, fertilizer, cosmetics are all mostly petroleum based.
I don't think anybody expects it to go away, what's interesting is what happens to the price if we dropped demand by 10 or 20% for instance. Would the price fall close to the cost of extraction or would supply restrict enough to keep it higher.
> Would the price fall close to the cost of extraction
My guess is we'll see the price fall closer to the extraction price, but less than where these petrostates can sustain themselves. So we'll see a succession of petrostate collapses, each one taking supply offline and popping the price back up. Would be an interesting time to trade crude.
I'm scared about a Saudi collapse. I can imagine that regime, which is already very radical, becoming much more so if the profits from extraction run out.
More than you think. A hybrid car gets more mileage out of its engine for two reasons:
- regenerative braking reduces the efficiency penalty of city driving. While a normal car sees a 25-30% mileage drop in stop-and-go traffic, a hybrid sees about 5-8%.
- the actual engine is more efficient! The gasoline engine in hybrid vehicles usually replaces the Otto cycle with the Atkinson cycle. The latter is more efficient but has lower power, which in hybrids is compensated by an electric assist that turns on when accelerating.
By taking these two effects together a non-plug-in hybrid can reduce fuel use in a city driving condition by more than 40%. I didn't make that number up: the 2019 standard Camry has 29 city mpg, while the 2019 hybrid Camry is rated for 51. The hybrid uses 56% as much fuel as the conventional engine! With a plug-in hybrid that can drop even lower.
Unfortunately the marketing around all of this was muddled and most consumers have never heard of the Atkinson cycle. The original hybrids (Prius, Insight) were molded for a Japanese market, where simple and cute is a winning proposition, but American gearheads thought it looked and drove like a toy, a perception which was compounded by the fact that early hybrids made self-maintenance nearly impossible. Just replacing the 12V battery on a Prius is a major pain (speaking from experience!). Atkinson hybrids quickly became associated with a certain type of person and, for a while, many/most car geeks thought the real efficiency breakthrough were the German companies' maintenance-friendly and appropriately-scented turbodiesels, and we all know how that turned out. Hybrids have never captured more than 3.2% of the US market, but even if no highway-viable electric cars appear, a switch to plug-in hybrids could erase more than half of car-related GHG emissions.
I know all of this mostly because of one very old and very stubborn former engineer who was impervious to every kind of advertisement and cultural stereotype, and who studied the technology in the Prius and bought one new in 2009. Everyone else in the family made fun of him, but Grandpa just didn't care, and raved about the Prius to anyone who would listen. Most of us, including me at the time, believed the meme that Atkinson hybrids were a marketing gimmick and only relevant if you drove in the city often enough to take advantage of the regenerative brakes, and anyway, turbodiesels were the future. Grandpa didn't live long enough to see himself get proven right, but I still drive his car.
As a(n obnoxiously outspoken) 2016 Camry Hybrid owner, it's true. On highway it usually gets ~40 MPG. Below 45 MPH the engine can shut off, and often it coasts along, only using the engine to accelerate or go uphill. My Costco route consistently gets 45-50 MPG, and I use about 28 gallons of gas to go 1,080 miles a month.
Long term, I'm hopeful to replace the NiMH battery with lithium and a plug-in charger.
He didn't say it was due to more efficient motors. Just compare the average MPG of the cars on US roads, running on subsidized gasoline, vs. those on European roads, running on heavily taxed gasoline.
An interesting question for this is will governments start with 'electricity tax'. There will be a ~$40bn revenue hole from cars swapping to electric in USA. Even proportionally more in Europe and Australia where the fuel taxes are much higher.
consider the expansion of plug in hybrids, similar to the Volt, Clarity, Prius, and Kona, all extend the viability of the petrol engine. In many cases it moves into the roll of a range extender because its weight combined with fuel is drastically less than what battery technology can accomplish; an example is the Model 3 which has nearly 1100 lbs of batteries for 310 miles.
engines directly? variable valve timing will be common place and variable compression has debuted. more forced air systems and better injection tuning all present themselves. there is even ongoing work on two strokes and some of them are delivering better performance and emissions than four strokes.
Without abandoning piston engines entirely and going to turbines or something, modern auto engines are approaching maximum practical thermal efficiency for the conditions under which they must operate (being primarily horsepower-oriented rather than torque-oriented). You can get maybe 50% better if you're powering an oil tanker rather than a car, but you're not powering an oil tanker, but rather something that has to accelerate and decelerate and idle in unpredictable ways.
Hybrid was the last big improvement. Barring a radical new technology (and variable valve timing ain't radical), we might squeeze, what, 10% better thermal performance out? Get 40mpg rather than 37? Big deal.
And really, this is all driven by energy costs in the end. We're already hitting a point where commodity solar/wind electricity is cheaper than commodity coal, and much cheaper than commodity gasoline. This creates a tremendous market incentive for purely electric vehicles. And that tech has much more room for improvement than any gas engine - batteries will keep getting cheaper and more efficient for some time to come.
When my options are a $25,000 Ford or a $90,000 Tesla, an electric car seems like a dream. But when it turns into a $25,000 Ford or a $30,000 all-electric car (maybe from Ford!)... TCO starts becoming a very attractive argument, on top of the feel-good factor.
"This creates a tremendous market incentive for purely electric vehicles."
Can confirm. I bought a used Nissan Leaf two months ago from a dealer (being used it was a small fraction of the $25k Ford). A near-identical car (trim/mileage/colour) is now listed on their site for close to 30% more than I paid.
If we were living in normal times this would make no sense - but the TCO picture is changing that rapidly (owing to oil prices going up and used EVs being so scarce).
I paid $5k for my 2011 Leaf with 10 bars and 30k miles. Best decision ever. Seems like people are catching on though since theyre getting hard to find anywhere near that now.
We still have to see how HPPI and turning off two cylinders out of four at low speed improves fuel consumption. There are also alternative fuel options for ICE vehicles such as LPG for petrol powered vehicles and DME for diesel vehicles. Current diesels already do 65 mpg which is a big deal compared to 36 mpg. DME can be produced locally out of syngas from industrial processes or biomass.
