SteveR Loc: Michigan

How many barrels did we produce at the END of the last administration?

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

See the information from the EIA above - just follow the link.

And BTW, it doesn’t matter anyway - the president doesn’t control oil production in the US as you well know. You’re confusing causation with correlation. Just because something has changed during the past or current administration, doesn’t mean the administration has control over it or is the cause (as much as the opponents of the current or past administrations would like to claim that)

When confused about correlation vs causation, remember that beating a Tom Tom during an eclipse will always bring back the sun

tlhender

Amen!

srt101fan

I really admire your ability to counter the BS spread by some these posters with such well reasoned responses delivered in such a civil manner.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Actually, there is a room in the sub-basement that controls the flow of oil into the country. The President can go down there and turn the dial whenever he wants. It's similar to the one below.

Effate Loc: El Dorado Hills, Ca.

The EIA report is a comprehensive report on what has happened re: production and costs but certainly can’t or doesn’t try to explain the reasons for production or the lack thereof. As has been eluded to the issue is very complex and above my pay grade. But from a lay person’s perspective I see supply and demand forces from Covid and many geopolitical uncertainties precipitating the upward trends in the market. However, to merely point to the fact that we are a net exporter does not tell the whole story otherwise we must ask why would we import one barrel we could produce. One reason much gulf oil gets exported may be the onerous 100 year old Jones Act. I’m sure quality of crude also plays a factor.

That being said it has been a clear objective of the current administration to cancel leases, stop the Keystone XL pipeline and not issue new leases on some of the most productive areas (federal lands) in a stated effort to wean the United States from oil and natural gas which as Governor Dunleavy (Ak) stated yesterday 200 miles from where we were drilling with technology to more cleanly extract oil, Russia has hundreds of oil wells with open flames extracting the same oil. Again, I do not have knowledge of the technology but I have read we employ the cleanest methods of extraction. Because of the onerous restrictions and stated policies of this administration investors are not willing to invest heavily in new exploration and drilling at this time as they are obviously bottom line oriented.

The report you cite (I have not fully read it but it has been widely reported) states we, contrary to what the administration is stating, are producing 1.2 million barrels a day less than we were in 2019. If this is true it seems to me if that oil was put on the world market simple supply and demand would cause crude futures to drop while not dealing with the devil (Iran, Venezuela and the Saudis) for crude. Additionally, we employ Americans and keep the profits. The bottom line is the world wide demand is there and it is laudable to move towards clean energy but at a pace that is economically feasible. Even Elan Musk said desperate times call for desperate measures and we should drill. Senator Rubio pointed out this morning that if oil and natural gas is not available to the world they will burn dirtier coal as they are not going to freeze in the winter just to please John Kerry.

PhotoPhred Loc: Cheyney, Pa

Stop pointing fingers of blame. Start thinking about a wartime economy like WW2. Reduce consumption, conserve.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Me too - maybe a plug in hybrid sometime in the future (but both my present cars are paid for, so there’s that).

Abo

No comment

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Thanks for the well reasoned response,. A couple of points:

It’s pretty universally understood that oil production and consumption dropped in 2019/2020 (worldwide) due to Covid, and now that the virus appears to be waning in the US, production is ramping back up like the production of all other products.

No argument that the current administration is opposed to drilling off the east coast and in the Arctic as well as other ecologically sensitive areas, and I’m all for it. We absolutely need to move from fossil fuels IC vehicles to EVs and not just this administration, but the rest of the world understands that as well. Note as I posted earlier that Mercedes Benz will cease all IC production by 2030 and move to EVs). Almost every other automobile manufacturer is moving to EVs and that is all about producing what people will purchase despite the huge cost of retooling and standing up battery production facilities. That’s the new reality, and it’s not driven by this administration, they’re responding (correctly) to this worldwide change. I credit them with the foresight to see this change coming and help the US prepare for it. It’s inevitable and even the oil companies can’t change the reality, but they can certainly extract every dime they can from their declining industry. We better move to EVs and save the oil we have left for the production of petroleum derived products (such as plastics) and airplanes.

Wuligal Loc: Slippery Rock, Pa.

Your dollar had a lot more buying power than it does today. Think of it this way. At $1.50 an hour you had to work one and a quarter hours to purchase ten gallons of gas for your car. Today, with wages at $15.00 dollars an hour you have to work three hours for that same ten gallons of gas. Your take home pay would have to be $30.00 an hour to be on a par when gas was 20 cents a gallon.

Wuligal Loc: Slippery Rock, Pa.

Food for thught:

Electric Vehicles: Green Energy

An interesting read.

Whether you are a proponent of electric vehicles or not, this is very interesting information. This is an unusual and thought
provoking article by Bruce Haedrich.

