this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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Science Memes

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Know thy enemy (mander.xyz)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (3 children)

correct me if I'm wrong, but the United States doesn't even have oil refineries that are capable of making gasoline out of American oil? like we need the type of oil that the middle East has, so we're constantly trading oil back and forth even though we have plenty of it

I think I've heard this is true. something about politicians wanting to look environmentalist and therefore preventing the building of any more refineries

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

Offhand I believe we have a few that can do light oil, but most of ours wouldn’t want to change over even if offered to do so for free. Rather the reason is the US has a lot of chemical engineers and capital and so is good at refining the more challenging to deal with and cheaper to get heavy oils while selling the easy to refine and therefore more valuable light oil we dig up down in Texas to places that have more primitive refineries.

While we could retrofit all of our our refining capacity to use our oil, it doesn’t make financial sense because your spending a lot of money to switch to an more expensive input, so companies arn’t going to want to do it unless the government forces them to, and the government would only force them to if it wanted to spite everyone else and raise domestic gas prices.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

it's also to do with prices. There is a certain amount of this that is true, but the primary reason is oil prices.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

yeah from what people are telling me, we have the capability of processing lower quality crude oil so it makes more sense to export our high quality stuff, then buy the cheap stuff since we can already refine it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

yeah thats pretty much the TL;DR here. It's complicated since oil is complicated and there isn't really a "insert oil" oil to talk about, there are a lot of variations of it, and a lot of ways to refine it, and a lot of different resultant products from it as well.

The fact that the modern petro industry even works is kind of insane.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

yeah it's wild to me that petroleum jelly and kerosene come from the same thing

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

that is quite simple actually.

Butter and skimmed milk also come from the same source. You have a complex mixture of stuff that is differently viscose, so in mixture it all ends up with a certain viscosity. Now you separate it and you get stuff that is almost solid and you get stuff, that is very liquid, or in the case of crude oil you get some gaseous fractions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Only butt-munchers will reply to this comment about something vague regarding US gasoline production

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

yes but how much of that gasoline was made from American crude oil? America has plenty of refineries, just none of them designed for American oil

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Crude oil us primarily classified based on density and sulphur content. It's all hydrocarbons and a portion of all of it can be turned into gasoline.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

dude. we are not talking about the gasoline. we are talking about the oil being used to make the gasoline. what percentage of the crude oil being refined into American gasoline is American produced crude oil?