Regardless, an all-electric car is going to be pushing 90% thermal efficiency - transforming energy into acceleration. A combustion car isn't going to break 40%. Exotic tech like variable timing and taking cylinders out of service isn't going to get huge gains - they're actually a lot of work for tiny gains, because all the huge gains have already been had. Moreover, electric cars will get that efficiency with no compromise in performance, unlike combustion cars with tiny, weak, "fuel efficient" motors. A Tesla Model S is the fastest car in its class, as well as the most efficient.
The only big win for combustion-based cars is the range potential, because the energy storage of liquid fuels is so much denser. I don't expect to see electric commercial aircraft in my lifetime. But biomass-based liquid fuel? Sure. It just won't be cost-competitive with solar/wind into a battery. It'll be limited to specialized applications where power/weight matters.
That's simplified as an engine + exhaust system + gas tank + gas + transmission weighs hundreds of pounds more than an electric cars engine alone. Electric cars do weigh more, but the difference is not that massive.
You can actually drive further using gasoline to turn a gas turbine > electricity > electric cars battery than using that same fuel to operate a normal IC car. But, nobody does that because wind/solar/coal/nuclear are all far cheaper than gas.
Plug in hybrids are probably only viable for a particular range of battery costs. When batteries are expensive it’s worthwhile reducing that cost by spending the extra money on a duplicated drive-train. As the cost of the battery falls the savings by having the extra drivetrain complexity fall.
Most people I talk with in my peer group wouldn't even think of getting an all-electric car (except maybe as a secondary vehicle), due to range anxiety. However, what I think will happen over the next 20 years (with battery improvement, etc) is more and more hybrids and plugin hybrids. For example, see Ford's plans starting in 2020.
But the plugin hybrids won't be sold as "fuel efficient", but sold as "more powerful". However once people start doing most of their driving in all-electric mode, that will cause many gas stations to go out of business (since they run on razor thin margins). That will then be the push to make the leap to all electric in the following generation. In other words, I fully expect plug-in hybrids to be the bridge to all electric.
Another way to think about it is owning an electric as a primary vehicle (most trips are under 50 miles or whatever) and the gas car as as secondary, long range vehicle. This makes way more sense than hybrids for two car families. We own a Nissan Leaf and its definitely our primary vehicle, it gets 10x the miles/day as the gas car at a fraction of the maintenance cost. We pull the gas car out for the weekends or trips to Canada. The drive train on either vehicle is comprehendible, I dare you to look under the hood of a hybrid and say the same.
100 miles would not be sufficient to get out of the path of Hurricane Florence currently on the US eastern seaboard (although Tesla has done of the honors of lifting any restrictions on their software range limited models, as well as providing free SuperCharging to get folks to safety [1]).
I agree I probably didn't use the right language. You'll need more than 100 miles to both get out of harm's way, and also to ensure you're able to make it somewhere with accommodations available considering everyone else evacuating.
Family in South Carolina are going to Atlanta to ensure there isn't an issue getting a hotel room.
I was thinking more immediate life threatening danger with 100 miles. If you leave early enough so that power outages aren't an issue, finding a place to charge shouldn't be too much of a problem, even if it's a slower charge that adds hours to your trip.
That could be a problem once electric vehicles are much more popular, but then again, fast charging stations should be more popular by then too.
100 miles into a rural area isn't equipped to support a million people driven off the seaboard.
My sister lives in the hillbilly sticks of the Virginia/North Carolina border, about 100 miles inland. She has to drive 45 minutes to get to a doctor. That area isn't going to take thousands of refugees for a week or two. Can't feed them or provide sufficient sanitation. That's how you get cholera.
And how many people live in hurricane prone areas with no decent sized non-coastal towns within 100 miles?
They might want to consider buying something else. Or society might have to add more rapid charging stations and buses if shorter range electric cars become the norm.
Big coastal cities are already nearly impossible to evacuate by car on short notice, and they already have tens of thousands of people without cars.
The point is, "100 miles inland" isn't an answer. It's a separate issue from the problem of impoverished people living in low-lying coastal areas who can't afford cars or other means of leaving at all (there are hundreds of thousands in the path of Florence).
If you're gonna leave the North Carolina coast for the hurricane and you can afford to leave at all, there's little financial difference to whether it's winding up in inland rural areas, or simply heading to a major city anywhere else in the country. Drive to Nashville, or fly to Chicago.
>If you're gonna leave the North Carolina coast for the hurricane and you can afford to leave at all, there's little financial difference to whether it's winding up in inland rural areas, or simply heading to a major city anywhere else in the country. Drive to Nashville, or fly to Chicago.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here?
For me, it's not really the range at all, it's what you do at the end of the range. Charging stations are rare and slow, fuel stations are common and quick.
I don't see why gas-electric hybrids, with say, 20-50 miles of electric-only range aren't more popular. That would eliminate the vast majority of fossil fuel usage [1], and avoid this problem entirely. It also seems a lot cheaper than loading a car with hundreds of miles worth of batteries.
The public is always reluctant to change established behavior and expectations... mass adoption requires revolutionary change that overcomes perceived functional and financial costs of switching, or evolutionary change with no perceived cost.
So EV will see mass adoption as soon as people can top up at a "charge station" in under 3 minutes and get 200+ mile range - because that's what people expect from "a car". The public doesn't care about the evolution of implementation details like gas vs electric.
The beautiful part is that once home charging is no longer required, people will be happy to charge at home! We are an adorably irrational species.
Alternatively, there is a revolutionary path: autonomous vehicles. If AI-EV offered completely hands-off transportation, no driving or maintenance required, people would happily ignore any perceived transition costs. However, this path seems unlikely in the near future.
>The beautiful part is that once home charging is no longer required, people will be happy to charge at home! We are an adorably irrational species.
The problem isn't that people are unhappy to charge at home now, it's that if and when I need to travel more than 200 miles without stopping at home, I need supporting infrastructure (and planning to find it) or to use another vehicle.
