Re: xkcd: Neighbor-Source Heat Pump

On 6/12/2025 7:54 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Lynn McGuire  <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

The production of crude oil in the USA is probably going to drop in 2026
due to reduced capital investment in oil wells (we are in a oil bust
again since 2009).

 When I was a kid, heating oil and heavy oil were byproducts of gasoline
manufacture, and when gasoline sales went up, heating oil prices went
down.  In the modern age when they have cheap cracking is that still the
case?
 I can say that commodity lubricating oils are way more pure than they
were when I was a kid.  Light machine oil used to have black gunk at the
bottom of the can and smelled like gas.  Now it has no deposit and no
smell.
 

The USA natural gas production will meet of all the USA's needs easily
for the next 100 to 200 years as we are flaring about 1/3rd of our
natural gas right now due to lack of customers and/or storage.  Most of
the 100% natural gas wells are closed in at this time.

 Storage is a big deal.  And transport.
--scott

Cracking heavy oil requires hydrogen to fill in the spots where the carbon chains used to be.  And lots of catalysts, mostly alumina. Expensive, very expensive.  My PhD Chem Eng father did his 1960 - 1963 thesis at Princeton using chaos theory on an IBM 360 to make longer retubing runs on cat crackers.  Shell sponsored his thesis and he got them to 12 month runs from the previous 9 month runs.  Cat crackers have constant temperature excursions (runaway exothermic reactions) and have to be retubed frequently.
One of my customers sells a dedicated reactor that converts asphalt into gasoline.  When the price of asphalt drops, their customers turn on the reactor until the asphalt prices go back up.
Lynn