A Drop of Rain

A very informative piece in the oil drum about how crude oil is refined, in terms of light sweet versus heavy crude, how much of each product (gas, gasoline, diesel, bunker fuel, etc) they get from each type, using different refining technologies.

This should help you understand a bit better how refineries are limited in the ratios of say gasoline and diesel / heating oil (’distillates’ below) from every barrel. Keep in mind also, there is an energy cost to converting the heavier crudes which this article didn’t get into much, but the article’s comments did mention that question. Interesting stuff, well written, and informative, helps clarify the processes involved in creating our various fuels.

When a refinery purchases crude oil, the key piece of information they need to know about that crude, besides price, is what the crude oil assay looks like. There has been a lot of discussion here at various times about “light sweet”, or “heavy sour”, and how these qualifiers affect the ability of a refiner to turn these crudes into products. So, I thought it would be good to devote an essay to this subject, and discuss how different types of crude can affect a refiner’s bottom line.

Let’s compare light sweet oil to heavy sour oil by looking at a pair of assays:

Liquid Volume %	Generic Light Sweet	Generic Heavy Sour
Gas (Boiling Point to 99°F)	4.40	3.40
Straight Run (99 to 210°F)	6.50	4.10
Naphtha (210 to 380°F)	18.60	9.10
Kerosene (380 to 510°F)	13.80	9.20
Distillate (510 to 725°F)	32.40	19.30
Gas Oil (725 to 1050°F)	19.60	26.50
1050+ Residuals	4.70	28.40
Sulfur %	0.30	4.90
API	34.80	22.00

Table 1. Comparison Between Assays of Light and Heavy Crudes

Refining 201: The Assay Essay

I say, if we’re going to be addicted to, then run out of, this petroleum stuff, then let’s at least understand what the stuff is, and what it’s used for, and how it’s processed into all those fun compounds we’ve grown so overly fond of….

Another nice recent oildrum article, though ultimately unfullfilling, was Richard Heinberg’s Coal in the United States, an overview of US coal reserves. And, no matter what the long term survival of most species on this planet would prefer, we are going to end up using up as much coal as we can, no matter how badly it destroys our ecosystem. Why? Because we refuse to drop growth based economic systems feeding absurd desires and unrealistic expectations.

Ilargi posted a very thoughtful comment in the automatic earth, a response to a Der Spiegel article on the environment.

Sometimes it’s refreshing to read a straight ahead piece like this amidst all the talk about the economy, especially when you have to hear pretty much every mainstream media voice on the planet talk about the costs of not killing ourselves, ie, the economic costs of stopping growth, which is what this all really boils down to in the end.

As long as we keep stating the earth’s value in monetary terms, we are irrevocably doomed. If you accept that you come from, and belong to, the world around you, and understand that Darwin has delivered proof that (wo)man has come from all that has been before, that 90% of our genes are identical to those of our pets and so on, than putting a dollar price on plants and animals and rivers and skies is identical to putting a dollar price on your own life, and on your children and loved ones. Everything alive is a part of you. Dollars are not.

In our economic system, based on debt, credit and interest, the future value of everything under the sun necessarily gets discounted over time. That is because currencies lose their value over time. It’s also in our genes: we prefer what we have now over what we might have later. Our ancestors were the ones who focused on immediate threats. Those who focused on future ones, in general didn’t live long enough to procreate.

There is an economist in this article who says:
“Protecting diversity is much cheaper than allowing its destruction.”
He’s wrong, because of what I just said: all future values are discounted, so destruction is more profitable than preservation. This economist has never grasped the essence of his own chosen field.
What is the earth worth?, the Automatic Earth, May 27, 2008

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Even Al Jazeera is getting in on the act, in this recent feature on peak oil they did. Notice how they don’t give much credence to the ongoing denial of the Saudis that oil production is in any way problematic. Wouldn’t it be nice to see our own mainstream media stop giving credence to the nonsense that our political system is spouting in terms of oil, energy, financial problems, and so on? Dream on.

Imagine seeing something like this on American mainstream television, heh heh… some major peak oil theorists are interviewed, from the Energy Watch Group, ASPO, plus Robert Hirsch, author of the Hirsch Report (check out the pdf summary and full report), etc.

Hirsch, in case you don’t know, is the guy that Bush and company commissioned to do the research, then whose research they promptly chose to ignore when his findings didn’t fit with what the Bush group wanted to hear.