Plus, I live in an apartment block with the under-building garage not having any plug sockets. Unless I drape an extension lead down 5 storeys and about 150m away, I can't see the upgrade path at the moment.
There probably are sockets closer, but it's not as simple as "park and charge", but either "lobby the building management and get sockets installed" or "find a hacky solution with long cables".
> I don't see why gas-electric hybrids, with say, 20-50 miles of electric-only range aren't more popular
As best as I can tell, Priuses are essentially an incremental evolution towards this. Check out Prius Prime vs the regular Prius. I imagine the main reason it's less popular is because of the higher price but they'll probably become more popular over time as Toyota works on bringing it down.
It's not about distance for me, really. It's about availability and convenience of fuel. Gas stations are EVERYWHERE and it takes 3 minutes to fuel. Electric fueling stations require route planning, and takes 30+ minutes to fuel.
For people who can get away with charging at home & work, it's fine. For people like me who do stuff like 170 mile trips to Tahoe often, I won't be able to have an electric car without "range anxiety" any time soon.
While I'll concede your point about the time it takes to charge, I think most non-electric drivers would be surprised how many charging stations there are.
I don't have an electric car, so I was surprised when I recently discovered that one of the local gas station chains has an electric charging station in the rear of every one of its stations. That's probably 30-40 locations in this small city from just one outfit.
Another odd thing I see more and more of is mobile EV charging stations in strip mall parking lots. They're these long trailers topped with solar panels that show up at Target and supermarkets and stuff at the far end of the parking lot, where you can hook up your vehicle.
They seem to be itinerant, so I'm not really sure how that business model works.
We are already there, 200 miles is already plenty. The vast majority of people only commute and the average commute distance is 16 miles each way so a 200 mile electric car satisfies the main use case. Married households could do an electric car for commuting and a gas vehicle for longer trips.
The main issue is one of cost, a secondary issue is style. Tesla's are expensive, but other automakers will fill the gap, with cheaper cars. Unfortunately today all electric cars except tesla are uniformly ugly.
I think people are ready for an electric car for daily commuting, but the cars need to be in the $20K range, 200 miles, and not look like crap.
Also keep in mind it doesnt make sense to sell an existing car to buy an electric car, so there is a 8-15 year lifecycle for people to ditch their old cars.
I may be the outlier, but I don't think the Prius looks like crap. It's not super appealing, but IMO most modern cars all look alike and they are boring. At least the Prius looked a bit more quirky when it came out, so a little more interesting. Now, they are so ubiquitous that the quirky sense is gone, but it's not worse than your typical sedan.
> all electric cars except Tesla are uniformly ugly.
Fact. And the reason is that many people that buy electric/hybrid cars are like vegans -- they want everyone to know about it. The Prius is a horrible monstrosity of visual appeal but it sells because people like to be seen being "better" or "more woke" than their neighbors -- while a Honda Civic hybrid looks exactly like a Honda Civic. That's the only explanation for the almost universally ugly and "distinctive" profile of electrics and hybrids. Even with other hybrids with similar specs (and less "distinctive" designs,) they didn't see anywhere near the sales numbers as the Prius. A Ford Fusion Energi can only be discerned from a normal Ford Fusion by a badge on the door, even if it gets better mileage than a Prius. But the Energi only sold about 15,000 copies in 2015, vs the Prius’ 200,000 or so.
An all-electric Suburban without adequately noticeable badging would earn the condemnation from more "enlightened" parents waiting in the school pickup line.
my case, I have a 3. I have a trip between Georgia and Ohio soon. This is three to four stops each direction. however the key stop when visiting is that I cannot charge at my destination. At home I have the necessary plug in my garage.
so at my destination I need to account for distance back to the nearest super charger. Fortunately for me the nearest at one destination is fifty miles but another is little closer. That knocks off 100 usable miles right there. Since the recommendation is not to charge to full except on long legs of your trip that will leave me about 150 miles of local driving.
What I think is going to be fun is that we already look back at the beta generation of sub 100 mile range EVs as unacceptable and the crop of 100-150 mile range EVs will join them soon. Within 5 years or so I bet 200-250 mile range EVs will be seen as quaint at the upper price points but mainstream in the 20k price range.
However EV range increases face many hurdles. the first is range is weight. 310 mile range packs in the 3 are just shy of 1100 pounds. Charging them to full with current SC tech is still an hour. At home at 32amp it is 30 miles of range an hour and damn if that cord gets very warm. Homes can reasonably be expected to step up to 48amp but after that requires rethinking how we build homes. On the road it will require systems beyond the Tesla Supercharger system but that involves its own problems of heat.
For anyone who wants one car and does trips the require more than one charging cycle 250+ is a requirement. Also, part of range anxiety just is not the range but the time it takes to replenish that range
250 miles is enough, when it only takes me $20 and 10 minutes to drive to a fueling station and pump the 8 gallons of gasoline required to take my range back up to full capacity.
It isn't enough when I need to find an outlet I can use legally--which will likely be NEMA 14-50 240V, if you can find one--and then spend an hour waiting for the charge to finish for every 20 to 30 miles I drove off my range. That's 8 hours. Lengthy, but doable for overnight. But I can't wait 8 hours every time I drive 4. My modal road trip is 700 miles, with an overnight at 420 miles (or 280 on the return). The current state of electric charging stations is such that I couldn't drive that trip with just "level 2" AC outlet charging.
If it's just a 120V outlet, it'll take 2.5 days to recharge 250 miles of range. The electricity will still cost much less than gasoline, of course, but road trips in the US can easily total thousands of miles. It's a big country, with lots of highways, crappy passenger train service, and airline service with increasing numbers of drawbacks.
DC fast charger networks are an absolute requirement to combat range anxiety. It isn't just how far you can drive at once, but how long it takes to refill your range. Your range circle shrinks as you drive, and you need to recharge before it gets too small to have a charging station in it. So you can't just drive out your full range. You still have to plan your hops between charging stations, and if those are 180 miles apart, any extra range below 360 miles won't make a difference, because you couldn't skip a charging opportunity otherwise.
