Saudi - Drug Capital of the ME

I mean what if we used our own oil first.

 

The oil that is produced in the US is light and sweet crude oil. Compared to the heavier and less sweet crude produced in the Middle East, the sweet crude oil is not compatible with the refineries here in the US.

Big oil could and should construct infrastructure and refineries to handle the lighter sweeter oil that but they would rather pay dividends to their shareholders and bonuses to their executives.

We (the US) has been the largest producer of oil and natural gas since 2018. Crazy, huh?

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/america-produces-enough-oil-to-meet-its-needs-so-why-do-we-import-crude#:~:text=The problem is that for,than the kind produced here.

 

And we have.

The country/companies that figure out renewable energy in a way that is profitable (and they will) will be calling the shots. For life of me I don’t understand why some folks keep pushing against it. Actually I do know but that’s a different subject.

 

Right, what I meant was, could we go full court press on pumping oil while also going full court press on developing renewables. This would allow us to become independent in both the old form and the new form.

 

That's good. Didn't know about the types of oil. I agree about the oil companies.

 

We are pumping more now but as a commodity it’s just part of world supply. Supply and demand always wins.

I had to laugh at DeSantis the other day when he was in Midland, Texas saying he was going to get gas down to 2 bucks a gallon.

One, how are you going to do that? Nationalize the oil industry? Great Hugo Chavez!

Second, do you think the oil folks in Midland WANT 2 dollars a gallon gasoline? What a moron.

In hindsight, maybe not a good idea to sell the biggest refinery in the US to the Saudis.

 

For sure.

 

Refineries are insanely expensive and take decades to recover investment. As an investment when we plan to phase out oil it would be stupid.

Also, during the fracking boom from like 2005-2020 US drillers and frackers incurred massive losses - hundreds of billions due to over drilling and low prices. They are much more wary of shooting themselves in the foot with excess supply.

 

I have an idea, perhaps Jarred and Ivanka should consider donating that cool billion to charity that was provided to them as "legit" from the Kingdom.

Why is this not being investigated ala Hunter?

 

It is criminal that more refineries and "Crackers" are not built.

I have my own opinions about it but I think its fair to say big oil pays the criminal pols on both sides of the isle to keep refineries FROM being built to keep prices high.

 

FINALLY!
Emphasis on "IF".

 

https://archive.ph/3McAy

Interesting. Seems to me this is the type of thing that should get government backing if they can’t get it going on their own. It is a national security type issue.

 

Witch hunt …

 

Agree. What he is proposing is essentially what we had with natural gas until recently. Natural gas wasn’t really easy to export so all of the gas stayed in the states - which was great for low prices but the industry lost a shit ton of money and now are much more hesitant to drill.

The Ukraine war has really increased the export of LNG which has opened up natural gas as a global commodity similar to oil. The good news is there is a lot more money to be made given worldwide market for our natural gas. The downside is US natural gas wont be as artificially cheap as it used to be.

I’ve posted this before but it is a really insightful article how how much money was lost during the fracking boom


Opinion | Hardly Anyone Talks About How Fracking Was an Extraordinary Boondoggle (Published 2022)




Today, with profits aided by the energy price spikes of the last year, the fracking industry is finally, at least for the time being, profitable. But from 2010 to 2020, U.S. shale lost $300 billion. Previously, from 2002 to 2012, Chesapeake, the industry leader, didn’t report positive cash flow once, ending that period with total losses of some $30 billion, as Bethany McLean documents in her 2018 book, “Saudi America,” the single best and most thorough account of the fracking boom up to that point. Between mid-2012 and mid-2017, the 60 biggest fracking companies were losing an average of $9 billion each quarter. From 2006 to 2014, fracking companies lost $80 billion; in 2014, with oil at $100 a barrel, a level that seemed to promise a great cash-out, they lost $20 billion. These losses were mammoth and consistent, adding up to a total that “dwarfs anything in tech/V.C. in that time frame,” as the Bloomberg writer Joe Weisenthal pointed out recently. “There were all these stories written about how V.C.s were subsidizing millennial lifestyles,” he noted on Twitter. “The real story to be written is about the massive subsidy to consumers from everyone who financed Chesapeake and all the companies that lost money fracking last decade.”

At the risk of oversimplifying the never-ending complexities of energy, there is a climate lesson here — a clear contrast to draw. Fracking was nothing less than a genuine energy transition, enacted quite rapidly and at enormous upfront expense with only speculative paths to real profit, requiring large-scale infrastructure build-outs against some cultural and political resistance and yet celebrated all the while as a product of irrepressible capitalism, the almost inevitable result of the never-ending appetite Americans have for cheap energy. And yet for a decade, as fracking boomed, Americans were told again and again — and not just by climate deniers — that rushing a green transition would be too expensive, imposing a huge burden on taxpayers, who would be footing the bill to subsidize and support a renewable build-out that couldn’t possibly be justified in terms of market logic or demand. For those exact same years, though middlemen profited off fracking, sector-wide losses mounted. “The industry, you know, it destroyed a lot of wealth,” Jeffrey Currie, the head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs, said recently. “Like 10 to 20 cents on every single dollar. I think the number is actually closer to 30 cents on every dollar.”

 

The thing about manufacturing is yes the input prices are higher, but they are even higher in Europe and we are steering away from China so those are equalizing factors.

 

Barring some massive tech advances the demand for energy is out growing the supply even when you figure in massive growth in alt sources.
Just look at the projections for the third world(India foremost) for the next 50 years.
Hell the US demand is increasing as well.

It’s not either or thinking it’s reality, the demand isn’t some static level. To ignore that is silly.