The show is cut into two parts:

Who said it’s all bad news? Globalization was always a totally false construct, built on a foundation of dirt cheap oil prices (around $10 a barrel until only 10 years or so ago), caused by a very temporary global oil glut.

So to see a story about globalization already collapsing at oil prices around 120 a barrel current really makes my day a bit more cheerful. Read on to see how rising oil prices are already impacting the US locally as well.

To summarize some other postings here, ship bunker oil, fuel oil, is from what I can gather basically Number 6 distillate, the heaviest, crappiest stuff, left over after they refine out gasoline, diesel, heating oil, and jet fuel. Read this nice overview in wikipedia if you want to learn the specifics. Check out this sample of current Los Angeles bunker fuel prices.

Noting there that all categories of bunker fuel prices are rising right along with crude oil futures, the following article now should be fairly easy to understand:

The rising price of oil is making international trade of heavy cargo prohibitively expensive, and acting as an incentive for importers to find products such as steel closer to home, new research by CIBC World Markets shows.
…
If oil prices continue to rise, the soaring cost of global transport will act like a major tariff barrier and lead to a substantial slow down in international trade, they argue.

“Globalization is reversible,” they state.
High oil prices will hurt trade, report says, Globe and Mail, May 27, 2008

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Last week saw Barcelona receive it’s first shipments of water from France to alleviate it’s massive water shortage.

I’m going to follow this story for a while to see when the first major news source points to overpopulation coupled with the drought. Currently the best they seem able to do is tell us that Barcelona has about 5 million plus people, but it seems to be too much of reach for anyone to say that the arid land simply cannot support that population.

Barcelona is a preview of what’s going to happen in the American Southwest, with Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, and many other large metropolitan areas built in the desert soon to face the same issues as their water supplies become increasingly impacted by global warming initiated snowpack loss, overpopulation, and of course, a lifestyle that is simply absurd to even consider realistically in a desert in the first place.

Barcelona is a dry city. It is dry in a way that two days of showers can do nothing to alleviate. The Catalan capital’s weather can change from one day to the next, but its climate, like that of the whole Mediterranean region, is inexorably warming up and drying out. And in the process this most modern of cities is living through a crisis that offers a disturbing glimpse of metropolitan futures everywhere.
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The political battles now breaking out here could be a foretaste of the water wars that scientists and policymakers have warned us will be commonplace in the coming decades. The emergency water-saving measures Barcelona adopted after winter rains failed for a second year running have not been enough. The city has had to set up a “water bridge” and is shipping in water for the first time in the history of this great maritime city.

A tanker from Marseilles with 36 million litres of drinking water unloaded its first cargo this week, one of a mini-fleet contracted to bring water from the Rhone every few days for at least the next three months. So humbled was Barcelona when prolonged drought forced it to ship in domestic water from Tarragona, 50 miles south along the Catalan coast, 12 days ago, that city hall almost delayed shipment and considered an upbeat publicity campaign to lift morale and international prestige.
Spain’s drought: a glimpse of our future?, independent.co.uk, 24 May 2008

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The following story shows how the global diesel shortage directly affects an entire region in Africa’s domestic wheat production.

Wheat farmers in the Southern Rift Valley on Tuesday said they were unable to prepare their land for planting due to a serious shortage of diesel.

“It will not be possible for some farmers to plant wheat next month because some parts will be too dry,” said Mr Samuel Gitonga, the chairman of the Nakuru chapter of Kenya National Federation of Agricultural Producers.

Mr Gitonga said that some farmers had been harrowing their farms in readiness for planting wheat but had now suspended it due to lack of diesel. Farmers in the Rift Valley Province produce about three million bags of wheat annually but Mr Gitonga said that the target may not be achieved.
Fuel shortage threatens South Rift wheat output, 5/14/2008

As you can see, unlike the dreams of economists, the markets do not in fact adjust everything nice and neatly, it’s a fairly brutal, unforgiving game, and the sooner countries extract themselves from the industrialized agriculture system, the better off they all will be.

The recent developments in global fertilizer price hikes, diesel fuel rising, global grain prices skyrocketing, point towards one fact:

At Some Point Sustainability Must be Addressed

That, of course, will also expose the true carrying capacities of each region, since industrial agriculture is essentially an extractive industry, not a sustainable one. Sustainable means sustainable, in case you’re trying to confuse yourself, it means you can sustain the practice over time. If unsustainable food production, aka: industrial farming, is used to maintain a population at a certain level, that population is not sustainable.