For me personally, 350-400 miles (in the worst case: with the A/C on full blast, up an incline, including frequent stopping and acceleration) would be a start.
But it’s also about about refueling (i.e. charging). Until a spot at a supercharger is as easy to come by as a gas station wherever you go, it won’t be the same. Not to mention having to wait 30+ minutes to charge, which can add up on a road trip.
It would be tough to standardize this across different vehicle models, much less manufacturers. A Model S isn't going to use the same battery pack as an electric heavy-duty pickup truck. You could use lots of small battery packs and bigger vehicles get more of them, but that complicates the machinery used to swap them.
It also hinders innovation. You can't produce batteries with innovative new form factors because nobody will be able to change them out at standard swap stations.
Finally, consumers would object to it. If I buy a brand new Model S I don't want to go to the swap station and give away my shiny new battery for someone's degraded high-mileage one that has an unknown probability of exploding or catching fire.
Tesla built one. They gave up on it because almost nobody used it. The problem with charging time on long trips is somewhat exaggerated. It does add a bit more time, but it’s not much if you're taking breaks the way you ought to anyway.
As others have noted, Tesla tried this with a single station off the I5 and quickly abandoned the idea.
The battery is probably the most expensive component in the entire car, and is ultimately a consumable. People would forever be anxious about getting swapped out with a battery with more charge cycles on it than the one they had, ultimately affecting the potential lifespan/resale of the car.
Not an insurmountable problem, but a problem that adds a fair deal of complexity to managing the inventory at the charging stations. From what I’ve read, the software on the few Teslas that used this service didn’t understand the battery had been switched at all, and continued measuring battery health as if it was still the same original battery. I certainly wouldn’t have been keen on this idea at all unless the car correctly tracked these things.
Neither are enough. Until I can drive across the continent as conveniently as I could in the ICE car I have today, I'll be extremely reluctant to purchase an electric vehicle.
Counterpoint: until I can drive around town as conveniently as I could in the EV, I won’t buy a gas car. (I won’t anyway, but....)
People focus on the extra time spent charging on trips (which is real but not huge) and ignore the extra time spent filling up at the local gas station every week even when you’re not taking any trips.
Personally, about 1800 miles. I'm sure there are others who might need more. I take a yearly drive to utah (~1400 miles each way, straight through only stopping for fuel). I'll have an ICE vehicle until range is sufficient to get me there plus a few hundred miles for exploring/getting back to a city where I can charge.
Why not rent a gas car for the one day a year you need that distance?
That's sort of where I'm ending up. Not w/ electric vehicles, but with bicycling. I bike commute year-round & use it for most of my travel, but for the rare case when I need to use my car for longer trips it's nice to have. However, paying the cost of upkeep & monthly insurance for something I use so infrequently is starting to make less sense.
Oh where to start. Ignoring the fact that I've rarely had a good experience renting:
Space - Rear seats have been unbolted/removed in my SUV and a roof rack added for the climbing/camping/canyoneering/safety gear I bring. Perhaps there are rental places with roof racks, I've yet to see one.
Cost - Most rental places I've checked charge > $0.50 per mile if you are out of state or over a couple hundred miles (if they allow it at all). On a 3000+ mile trip I'd have $1500 in mileage fees. Don't be fooled when they say unlimited mileage - its like unlimited data for cell phones. If anyone has experience to the contrary where it isn't prohibitively expensive for a trip this length I'd love to hear it (keeping in mind I go down rough dirt roads so SUV/truck, not passenger car).
Comfort - Custom stereo and other things that you can have in your own car but not a rental. Also my car is modified so passenger seat can lay flat allowing one person to sleep while another drives, greatly reducing travel time.
Safety - I'm very familiar with the capabilities of my vehicle when I go down some of the rougher roads, or have to get through sand. Also how far I can push when the gas tank gets low.
I'm not opposed to the idea, it's just a hard sell. I'd love to have an electric car for commuting to work and just rent a few times a year that I need something bigger.
One problem with the "rent a gas car for long trips" approach is that for many people their long trips are at times or for events that a lot of people also need a gas car for. Rental cars may be hard to come by at such times, or may be very expensive.
Because it’s a huge pain in the ass. So I go to a car rental place in my EV and then what, leave it there? Bring someone along to drive it back. Add a couple of hours renting a car to a trip that’s already jam packed with fussy kids and irritated spouses, that you’re trying to squeeze in on a weekend?
When I didn't have a car, I rented from Enterprise several times a month. I never found it to be inconvenient. They pick you up! Besides, if like GP you mostly get around by bicycle or public transport, it doesn't seem like a hardship to get to or from the rental place that way.
Yep. Here in Portland we also have services like ReachNow & Car2Go which have the cars sprawled out around the city rather than needing to go to a specific place.
As a cyclist, I wish more of these services (Enterprise included) would have cars with bike racks on them. Car2Go did with their Smart-car fleet, but that was phased out.
It still takes ~30 mins, and the one near me isn't open on Sunday afternoons, which cuts into my Monday morning and pushes a 2 day rental to a 3 day one.
I don't understand why car rental places haven't tried to address this yet: e.g. offer drop-off and pick-up (of the car, not me), including evening and weekends.
You can sort of get this through Turo, but you don't get the network benefits (one-way rentals, easy replacement, etc.).
It helps to be married. That way one spouse can have an electric vehicle for daily commuting or banging around town, and there's still the other spouse's gas-fueled car for longer trips.
For my part, I'm not anxious about range; price is the main issue. The car purchases over my lifetime have been $5000, $2500, $1, $4000, $11000, $8000, $12000 ... and I have never bought new.
I do not see a viable electric vehicle for me. Tesla looks awesome, and I cannot find an affordable one near me. Hell, there are TWO (count 'em, 2) used Model-3's within 20 miles of me, and they're selling for $50,000.
LOL and Model 3 was claimed as the "affordable" one. I make 6 figures, and look at my car-buying habits. * Model-3 is just not in my wheelhouse, and probably won't be for many, many years.
