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Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

General discussions of the systemic, societal and civilisational effects of depletion.

Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby donstewart » Fri 09 Jun 2017, 14:07:15

Drawdown; Skeptics
Several commenters were dismissive when I brought up the Paul Hawken edited book Drawdown. Here is a link and some excerpt from an interview with Hawken. This should answer some questions, and perhaps get some of you interested. You may also understand why I was so enthusiastic about the inclusion of farming, gardening, and food.
Don Stewart

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environm ... nge-ranked

And so I finally decided to do Drawdown: name the goal and then map, measure, and model, see if it’s achievable. And away we went, for almost three years, with 70 Drawdown research fellows from 22 countries and six continents.

Because that’s what you hear from Charles Ferguson, Al Gore, [Jeffrey] Sachs, or Christiana Figueres. They’re all saying the same thing. It’s understandable — 62 percent of the [greenhouse gas] molecules up there came from fossil fuel combustion, so you just invert it, right? It makes sense. It just doesn’t work out that way.

But even then, the number one solution is educating girls and family planning.

Every carbon number [in the book] is peer-reviewed data.

In the process of covering land use, we had to identify what had actually been studied. So we have 22 land-use solutions. We’re splitters, in order to get accurate data.

By the way, we’re doing D2 — Drawdown Two. And it’s all coming attractions that weren’t in D1 — 60 more of them, things that are nascent, on the horizon or just below the horizon. They are game-changers, a lot of them. Some of them will fail. It’s hard to say which will or won’t.


David Roberts

I guess what trips me up is that the scenario you’re calling “plausible” involves reductions in carbon that most modeling outfits would characterize as wildly ambitious.

Paul Hawken

Our models include a lot of things that were excluded from other models. One is land use. It’s given passing reference, but hasn’t been given much credibility by the IPCC.

They don’t include, for example, farmland restoration — over a billion hectares of abandoned land all over the world. We know how to regenerate that, using animals, using cover, using no-till. Is there a transition cost? Yeah. But it’s a big sink.
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby asg70 » Fri 09 Jun 2017, 19:54:09

This thread is going hopelessly off-topic. It's about refineries being clogged with oil due to the glut, not a referendum on ecological sustainability.

BOLD PREDICTIONS
-Billions are on the verge of starvation as the lockdown continues. (yoshua, 5/20/20)

HALL OF SHAME:
-Short welched on a bet and should be shunned.
-Frequent-flyers should not cry crocodile-tears over climate-change.
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby AdamB » Fri 09 Jun 2017, 20:44:08

asg70 wrote:This thread is going hopelessly off-topic. It's about refineries being clogged with oil due to the glut, not a referendum on ecological sustainability.


Agreed. Can the eco-gibberish faux process understanding pieces be sheered off and dropped into some other thread, or its own? "How eco-system analysis can be used to understand the oil and gas business incorrectly" or something like that?
Plant Thu 27 Jul 2023 "Personally I think the IEA is exactly right when they predict peak oil in the 2020s, especially because it matches my own predictions."

Plant Wed 11 Apr 2007 "I think Deffeyes might have nailed it, and we are just past the overall peak in oil production. (Thanksgiving 2005)"
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 00:21:52

But it should be obvious why certain individuals avoid the subject and divert the thread: the premise that refineries are hurting because they are "clogged" has been completely trashed by a cornucopia of DOCUMENTED FACTS. Folks can argue opinions and interpretations but it's very difficult to refute DOCUMENTED DATA showing that not only are refineries not "clogged" but in reality are doing pretty f*cking good.

Granted profits are down from where a few years ago. But understand: a few years ago US refineries were making a product merging of $25/bbl for the oil they processed.

First understand "crack spread": it is the differential between the price of crude oil and petroleum products extracted from it. The crack spread approximates the profit margin that an oil refinery can expect to make. According to the EIA the crack spread has doubled since last March from $8.40/bbl to $16.80/bbl.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/marke ... oducts.cfm

And you see that doesn't fit the "oil industry is dead" theme some have been push. While the exploration/production side has taken a hit the refining side is doing OK. Which is important for Big Oil which, by definition, is vertically integrated. Which means a slump on the oil production side tends to be offset to some degree by better times on the refining side. Always good to remind some folks that refineries are oil buyers...not sellers.
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby asg70 » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 00:42:25

Moderators, please lock this thread. It's going nowhere but off-topic.

BOLD PREDICTIONS
-Billions are on the verge of starvation as the lockdown continues. (yoshua, 5/20/20)

HALL OF SHAME:
-Short welched on a bet and should be shunned.
-Frequent-flyers should not cry crocodile-tears over climate-change.
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 01:10:48

70 - That and you and I agreed the other day that it had been fully clarified. At that if someone didn't get it the probably never would. LOL.
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby donstewart » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 05:46:15

Dear Critics
asg70 said 'prescriptive solutions have been proven not to work' and some people who shall remain nameless cast aspersions on Paul Hawken without knowing anything about him or his new book.

