Re: the future long term financial apocalypse of the USA

On Fri, 24 May 2024, Lynn McGuire wrote:

On 5/24/2024 12:14 PM, D wrote:

  On Wed, 22 May 2024, Lynn McGuire wrote:
 

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
 

 Hmm, could this be an addon to carbon capture plants coupled with solar power?

>
The current carbon capture plants are a disaster.  The absorption units must be made out of stainless steel since CO2 is an acid gas.  That ups the cost of the carbon capture plant by 2X or 3X.  The early plants used carbon steel absorbers with significant failures just three months to six months into production causing incredible cost overruns in the 3X to 4X range.
>
Then where do you put the high pressure mostly CO2 and water mixture ? Many of the places with high pressure disposal wells are having minor earthquakes.
>
Lynn

Interesting! Had no idea! But posts like this is what makes usenet worth its weight in gold. I'll try and remember that next time I talk with an "environmentalist" about carbon capture.