I'd love to buy a quality electric, and I don't see it happening any time soon. Anyway, this is just one more data-point ...
... * and to anyone who suggests I change my habits, I'll reply: 401k is important to me, saving for my first house is important to me, saving for kids' college is important to me, and staying debt-free tops everything (aside from a mortgage someday).
> I do not see a viable electric vehicle for me. Tesla looks awesome, and I cannot find an affordable one near me. Hell, there are TWO (count 'em, 2) used Model-3's within 20 miles of me, and they're selling for $50,000.
I think this year is a watershed along those lines. My guess is you will start seeing used hybrids shortly (within 3 years) at reasonable prices.
Quite a few "hybrid" cars in California are losing their ability to use the carpool lanes because there are so many of them. You now have to be able to do something like 40-50 miles on battery or you don't qualify anymore.
In addition, I think GM has moved out of the first tier of federal rebates on their electric/hybrid cars because they've sold so many of them.
You probably won't find used Teslas, but I bet you will start finding used Volts/Bolts.
From my point of view, the biggest issue I have is that while my internal combustion engine car is 25 years old, I haven't been able to keep a hybrid for more than 5 years because the technology is still evolving so quickly.
The Model 3 has only been produced in significant numbers for a few months now. The oldest production unit that exists at all is barely over a year old. This isn’t the sort of situation where you find a bargain on used cars. Give it a few years and there will be a more reasonable used market.
That's what I'm hoping for. You may notice I mention "quality" electric car ... and from what I can see, Tesla is the only producer of quality electric cars, period.
We bought a 2014 leaf last October for less than $10,000 after tax and registration. FWIW Quality was much higher than the 2006 Civic I had previously. It is a great car and cheaper to operate.
I got a 2013 one not long ago with a 24kwh battery (with about 20kwh of capacity remaining). I paid well under $10k for mine with a bunch of Nissan incentives (warranty and MOT cover for 3 years, things like that).
In fuel and tax savings it'll have paid for itself within those 3 years (versus a petrol or diesel car), after which it's effectively a free, zero-tax, zero-fuel-cost car.
My point being that an EV is already an absurdly good deal if you can make it fit your lifestyle. Also, I realize I'm biased, but I don't really get the range anxiety argument. If I run out of gas in a car I need to get towed to a gas station. If I run out of electricity I need to get to literally any wall outlet.
>Also, I realize I'm biased, but I don't really get the range anxiety argument. If I run out of gas in a car I need to get towed to a gas station. If I run out of electricity I need to get to literally any wall outlet.
This adds to my thought that EVs will be a massive boon to the working poor. No more scraping the couch cushions for enough change to put in your tank to get to work, just go sit at a free charger somewhere. No more random breakdowns of a transmission, radiator, exhaust, etc. which can cascade into a lost job from missing work since you cant fix it. Once you can get an old used 20kwh+ EV for ~$1000 in decent shape, it’s going to be amazing for these people.
Yes, but I ignored that because it didn't support my argument. And you caught me!
You're right of course, although I still maintain plugging the car into a wall socket for an hour is easy to do almost anywhere - realistically this would get enough charge for most people to get to a charger (in my case it would get me to a rapid which would top up the rest of the battery in another 25 minutes).
I wonder if the day will come soon when tow trucks feature inverters and outlets as a standard feature, in order to help "gas up" a stranded (electric) motorist.
Price anxiety and maintenance anxiety. I buy 2-3 year old cars and drive them for another 10 years. What is maintaining a 12 year old electric car going to cost? Nobody knows! When Tesla has been gone for 5 years, will a 10 year old model 3 still even boot up?
Tesla has its nay-sayers and financial enemies shorting it, yes, but there is decent reason to wonder if they'll be around 10, 20 years from now. If I buy a Model 3 in 10 years and plan to drive it 10 years, that's a very important consideration.
Because they're incredibly slow and you'd need a giant facility to accommodate what even a tiny 4 pump gas station currently does? I live in Seattle and there are tons of Teslas, but the nearest Supercharger is way out in the suburbs at a mall so you can do something with all your waiting time.
I think the number of spots you need is actually similar. A car will occupy a spot for much more time, but it will need it much less frequently since it’s only necessary for long trips.
That’s why your nearest supercharger is out in the suburbs: it’s for travelers, not locals.
We're going to need a ton more spots, it only works now because almost no one has an EV and those that do are self selected to people who can charge at home. Somewhat ironically, EVs currently work best when you live in the suburbs and commute into the city. If you live in the city you likely won't have a garage where you can charge. Even if you drive to work and your work has parking and your work parking has EV spots at best there will only be a handful.
Because charging points don't have the same environmental concerns as gas station fuel dispensers and storage meaning they can be anywhere. So why would you want to single purpose the land as most gas stations are. The convenience stores attached to most are designed to serve people in the time it takes to fuel a petrol vehicle which is five to six minutes max.
So chargers can be at places that encourage longer stops and since there is no real environmental impact that means they can be placed about anywhere a parking space already is.
Because if you are driving a PHV all-electric, you are probably charging at home, gas is a long-term range extender. Sure, as all-electric displace PHVs, that rane extender role shifts to charging points, but the big drop in demand for out-of-network fueling/charging comes from basic commuting being met by in-home charging.
Most people are going to charge at home (garage, parking lot, street charging point) or at work (garage, parking lot, street charging point.) That's not where gas stations are.
Because people will charge at their destinations or at home.
Think of it this way: You go on a long trip and need to stop for gas somewhere along the trip. Instead, you just plug in at your destination. That saves you a stop.
If you were going on a trip long enough that it requires a stop in an ICE vehicle you're going to have to stop in your electric vehicle. Maybe even stop twice.
>However, what I think will happen over the next 20 years (with battery improvement, etc) is more and more hybrids and plugin hybrids.
I disagree. I think hybrids are a dead-end. They don't help electric car adoption, rather they hinder it because they validate every criticism about electric cars. Part of the reason why Tesla got as big as it did is because it didn't feel the need to argue for electric cars on gasoline-car terms.