My last post was simply an attempt to set the record straight. It's not arguing about how to run refineries. It's about giving some factual information to offset the aspersions which were cast.

Don Stewart
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby dissident » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 09:34:32

EdwinSm wrote:Many pages back on this thread (and sorry for the delay in reply) Dissident posted a link to a "simple" explanation of Velocity of Money:-

dissident wrote:https://www.joshuakennon.com/the-velocity-of-money-for-beginners/


An interesting read, but one very worrying assumption was made:- That is if the government taxes any thing then that tax money is totally removed from circulation. That is the the conclusion one can make from the worked examples of tax in two mythical towns. The total removal of any tax money from the calculation implies that the government never spends any money :lol: . Most western governments that I know of spend more money than they collect in tax, so one must assume that any tax income is quickly returned to the general circulation of money.


What's your point, the velocity of money includes all spending in the economy, including by the government. Clearly, in your face obviously, the government spending is not acting as a governor to offset the spending decline in the private sector. So the government is not some magic element that makes everything hunky dory. There are various reasons for this, including the fact that a lot of government taxes are spent on rent type economic activity. Such economic activity is not conducive to GDP growth. In general, the government does not spend money like a consumer.

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/rep ... xpense.htm

The US government is spending $430 billion per year on debt servicing. This spending contributes nothing to the velocity of money directly and is in fact a negative contribution, since if the money stayed in the pockets of taxpayers they would have spent it on goods and services and would have increased the velocity of money. A lot of welfare money goes to pay rent.
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby creedoninmo » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 10:47:11

Rockman: "Always good to remind some folks that refineries are oil buyers...not sellers." Exactly.
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby shortonoil » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 11:42:00

The number one solution, in terms of potential impact? A combination of educating girls and family planning, which together could reduce 120 gigatons of CO2-equivalent by 2050 — more than on- and offshore wind power combined (99 GT).


@[Don]

It appears that Hawkens is simply stating that the size of the environmental load is directly proportional to the size of the population. That has been a commonly accepted hypothesis for a long time. The problem again reverts to timing constraints; is there adequate time to avoid catastrophe from the impact of resource depletion, or climate change before the population can be reduced to a manageable level? That is the question that he does not answer, and until it is perma-culture approaches are only going to be applicable for the survivors.
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby donstewart » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 11:44:48

'refineries are oil buyers...not sellers.

Can the eco-gibberish faux process understanding pieces be sheered off and dropped into some other thread, or its own? "How eco-system analysis can be used to understand the oil and gas business incorrectly" or something like that?'

I can only speak to what I have commented on. I used a reference from the Drawdown book to illustrate the thermodynamic precariousness of the petroleum business. Some people said that if I used such a ridiculous reference, it means that my entire post must be useless. Yet the ‘one percent efficiency’ of private automobiles using petroleum products from the pump has also been used by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in Europe and the physicist Robert Ayres speaking globally.

Which means that the refineries are selling a large percentage of their products into a very inefficient transportation system. Whether the refining process is efficient or becoming inefficient I made no claims. But it seems clear to me that there is some danger on the products side, and perhaps the production and processing side.

The market value of Musk’s electric car company seems to indicate that a lot of rich people think the same. That they think so is remarkable since Musk has never made a nickel selling cars.

At any rate, I do not see any evidence that the global car companies are committed to keeping the internal combustion engines. So the ability of the refineries to sell gasoline and diesel is not at all assured. As I mentioned, I am more skeptical about the replacement of ICEs with electric vehicles than the panel who wrote Drawdown, but I do think it is wise for everyone to understand the depth of the problem from the pump to the wheels. It is also wise to do the sort of forensic analysis for energy and the economy, trying to explain what we see given the evidence.

If these concerns are ‘eco-gibberish’, they seem to be shared by stock markets.

Don Stewart
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby donstewart » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 12:01:29

@shortonoil
As I have said before, I believe your model of the oil business is the best one we have. Which would mean that time is short. So the direct answer is that Hawken and his panel of experts most effective remediation method (educating girls and birth control) does not have time to become effective.

Hawken and his panel are also very enthusiastic about wind and solar and some other miscellaneous energy initiatives. If YOU are right, there really isn't time to save civilization with those initiatives, either...even if solar panels and wind turbines can actually replace fossil fuels.

My interest lays primarily in the farming, gardening, forestry and food sector, which is a larger contributor than the wind and solar initiatives by Hawken's accounting. Gabe Brown, the North Dakota farmer and rancher, took 20 years to figure out how to do carbon farming. I heard him say in March that 'a young farmer now can take what I learned and do it in 2 or 3 years'. ALL of the farming, gardening, forestry and food initiatives are financially positive by Hawken's accounting. So there is no reason, other than inertia, why every farmer doesn't adopt these practices now. When a farmer or gardener or forester starts the practices, the soil and the plants immediately start to improve. None of the first 60 initiatives in Hawken's book require any new inventions. They are all off-the-shelf.