It’s not, however, nearly as simple as it seems. As a recent The Nation piece reminds us, most global food production has been industrialized, and is in one way or the other, in the hands of global food corporations.

The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by “free market” policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank executive board described as “unprecedented thoroughgoing interventionism” designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine identified as barriers to economic efficiency.

Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.
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With the shutting down of the state marketing agency for corn, distribution of US corn imports and Mexican grain has come to be monopolized by a few transnational traders, like US-owned Cargill and partly US-owned Maseca, operating on both sides of the border. This has given them tremendous power to speculate on trade trends, so that movements in biofuel demand can be manipulated and magnified many times over. At the same time, monopoly control of domestic trade has ensured that a rise in international corn prices does not translate into significantly higher prices paid to small producers.
Manufacturing a Food Crisis, May 15, 2008

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I came across an interesting article re rice production. As you may have heard, the main components of fertilizer are skyrocketing in price. Economists, and people who believe that this way of thinking will help our future, of course make the predictable statement: high rice prices benefit the (largely corporate, but let’s leave that aside) rice growers.

The formula is simple: skyrocketing fertilizer prices are forcing down fertilizer use, which will next year create a major rice shortage.

Few people are aware that beneath the worries over rice which pervade media these days is a looming disaster which could make the rice crisis seem puny in comparison.

To understand the magnitude of this global menace, one would first have to appreciate how world food production quintupled many times over from the early 19th century to the present, making possible the global population explosion.

Of course, advances in global agricultural production technology played their part in boosting food production worldwide, but even their combined impact cannot compensate for something basic to agriculture which has been mainly responsible for increases in farm production since the earliest times: fertilizer.
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One thing which has not been given due attention in the present rice crisis is the effect of fertilizer in rice production. It´s fertilizer which enables countries like Thailand and Vietnam to have astounding rice yields compared to the Philippines. Thus, while we have a wider area planted to rice compared to these two countries, they produce more rice and we often end up importing from them. Without having to go into the details of the variance in yields between irrigated and raid-fed rice paddies, it´s easy to see evaluate the impact rising fertilizer prices have had on the farm gate and retail prices of rice.
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So why does this all matter to the ordinary consumer already burdened by rising prices of food, rice and petroleum products? With the dropping utilization of fertilizer as a result of its rising prices, domestic rice production is expected to fall by over 50% of the rice produced last year and the crisis that is being perceived today will further escalate to real crisis level as early as 2009.
Fertilizer and the looming global food crisis, May 23, 2008

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Although I do not believe that the car based lifestyle has any future, clearly I am in a minority. Most of the United States is built around the concept of suburban, car based development, and most of the people who bought into that are not about to let go of that dream, at least not without a fight.

In general, I consider most of the so-called ‘advances’ totally pointless. A Prius, for example, gets only about 42 or so miles per gallon highway, which is actually less than say a mid 1980’s Honda CRX, which was a very light car.

Other totally ridiculous things being promoted are the ‘hybrid’ Tahoe SUV. But I came across the Aptera electric/hybrid-electric recently, it’s pretty interesting, and, unlike the Prius style development, is a fairly serious effort to get around the core issues of modern cars: weight and air resistance (review in www.treehugger.com).

In a sense, it pains me to post things like this, but because this vehicle is clearly real, and equally clearly, is far less of a conceptual joke than say the Prius, I feel an obligation to take note. The car has a pretty large range in electric mode, about 120 miles, and, on sub 300 mile trips, gets about 300 miles per gallon (when considering the first 120 miles is on electric batteries). Real, non-electric mileage is 120 mpg, give or take.
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Well, I’d say the mainstream media’s main sources are all stumbling towards a part of the first step of realization. Seeing Kunstler featured in the Washington Post editorial pages is a pretty good sign in my opinion, although it’s a bit late, since from what I can see, we are now starting to bump our way down the back end of the global oil production peak.

The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the “peak oil” story. It’s not about running out of oil. It’s about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply.
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As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What’s more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation.

And that’s the worst part of our quandary: the American public’s narrow focus on keeping all our cars running at any cost. Even the environmental community is hung up on this. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been pushing for the development of a “Hypercar” for years — inadvertently promoting the idea that we really don’t need to change.
GRAND DELUSION
Wake Up, America. We’re Driving Toward Disaster, May 25, 2008

Kunstler took good advantage of this opportunity, and I’m glad that the Washington Post is printing this story.
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