> I wonder what the next 20 years will bring, especially with the shift to electric vehicles.
The expectation of a shift to electric vehicles is highly exaggerated. In 20 years, most of the cars will run on gas with a small market share of electric/hybrids/hydrogen cars. It's pretty much a certainty at this point. Even if electric vehicles are economical today, everyone isn't going to switch their current cars. Moving the car market towards electric will take many decades, if it ever goes electric at all.
The projections for oil is the projections for every energy source but coal. Up.
The International Energy Association does forecasts of global demand, which are as good as anything. They see oil demand peaking at around 100 MMb/day at 2030 last I checked (we are at around 90 now).
Batteries don’t use rare earths, nor does China have a monopoly on them. There are mines for example in Nevada. They were closed though when China flooded the markets with cheap rare earths. But they can be reopened.
"Rather than worrying about a lack of lithium, there could be shortages of rare earth materials, should the EV replace the conventional car. One such material is the permanent magnet for the electric motors. Permanent magnets make one of the most energy-efficient motors. China controls about 95 percent of the global market for rare earth metals and expects to use most of these resources for its own production" - https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/availability_of_...
Right, rare earths are in motors, not in batteries, as the quote you cited says. And indeed China controls large parts of the global market, as they flooded the market with cheap rare earths, which caused mines in the west to shut down. They can be reopened as the market price for rare earths rises.
The US has _always_ been the first or second largest crude oil producer since the beginning. Not much has changed. We just have millions of oil wells, whereas Saudi has only a few hundred, many of which had naturally pressureized well heads (no pumping required). In fact the largest single oil well on the planet is in Saudi (it's called Ghawar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghawar_Field, which is such a lovely name) and it's over 150 miles long!
They don't need to influence all of us to affect all of us. U.S. taxes are funding Al-Nusra in Syria at Israel's (who hospitalizes them) and the Saudis' request in a larger war on Shiite rebels.
Enabled entirely by tar sands and fracking tech. OPEC made oil really expensive incentivizing technology development and now US*Canada have put a cap on oil prices and could bankrupt any nation relying on oil for the majority of their GDP.
History books might cite oil technology, electric cars, Trumpism, the failure of European unity, and the coming recession to be the collection of triggers for the most "interesting" times we've seen since WWII. The legitimacy and power of the American government is at a low point, if we bankrupt our adversaries and fall into a recession ourselves, who knows what could happen.
>No, not really. They still have the ability to flood the market and cause prices to tank, which would wreak havoc on the US fracking industry.
...And tank their own profits? Cheap oil is good for literally everyone but the Saudis, that's the entire reason they've cut supplies since the glut of 2014-15.
US fracking is already barely at a fraction of capacity right now with how low prices are. It's not an essential industry for us, and our economy is doing fine without it.
At this point the US can essentially produce unlimited oil at ~$50/barrel (break even for fracking with current tech [0]) whenever we want.
I always bet on entrepreneurs and free markets over kingdoms and dictatorships. The Sultan got things set up a certain away and assumed nothing would change, while the free West just responds and innovates no matter circumstances.
I don't know about all of that. We got lucky to have such rich natural resources within our borders. All of the innovation and entrepreneurship in the world wouldn't have helped much if a bunch of plants and dinosaurs didn't happen to die and get buried in a geologically fortuitous way.
>>...And tank their own profits? Cheap oil is good for literally everyone but the Saudis, that's the entire reason they've cut supplies since the glut of 2014-15.
Like you yourself said, Saudis are obscenely rich. They can tolerate losses in profits. In contrast, fracking companies in the US can't, at least not without massive government subsidies.
I agree with what you said, they certainly can do that and you could argue the last crude crash was motivated by the US boom. The other argument is that Saudi Arabia's main objective is capturing as much profit as possible on all of their reserves before demand falls off a cliff vs strong-arming competition. They don't want to be stuck with huge deposits nobody wants in 30 years. It's their only export and they will stimulate demand as needed to sell every last drop. In this case, undercutting others would be a side benefit.
Well that's the trillion dollar question. Renewable energy adoption and carbon regulation are accelerating. I'm struggling to see a scenario where we run out of reserves in this century. I wouldn't put it past a country almost completely dependent on oil to keep stimulating demand.
I think you are right. Their per barrel production costs were < $10 in 2016 and seem to be the lowest of all the producers [1]. When the price per barrel over the last couple of years was under $30, the US fracking industry lost quite a few jobs as I recall.
We live in a completely different power structure
now from 20 years ago.
The US has always imported <10% of its oil/gas (if you don't count Canadian sources). There has never been a large scale dependence on foreign oil. Most of this was conservative propaganda from the Bush Administration to help justify the war in Iraq.
That being said OPEC had some control over the price that oil was traded at, but never the volumes.
There are some question marks on how sustainable the US oil boom is as the extraction methods are quite capital intensive. We are at historic low capital price and have a fairly high oil price and still the profitability picture is not pretty.
Oil and Gas producers are also facing severe price discounts due to a lack of pipeline capacity in the United States[1]. One could argue that as more pipelines come on line, shale producers will start to see significantly more profits.
True, but the reason it doesn't deploy it is that it has decided it cannot drive the U.S. frackers out of business, even if it drives them into bankruptcy. The initial investor may lose their investment, but the oil keeps flowing. So, they are trying to bring the price back up by holding back some of their capacity. Either way, it doesn't seem like the amount of money they got when a barrel of oil cost $125 or more, is coming back any time soon.
Nobody really knows what Saudi reserves are. Including, very possibly, the Saudi's themselves. Moreover, very old fields and, I believe, little in the way of new discoveries.
Good on them. But what a sorry state to be in, when global warming and sea level rise related problems already are a reality in Miami or - of all places - Norfolk's naval base.
You might be referring to the aftermath of the Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater, which is one of the largest craters to have struct Earth.
The crater is classified as a complex crater and as a result of the impact, the asteroid left a "W" imprint in the surface. The land on the outskirts of the crater(The "W") is unstable and is most likely what is calling the region around Norfolk to sink.
