Re: the future long term financial apocalypse of the USA

On 5/22/2024 8:45 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Lynn McGuire  <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

You are always with the bad vibes !  Be happy, dude !

 Oil is so great for lubrication and as a plastics precursor that we are
going to be needing it for a very long time.  It seems a shame to waste the
stuff we have just burning it for fuel.
--scott

Most plastics plants use natural gas as their main precursor.  Natural gas is about a fifth of the price of crude oil here in the USA.  Outside the USA, resource short countries such as China, Japan, and Taiwan that have plastics plants are moving them to the USA since the USA natural gas price is 1/10th that of the world price (LNG).
The transportation industries (train, truck, car, etc) use about 1/4 of the distillate fuels in the USA.  They are very slowly converting to liquefied natural gas and electricity but there are many problems involved with heavy LNG storage tanks and heavy batteries dropping the payload capabilities of the vehicles.  If you use 1.0 gallons of diesel then that is 1.2 gallons of gasoline or 2.0 gallons of LNG.  I am not sure about the battery weight but the Tesla Semi has either two 250 kwh batteries (250 miles) or four 250 kwh batteries (500 miles).
If the lack of lubrication oil is very needful, we can always reverse the CO2 process and make oil from the trace amount of CO2 in the air. We can do this already, the current cost is around $15 to $20 per gallon (SWAG).  The majority of the cost is the expensive catalysts and the high energy requirement.  Also, the process makes a lot of glycerine (1/3 to 2/3) which is usually landfilled.
Lynn