Posted on 11/30/2019 6:41:37 PM PST by cba123
Because being tied to petroleum imports tied the USA to the world "petro-economy", basically forcing it to secure lines of supply, and leading to "entangling alliances" to do so. That constraint is now largely gone and/or maintained for the benefit of our allies.
Which puts "us" (i.e. U.S.) in the catbird seat, and said allies between the proverbial rock and hard place.
See book "The Absent Superpower" for some geopolitical ramifications.
Heavy crude can be produced and transported from Alaska and oil sands of Alberta. Instead we bow to market forces and buy heavy crude from the middle east. Absurd.
Environmentalists, no doubt funded by foreign money, have choked the Trans Alaska and Keystone XL pipelines.
Needs to be a campaign issue in 2020. Slam California on this. Conversion of California refineries not necessary. They can get all they want from Alaskan and California oil.
Conversion of midwest, gulf, and Montana refineries should be going on now.
Why bother with heavy crude at all?? As fracking continues to spread, more and more light sweet will become available. The refineries will be re-vamped to handle it. ALL the Texas/Louisiana refineries were originally designed to handle lights...returning them to that capability is certainly easily possible.
Heavy crude versus light. I may be wrong but there is a distinction between the two.
I believe heavy produces more diesel. Light produces percentage wise more gasoline.
Am too lazy to find it, probably in eia Web pages somewhere.
Around the Bakken in ND there is a refinery in Belfield that produces diesel for ND trucking but ships the naphtha for further processing elsewhere to get gasoline.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237733355_PHASE_BEHAVIOR_IN_PETROLEUM_FLUIDS/figures?lo=1
Qualitatively, your picture is “somewhat correct”. Quantitatively, not so much. The chart of crude type vs carbon number distribution gives the true picture.
Anything above about C20 is pretty much waste product, which is why we build roads with it.
The petrochemical industry runs on C2 to about C8. Gasoline prefers the fraction centered on C8 (octane), and diesel the fraction centered on C16 (cetane).
As you can see, anything above “Intermediate Crude” needs a lot of work to break down into shorter-chain units of use to industry.
Bill Clinton is a large part what happened to our refineries.
He used multiple environmental levers to eliminate a large percentage of our refinement.
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