Someone with more geology knowledge might have more to say about it however :)
one thing that I don't fully understand yet: there were always storm surges above 2m (?) how come that 50cm sea-rise without any storm surges are already causing problems?
An extreme event that happened once every few years (or decades) might be tolerable, and become a vastly larger problem if it starts happening once a month instead.
New York recovered from Sandy, but the city would need massive changes if that water level became routine.
Having a higher base-line sea level is never going to help with flooding. Remember a component of the rise is that the water is warmer, and warmer water takes up slightly more space, but the real problem is that the increased temperature makes storms more aggressive and from there increases storm surge.
Old: ok so 10cm global sea rise + 15cm tide fluctuation, which might well reverse.
I can't believe some cities are built so close to the water when storm surges and natural tide fluctuation over decades is over 50 cm (20'') as seen in Alaska etc.
^^ This statement still holds somewhat.
(3rd chart down - look at number immediately below).
In the most recent wk, 9/7, production dropped back from 11 to 10.9.
Production for SA, Russia and the US have been nip and tuck for a while and (provided capital and markets hold up) the US will likely surpass the other two - but maybe not just yet.
Not that I doubt that they're right about this data point, but interesting choice of source... appears to be some sort of climate-change-denial organization?
More like another Russian revolution dragging in old satellites or a regional war in the middle-east.
Less wars of aggression and more overthrowing the powers which were held there by oil profits. Mix in world powers trying to "help" and we've got something coming.
i still have the feeling that the next big bust will come from the fracking industry by 2020. The reserves are vastly overestimated, profitability muddled by financially wizardry, and capital flow about to get squeezed as interest rates rise.
Fracking is actually far more resilient to market swings than traditional oil fields/wells. If prices for crude/natural gas drop, you just shutdown the well. Spinning it back up is far faster and cheaper than normal wells.
I work in the O&G industry and I think this is backwards. You're far more likely to see conventional wells be choked back or shut-in during price drops. That is what we saw in the recent oil price drop.
With unconventional wells (horizontal fracked wells) decline rates are so high that you will see a dramatic decrease in production by simply stopping drilling of new wells.
>...fracking could not have taken off so dramatically were it not for record low interest rates after the 2008 financial crisis. In other words, the Federal Reserve is responsible for the fracking boom.
>Frackers haven’t proven that they can make money. “The industry has a very bad history of money going into it and never coming out,”
If we are talking strictly about the economic measures going into a business decision, using (cheap QE) debt to finance capital expenditures was a good idea. The profit being made off of the capex justifies it well. It is not unsustainable in the sense of a business decision.
The article argues much of the industry may not be profitable on using normal accounting and:
>the public markets have been valuing fracking companies not based on a multiple of profits, the standard way of valuing a company, but rather according to a multiple of the acreage a company owns.
A bit like valuing dot coms on eyeballs rather than GAAP profits. It all depends on oil prices and the like I guess though.
There's a difference between a company being profitable (revenues>income) and being profitable to investors (stock goes up). Oil companies are profitable, but bad investments, especially long term.
Assuming they are fixed rate loans, it would not effect capex purchases that have already been made. Less purchases would happen in the future though (only ones meeting the more stringent requirements on investment payback that go with a higher interest rate)
There is not much here about whether or not the US can sustain this position long term but in the short term this development puts in an advantageous position geopolitically. NATO is very reliant on Russian oil and if the US is a top producer we can export more to Europe, although Russia will most likely remain the preferred exporter.
Also, this allows us to have a more aggressive stance with Saudi Arabia, especially when it comes to their disastrous human rights record in Yemen. Although the issue with that is that the current administration has shown no interest in SA's human rights record and defense contractors would lobby strongly against any sort of stirring of the relationship.
"Their"? That should be "our". Every bomb and bullet says "Made in USA", and has since 2015. Oh and of course we've also had troops there since then as well. Who in either branch of the mainstream party do we expect to pressure KSA about the atrocities in Yemen? How about the media? Oh, wait:
I take pleasure in knowing that on another timeline the US is a truly great nation that has managed to completely remove its dependency on fossil fuels, and is now switching its focus to helping poorer nations do the same.
It’s just a shame we are all stuck on this timeline...good for them though!
Hey now, oil is fantastic. The U.S. will be able to use the proceeds from this bounty of natural resources to fund an excellent public health system, just like Norway!
Ha! Well, at least we get to see some fun? Thinking this way, it sure does give you a sense of detachment from everything that’s going on. I’m undecided if that’s healthy or not? I guess it all depends if you have confidence in the Multiverse space time theories.
PS on another timeline i just called you a socialist. On this one i appreciate you. It’s rough out there...
Looking at China and India, I forget how big the US actually is compared to an average country. Same goes for our abundant natural resources which we don’t really talk about much (in the media at least).
Yes China and the US are basically the same size in area. India is smaller. What, to my mind, gets paid less attention is that the US is, in fact, the 3rd most populous nation in the world.
I'm curious what you mean relative to China. China is almost the same size as the US (10 million square kilometers) as the US, though of course normal distorted projections make the US look much larger.
With over a billion people! That’s the point the US is huge, massive urban areas and modern wealth yet it’s old fashioned commodity wealth is still massive.
Daniel Yergin is an energy analyst who has written several good books on oil and energy, The Prize and The Quest. The Prize is a history explaning how to got to 1990. And The Quest explains how we got to 2011. By the end of The Quest, you will understand how we got to here. Why Russia is a major natural gas provider to Europe. Why Venezuela's economy is collapsing. Why Saudi Arabia may follow. And mostly importantly, why the US is now one of the top energy exporters in the world (TL;DR we have tons of resources and the capital and business structures to exploit them).
Right now the US seems to be using oil exports to weaken other countries, rather than banking the oil and exploiting it when supply starts to dry up. I also think that some methods aren't long-term a good idea.
Right now the US seems to be using oil exports to weaken other countries, rather than banking the oil and exploiting it when supply starts to dry up. I also think that some methods aren't long-term a good idea.
