ldevon1

August 30th, 2017 at 7:39 PM ^

But I'm not sure what a backup plan could be, unless you ride around with gas cans in your car, and if it's really a shortage, they usually limit purchase amounts.

Joined: 09/09/2015

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dfetts

August 30th, 2017 at 7:48 PM ^

If renting a car, it might make sense to select the fuel option and have the rental companies worry about having to fuel up the vehicle.

Joined: 09/06/2011

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NittanyFan

August 30th, 2017 at 8:11 PM ^

which is a massive flip in the situation from a decade ago.

Of course, 20% of American refining capabilities are in SE Texas, with another 10%-15% in Louisiana.  They're rather clustered geographically.  We could theoretically slow exports of refined products to help the domestic situation, but those large percentages above dominate the mathematical equation.

Joined: 12/04/2012

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carolina blue

August 30th, 2017 at 8:54 PM ^

Is fossil fuel. It's kind of a ridiculous term really. We somehow think that the trillions and trillions of gallons of oil pulled out of the ground are dinosaur bones or some other "fossil"? Does that make sense? Common sense says that oil is just something the earth makes. Additionally, how would you explain "dried up" oil wells suddenly getting redrilled with millions more gallons.

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BlueWon

August 30th, 2017 at 9:32 PM ^

most vehemently disagree with your opinion. 

EUR rates in new wells are going through the roof and the techniques allow for re-drilling of old wells (unfortunately, the locations of only about half of the previously drrilled 18,000 wells are known).

As for fossil fuels, remember, they are organic compounds -- Dino is still, and always will be, the source.

Joined: 04/10/2015

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carolina blue

August 30th, 2017 at 10:01 PM ^

Doesn't mean it's decomposed Dino. There's a mass issue at hand here. Per IEA numbers, the world drills 35 Billion barrels/year. Now, we haven't drilled at that rate since the beginning of oil drilling, but even if that's just the last ten years, you're talking about 350 billion barrels, which equals almost 15 trillion gallons (350B x 42 gal/barrel). And that's just the last decade! There's no way there was enough lifeto supply the kind of volume we're talking about. It's not really dinosaurs, but plants and things like that. But we could very well be over 100 Trillion gallons. I'm willing to admit I could be wrong, but as a scientist I know that many of us fail to see the forest for the trees sometimes and are prone to groupthink. This is one of those times I think it has happened and that we are wrong about what oil is. It still burns, regardless.

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carolina blue

August 30th, 2017 at 10:39 PM ^

Because I've looked it up. And I'm still not buying it. You have any idea how much it would take to make 100 Trillion gallons of oil? The scale is incomprehensibly large. Btw, were still going strong and don't seem to be anywhere near on the verge of running out. The science on oil origin is still ongoing. It is also thought that it might be mostly old compressed algae from periods when the earth got super hot. What I'm getting at is that we don't truly know, and I'm open that it may be a combination of these things, or possibly none of them at all. there are very very few scientific things on our lives that are truly facts. Every day we discover things we thought to be true but aren't. The more you open your mind to the possibility, if not probability, that we are wrong about most things, the more discoveries will be made and we will all be better off. Always remember, anyone shouting you down for being wrong about scientific "facts" doesnt know what he/she is talking about and has lost the argument.

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BlueWon

August 30th, 2017 at 10:53 PM ^

when the first oil well was drilled in the US.

We're just getting a lot better at finding and extracting it but, make no mistake, that is getting harder at the margin. Due to the declining investment in E&P activity there will be another oil supercycle -- bank it.

Joined: 04/10/2015

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drjaws

August 30th, 2017 at 10:54 PM ^

claiming there is an entire area of chemistry that humans don't get, that likely breaks all the known laws of chemistry and physics, and this new special chemistry resulted in the creation of crude oil even though the human species has essentially mastered petroleum based chemistry (just google stuff made from crude oil)? That's your reasoning?

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Squader

August 31st, 2017 at 12:10 AM ^

"You have any idea how much it would take to make 100 Trillion gallons of oil?"

These are the kinds of "whoa dude" questions that fall apart at the slightest consideration of actual numbers. People are bad at geologic time. So, let's do some quick, extremely crude math, keeping in mind that land-based multicellular life dates to (conservatively) 420 million years ago.

According to a quick Wikipedia search, "Apart from bacteria, the total live biomass on Earth is about 560 billion tonnes C [tons of organically bound carbon], and the total annual primary production of biomass is just over 100 billion tonnes C/yr." We'll use a nice round 100 billion tonnes of organic carbon/year as our starting figure.

Of course, most of this matter gets recycled into the biosphere when it gets eaten or decomposed or whatever. So let's say only 0.000001% of it ends up in environmental and geologic conditions where it could be converted to oil. In other words, if you killed every single human being alive on earth today, this ratio assumes that only 70 would be in the right place to have their organic matter eventually converted into oil. I think that's sufficiently conservative for our purposes.

Well, what does that leave us with? A scant 1,000 tonnes/year of organic carbon to be converted into oil from our original 100,000,000,000! How could that ever add up to 100 trillion gallons?!

But of course, this happens every year. And 420 million years is a long time. After a century, we have 100,000 tonnes. Now multiple that times ten. And then times ten. And then ten again. And then ten again. Congrats, you've reached your first million years. So multiply that times 420 for the age of complex terrestrial life. And now multiple that times 303, which is about the number of gallons of oil in a metric tonne.

Surprise! We're already at 127 trillion gallons! 

Obviously trained specialists can take issue with any of my example numbers here, and I completely made up the conversion rate from biomass to fossil fuel. But the idea that there's just not enough biomass to create 100 trillion gallons of oil over the entirety of earth's history is simply, well, preposterous.

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BlueWon

August 30th, 2017 at 11:01 PM ^

scientific logic to your "belief". If I understood your contention, you think rock and other inorganic sources are spontaneously producing fossil fuels -- that seems purely nonsensical to me as it flies in the face of everything we know about geology and chemistry. 

 

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Ali G Bomaye

August 31st, 2017 at 9:58 AM ^

Gasoline is less essential for most people, but I've seen this argument in response to articles about Houston-area stores price-gouging for water and food, and in my opinion, it's both economically flawed and morally despicable.

It's economically flawed because proper allocation of scarce goods depends on consumers having full information and being able to comparison shop. In reality, after a disaster, consumers are lucky to find anything at all to buy. So they can't say "this retailer is charging $40 for a case of water, so I'll just look at the store down the road."

And it's morally despicable because the argument boils down to "only rich people should survive." $10 for a loaf of bread is no big deal to many people, but it's an insurmountable obstacle to many others.

Joined: 07/08/2008

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calgoblue81

August 30th, 2017 at 8:33 PM ^

CNBC reporter said earlier in the week that there is a least 3 weeks of gasoline supply and to report price gouging.  Like the idea of taking the fuel option - my wife and I are heading to Dallas Thursday.  We are excited to see the game and may walk from downtown Dallas if that is our only option.

Joined: 12/28/2014

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