I have been frustrated because every spring we have a 'climate change' conference here, and every year we hear some speakers and every years things sound OK, but nobody actually does very much. Beginning in July, I am on a committee which is supposed to start thinking about next spring's conference. I am using Hawken's book as a sort of roadmap....OK, let's get started. Exactly how do we go about accomplishing what Gabe Brown accomplished in North Dakota, starting deeply in debt and with no money....he had to sell his tillage equipment in order to buy a no-till seed drill.

Maybe there is time to do something. At least, I will rest easier in my grave if we actually get busy and try something.

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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby donstewart » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 12:29:20

@shortonoil
Perhaps an example of the speed of response on the ecological initiatives. I did not hear Gabe Brown talk about this in March, except in passing, but I have heard snippets from other people, so take it as fairly good intelligence.

Somebody left the State of North Dakota a section of land for use as a game preserve. It pretty soon became an ecological desert, covered with invasive plants. The State approached Gabe, knowing of his prowess in restoring degraded land. He accepted responsibility for it, with a few conditions. One of the conditions was that they leave him free to graze as many cattle on the land as often as he wanted to graze them. Another condition was that they NOT spray the land with herbicides. (The need for that condition is that the Land Grant universities have long believed some bull-shit about over-grazing and of course Monsanto owns the Land Grant universities. Gabe had to keep the university people out of it.)

It's now about 3 years later, and the invasives are disappearing, healthy native prairie is reappearing, and wild animals are coming back. Gabe's tools were intensive grazing for short periods of time followed by relatively lengthy recovery periods, plus some seeding.

It is this sort of evidence that makes land regeneration one of the initiatives in Hawken's book.

Don Stewart
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby donstewart » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 12:37:31

@shortonoil
I forgot the punch line. Carbon sequestration can happen very rapidly in the scenario I described for Gabe Brown. While there are different methods of measuring carbon, it is fair to say that Gabe's ranch is now close to the carbon level of the native prairie when the buffalo were there. (Globally, soils have lost about half their carbon.) The Singing Frogs farm in California achieved about a half of one percent per year increase in soil organic matter, using different methods than Gabe...because they are operating a vegetable farm. The Singing Frogs people got their SOM up to 14 percent, decided it was not paying dividends to have that much, and have now reduced it back to 12 percent. California as a whole is about 1 percent.

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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby Cog » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 13:26:39

Don't these sustainable farming practices posts belong in some other thread?
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby donstewart » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 13:37:34

@cog
They only got here because some people made very nasty comments about a reference they did not understand. Then came some questions, which I have tried to answer.
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby shortonoil » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 14:18:26

The number one solution, in terms of potential impact? A combination of educating girls and family planning, which together could reduce 120 gigatons of CO2-equivalent by 2050 — more than on- and offshore wind power combined (99 GT).


@[Don]

It appears that Hawkens is simply stating that the size of the environmental load is directly proportional to the size of the population. That has been a commonly accepted hypothesis for a long time. The problem again reverts to timing constraints; is there adequate time to avoid catastrophe from the impact of resource depletion, or climate change before the population can be reduced to a manageable level? That is the question that he does not answer, and until it is perma-culture approaches are only going to be applicable for the survivors.
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby shortonoil » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 14:24:31

They only got here because some people made very nasty comments about a reference they did not understand.


It is just that they believe that they have a right to their own options, and their own data.
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby AdamB » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 16:34:12

ROCKMAN wrote:But it should be obvious why certain individuals avoid the subject and divert the thread: [b]the premise that refineries are hurting because they are "clogged" has been completely trashed by a cornucopia of DOCUMENTED FACTS.


We know. Which is why we would like all the nonsense to distract from that fact to be flushed away elsewhere.
Plant Thu 27 Jul 2023 "Personally I think the IEA is exactly right when they predict peak oil in the 2020s, especially because it matches my own predictions."

Plant Wed 11 Apr 2007 "I think Deffeyes might have nailed it, and we are just past the overall peak in oil production. (Thanksgiving 2005)"
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Re: Reuters: "World refiners are CLOGGED with oil"

Unread postby AdamB » Sat 10 Jun 2017, 16:36:37

creedoninmo wrote:Rockman: "Always good to remind some folks that refineries are oil buyers...not sellers." Exactly.


They are also manufacturers. Consumers don't demand oil...refineries do. And then they manufacture the stuff people want. Any chemical engineer can explain how we made gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, asphalt, lube oils and petrochemical products from light sweet crude, natural gas, tar sands, hydrates, or whatever other chemical feedstock fed into them to create the things consumers want.
Plant Thu 27 Jul 2023 "Personally I think the IEA is exactly right when they predict peak oil in the 2020s, especially because it matches my own predictions."

Plant Wed 11 Apr 2007 "I think Deffeyes might have nailed it, and we are just past the overall peak in oil production. (Thanksgiving 2005)"
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