I will second the book recommendations and I will also note that by far the best thing the U.S. can do in the short term is switch to electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. (And I mean "vehicles" in the broadest sense, including but not limited to cars: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/10/17631318/electric-sc...). That will cut the influence of bad political actors considerably. And almost everyone can, as individuals, take important steps in that direction.
That was my conclusion, too. The personal economics and the carbon footprint correlate surprisingly strongly. The CO2 costs of hybrids look attractive on a 5-6 year timescale, but it gets bad when the environmental costs of a new set of batteries get factored in. People underestimate the various costs of the vehicle itself, and how they look over a longer haul.
I just threw in the towel on my 20 year old vehicle for a new small gasoline engine car. I figure my odds of getting >12 years out of this vehicle are quite high.
Maybe the picture will be very different in 10 years, with improvements to battery technology. But today I stayed away from the hybrids and electric vehicles, for both fiscal and environmental reasons.
Electric vehicles are only a minor improvement and a large tradeoff (producing batteries is a nasty business). EVs still need power production, which throughout the US uses either coal or natural gas with some solar, nuclear, and wind. I think what we really need is better energy storage so we can store solar energy during the day and release it at night while reducing oil and gas use as small as possible, or exporting it to other countries which haven't got the resources to convert their economies.
I second the Yergin recommendation but don't understand this:
> Right now the US seems to be using oil exports to weaken other countries, rather than banking the oil and exploiting it when supply starts to dry up. I also think that some methods aren't long-term a good idea.
The US is still a net importer. It exports some because its refineries are more setup for heavy grade imports. The light, sweet crude from its newer shale efforts command a premium price on the world market from those refineries that are less able to handle heavy crude, so are exported.
I am going to side track the discussion a bit, what are the implication of this to Petrol Dollar as the world's reserve currency?
One of the reason US dollar is being used as reserved is its absolute influence / Protection in Oil and OPEC. Now US is producing more Oil than anyone else, China is buying more from and start to settle those deals in RMM, what happen next?
So if USA is producing so much oil why is it not able to pay for things like Healthcare? Presumably oil coming out of the ground is free. Where is that money going?
As a side note, the GWPF (Global Warming Policy Forum / Foundation) is a climate change denialist organisation set up by Nigel Lawson (UK politician of the Thatcher years) [0]:
> On 23 November 2009 Lawson became chairman of a new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a registered education charity, involved in promoting climate change scepticism.
This is a political disaster. Fracked crude is only profitable because the externalised costs of the catastrophic environmental damage are born by others.
This is another direct wealth transfer from the general population i.e. 99% to the 1%.
If instead of allowing fracking we invested massively in renewables we'd have more jobs, a path to much-cheaper-than oil energy, and we wouldn't be leaving toxic residue all over our water tables to make our children and grandchildren sick with any number of diseases.
As usual capitalism is taking the quick easy cash with large externalities because they aren't affected by them.
Also, abundant cheap energy is wildly important to the 99%. I can't believe that even needs to be pointed out. Thats why we deal with the pollution externalities the way we do.
Its a bridge from dirtiest energy (coal), hopefully to better things, but an important bridge it has been. The real mistake was letting nuclear go under if we cared about pollution and carbon.
Fracked crude might not even be first-order profitable. There is an assertion here by a book author being interviewed that the fracking industry is largely not long-run profitable and that only low interest rates allowed them to run speculatively at all.
This was new to me, and I don't really know if it's a correct assessment. But it's very interesting to mull over. I wonder if anyone has other information in this vein?
I'm not seeing where he says they are not long-run profitable, only that the oil industry is hard to predict, which has been obviously true for decades.
American shale plays can be profitable down to $40/bbl
"And what fascinated me about this industry is it doesn't make money. These companies lose billions of dollars. They've never produced free cash flow. They're really dependent on Wall Street's willingness to fund them. "
That's where I made the interpretation that the idea being presented here is that fracking is not long-run profitable. So I now have to wonder, when "profitable" at $40/bbl is quoted, does that might mean some form of operational profit but not payback of capital layout - or maybe not including debt service or equipment wear out if she's talking about free cash flow.
Except it hasn't been at all, because much of the oil is more profitable to sell and refine abroad than use domestically. So if we actually wanted to force independence we'd need to prohibit companies from exporting their oil.
I doubt that's ever happening. Watch the "energy independence" talking point evaporate now that the new millionaires have been minted. It's almost as if that's what it was always about, isn't it?
We're energy independent in the 1970's sense, which is when the term originated. We are no longer subject to the sort of oil embargo OPEC initiated in 1973 over Western nations' support of Israel, because the West now has sufficient capacity to plug any gap in supply.
I'm not sure about that. The US still consumes a lot more than it produces. It might be the largest oil producer by a little, but it is the largest oil consumer by a lot. Looks like, net of exports, US production needs to rise several million barrels a day more to be really capable of meeting its own supply. Unless you are thinking of other Western countries that have enough surplus to cover the difference for the rest?
"Energy independence" originated as a "talking point" with the warmongers in the military-industrial-media complex. They didn't think it was possible, so they could cry some crocodile tears about that while fomenting more death and suffering in the Middle East. The innovators took them at face value, and decided that it's good to make money by avoiding war. That's when we started hearing about chemical weapons...
The word "producer" is misleading. No new oil is being produced. Should be largest "Extractor." Too bad. Wouldn't it be better to buy from other countries and leave your reserves in the ground? In the future, once all the easy to extract oil is gone, the US will have to buy from abroad at potentially higher prices.
I strongly suspect that oil usage is going to drop drastically in the next fifty years, thanks to renewable energy and electric cars. While some oil will still be needed for other sources (for example, planes), it should mostly drop off. What’s the in having oil reserves that you don’t need?
There's a case to be made for saving these oils for later or converting them into readily usable forms but few people understand it - I expect conflating it with other topics like CO2 emissions and alternative energy.
It's like how it's assumed that high quality artificial meats would replace farming of animals. Not quite - since meat is one of a 1000 products they're used for. Also true of oil.
