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I was thinking the same thing! Having played through Factorio and a fair amount of GregTech really reframed my viewpoint on energy production that a huge part of the benefit of fossil fuels is the byproducts, not just raw energy output.
All the more reason to save fossil fuels instead of burning them for energy.
Hurry up and become crude oil.
The article is quick to point out the huge role of oil in the modern energy mix. It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat. The so called "Primary energy fallacy". Other than that, it's a great read.
> It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat. I've heard the statistic that 40% of the total oil pumped out of the ground just to transporting oil. We use almost half just to move it to and fro before even using it. Is this accurate?
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[off topic] Given your background,I was wondering if you could offer some clarification if I'd read some Bs or just misunderstood. Long ago I had read something in a petrochemical book, maybe I got wrong, but one little section I skimmed over seemed to point out a modern refinery cracking plant could use vegetable input stock with I think was a caveat in regard to cleaning or addition by-products. Is this feasible or…
Yes, Hydroprocessing units at refineries can either co-process vegetable oil with hydrocarbons or run 100% on vegetable oil after some modifications. Vegetable oils are tri-glycerides. These molecules can be cracked into three long chain paraffins and a propane molecule by reacting them with hydrogen at high temperature and pressure over a catalyst. This makes a raw diesel fuel that then needs to be isomerized to low…
Bio fuel is what most people think of when it comes to renewable - though by way of proper refinery processes, none of the issues or perceived issues would exist especially for more modern fuel injection pumps.
My father actually works at the Jamnagar refinery. I was bought up in there seeing and visiting the refinery as families are allowed for some trips every now and then. I learnt a lot of this process of refining out of curiosity of what my father did and it was just so cool. The refinery in context is the world's largest since more than a decade and seeing it with your own eyes, it feels like a wonder of the world for…
Would love to hear stories about it. Reliance is working on replicating the Jamnagar refinery approach in America [0] now as well. It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain as well as see an industry that the US used to lead in increasingly become dependent those partners. What a massive shift in just 25 years. [0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026…
> It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain
You really don't want downstream in your backyard, though. The environmental oversight in these countries is...less. Meanwhile, it's a hyper competitive industry with low margins so adding new capacity only works in places with cheap labor and less red tape.
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To me (as someone who has worked on oil rigs, oil pipelines, oil refineries, and chemical plants), crude oil seems far more valuable as a material than as an energy source. It feels like a damned shame that we're still combusting so much of it for heat rather than reserving it for physical materials. I understand the ways that economics are very important, and that the economics still currently favor burning a large…
We can always make polymers and HydroCarbons in general from other sources if we have energy abundance. We literally can just capture the CO2 we emitted from burning fossil and make it plastics. Of course this does not make sense in a world where we do not have enough energy to even keep datacenters open. Edit: To clarify, I do not propose burning fossils to capture CO2 and make plastics. I am a Thermo Laws believer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_distillation
Fractionating column
Two things stand out in my memory:
Even though the refinery was in full operation, we saw no other people as we walked and drove around the facility. The only staff we saw were in the control room, and they didn’t seem very busy.
The other was the almost complete lack of odors. That particular refinery is close to an upscale residential area, and the company had to be careful to keep sulfurous and other gases from escaping in order to avoid complaints and possibly fines. Some of the documentation I was translating then was about their system for detecting and preventing odor releases. As I recall, they had people walk around the perimeter and local neighborhoods regularly, just sniffing for smells from the plant. On the day we were there, I noticed petroleum odors only when we were close to one of the refining towers; otherwise, the only smell was from the nearby Tokyo Bay.
Good read. Just sadly all temperature measurements are in Fahrenheit. Really makes it hard to grasp for the other 99% of the world
Have Claude make you a browser plugin that does the conversion and quit whining.
Also the fact that that oil is different colors (green, red, etc) and not black is always amusing.
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To me (as someone who has worked on oil rigs, oil pipelines, oil refineries, and chemical plants), crude oil seems far more valuable as a material than as an energy source. It feels like a damned shame that we're still combusting so much of it for heat rather than reserving it for physical materials. I understand the ways that economics are very important, and that the economics still currently favor burning a large…
There is way more carbon in the ground as rocks than as oil. If you have plenty of energy, the difference is quite manageable. Besides, as somebody already pointed out, there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of. It's nothing compared to the rocks, and a little harder to get, but getting it first would improve things a lot.
There needs to be more appreciation for the laws of thermodynamics when discussing technology. Everything is not a 1-dimensional reduced abstraction.