When I saw the title of this lecture, especially with the picture of the scantily clad model, I couldn’t resist attending. The packed auditorium was abuzz with questions about the address; nobody seemed to know what to expect. The only hint was a large aluminum block sitting on a sturdy table on the stage. When the crowd settled down, a scholarly-looking man walked out and put his hand on the shiny block, “Good evening,” he said, “I am here to introduce NMC532-X,” and he patted the block, “we call him NM for short,” and the man smiled proudly. “NM is a typical electric vehicle (EV) car battery in every way except one; we programmed him to send signals of the internal movements of his electrons when charging, discharging, and in several other conditions. We wanted to know what it feels like to be a battery. We don’t know how it happened, but NM began to talk after we downloaded the program.

Despite this ability, we put him in a car for a year and then asked him if he’d like to do presentations about batteries. He readily agreed on the condition he could say whatever he wanted. We thought that was fine, and so, without further ado, I’ll turn the floor over to NM,” the man turned and walked off the stage.

“Good evening,” NM said. He had a slightly affected accent, and when he spoke, he lit up in different colors. “That cheeky woman on the marquee was my idea,” he said. “Were she not there, along with ‘naked’ in the title, I’d likely be speaking to an empty auditorium! I also had them add ‘shocking’ because it’s a favorite word amongst us batteries.” He flashed a light blue color as he laughed.

“Sorry,” NM giggled then continued, “three days ago, at the start of my last lecture, three people walked out. I suppose they were disappointed there would be no dancing girls. But here is what I noticed about them. One was wearing a battery-powered hearing aid, one tapped on his battery-powered cell phone as he left, and a third got into his car, which would not start without a battery. So, I’d like you to think about your day for a moment; how many batteries do you rely on?”

He paused for a full minute which gave us time to count our batteries. Then he went on, “Now, it is not elementary to ask, ‘what is a battery?’ I think Tesla said it best when they called us Energy Storage Systems. That’s important. We do not make electricity – we store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid. Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, n’est-ce pas?”

He flashed blue again. “Einstein’s formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.”

He lit up red when he said that, and I sensed he was smiling. Then he continued in blue and orange. “Mr. Elkay introduced me as NMC532. If I were the battery from your computer mouse, Elkay would introduce me as double-A, if from your cell phone as CR2032, and so on. We batteries all have the same name depending on our design. By the way, the ‘X’ in my name stands for ‘experimental.’

There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals. Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium.

The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.

All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery’s metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle batteries like me or care to dispose of single-use ones properly.

But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs.”

NM got redder as he spoke. “Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.

In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.

The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.

Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it’s back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.

But wait - can you guess one of the highest but rarely acknowledged embedded costs?” NM said, then gave us about thirty seconds to make our guesses. Then he flashed his lights and said, “It’s the depreciation on the 5000-pound car you used to transport one pound of canned beans!”

NM took on a golden glow, and I thought he might have winked. He said, “But that can of beans is nothing compared to me! I am hundreds of times more complicated. My embedded costs not only come in the form of energy use; they come as environmental destruction, pollution, disease, child labor, and the inability to be recycled.”

He paused, “I weigh one thousand pounds, and as you see, I am about the size of a travel trunk.” NM’s lights showed he was serious. “I contain twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside me are 6,831 individual lithium-ion cells.

It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each auto battery like me, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just - one - battery.”

He let that one sink in, then added, “I mentioned disease and child labor a moment ago. Here’s why. Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?”

NM’s red and orange light made it look like he was on fire. “Finally,” he said, “I’d like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being ‘green,’ but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.

NM lights dimmed, and he quietly said, “There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent. I’m trying to do my part with these lectures.

Thank you for your attention, good night, and good luck.” NM’s lights went out, and he was quiet, like a regular battery.


The other costs associated with EV's is the infrastructure cost of the charging stations. Right now, utilities are subsidizing them in places where the stations are easily installed, fat, easy targets, mostly like low-hanging fruit. However, wait until demand rises, and the easy installations become harder to produce. What about folks who park cars on streets, because they have no off-street parking? What about unassigned parking in apartments, or other similar places? And from where do you get journeyman electricians. A couple of years ago, Michigan was short approximately 13K, and with COVID, etc., that number has grown. Right now, the IBEW can't get enough apprentices into FREE training, paying apprentices good wages while they learn. And the rest of skilled trades such as plumbers, carpenters, millwrights, steelworkers, etc., are all in the same bind.

Triple G

I know that wages haven’t kept their purchasing power. Look at the wage-production differential gap.

https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-divergence-between-productivity-and-a-typical-workers-pay-why-it-matters-and-why-its-real/

DennyT Loc: Central Missouri woods

Normal inflation

$4.50 in 2008 is $ $5.93 in this years dollars you should not count extremes as they are subject drastically different state taxes and local difference. Look at average

srt101fan

Another intelligent response. If we had more of those it might have kept the thread out of the Attic. But some folks just can't refrain from simple-minded political finger-pointing.....