One guy’s notion

[bruce MN]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/gas-prices-ethanol-subsidies-putin/627053/

[rickgthf]

.. cut 10% of our gasoline supply?  Last year, the US government, or should I say the US taxpayers subsidized the oil & gas industry to the tune of $62 billion for the depletion allowance alone, not even counting the "Research" deduction or any of the other petroleum industry boondoggles.

   For what, to grow a little more wheat?  The biggest use of wheat here is the straw to balance dairy cow rations otherwise it's a money loser.

[ddtfarm1]

I agree that ethanol is not perfect, but this article tries to make a complicated issue simple by just disregarding so many other factors. Frum came to fame as a speech writer and not an analyst. He could probably write an article to argue either side. I'm guessing an oil guy bought his Starbucks drink last week.

[erikjohnson61y]

First, Frum seems ignorant that only the starch is taken out of the corn and the DDG's remain for feed, which are healthier for the animals anyway. I ask my city friends if they've noticed that bacon and other pork products have become a lot leaner over the last 20 years, and they say Yes, why is that??  Because we take all the "sugar" out of the feed before we feed it to them!

Second, to Rick's point, knowing what we know about the profitability of wheat versus oil, Frum is a bit of an idiot to suggest that depriving Putin of wheat revenue would hurt more than depriving him of oil revenue.

Third, crop selection is a function of growing season and available sunlight and water. Given enough of a growing season and water, corn converts more sun energy to carbohydrates, protein, and oil than just about any other crop, making it the most valuable on a per-acre basis (vegetable crops in places like the Central Valley in Cali are the obvious exception).

The best (and obvious) way to hurt Putin is to ramp up domestic energy production and encourage the continental Europeans to do the same. Offshore Norway and the UK North Sea could still produce a significant chunk of their needs if the needed investments were made. And new fields in Africa can be developed with Europe being the obvious customer (If China doesn't get in there and fund the development first).

[sdholloway56]

Yeah, there are some points in there but I'm not sure he brings it to a coherent conclusion.

It is true that food inflation is a much bigger threat to global geopolitical stability than high oil prices- just like the Arab Spring, brought to you by the US ethanol program. But there would be ways to build more elasticity into the US ethanol mandates- you don't need to just throw them out.

But anyway- a breakneck program to replace oil with renewables is the obvious answer.

US drillers aren't going to go back to drilling full out because they're making a fortune screwing us. To hell with them, the Saudis, Russians and the whole rotten lot of them.

[erikjohnson61y]

1) Would it be a thing for countries to try to keep their populations within the range that they can feed themselves?? (regarding Arab Spring)

2) Define "breakneck".  I think when you try to define "breakneck" you will run into "bottleneck". Making EV's is easy. making juice from wind and solar takes a lot of steel, copper, aluminum, and silver mining, not to mention rare earths. Significantly ramping up production of the needed minerals and metals is really hard to do at "breakneck" speed. I would bet a whole lot that the next energy transition to non-fossil fuels will take as long as the transition from wood to coal, and from coal to oil - about 100 years each, and we're maybe 10 years into it. And then there's the transmission grid... We haven't built enough renewables to replace coal yet, let alone eat into oil demand. (To be clear, I'm in favor of renewables, just have a realistic view of the time frame required to accomplish the transition).

US drillers aren't going to drill until there's some certainty that what they're working on won't be cancelled on a whim with no recompense by idiot politicians. Reserve replacements is a key metric in an oil companies' stock valuation, so they have a continuous incentive to find more. They're just off looking for better regulatory environments.

[sdholloway56]

Oh, full transition from fossil fuels will take twenty years. The point is to seize the upper hand back- the pandemic gave them the chance to grab it, and now they’re raping the planet’s people faster and harder than they were already raping the planet.

MBS to Putin to the Koch extremist networks that are funded by the multinationals laundering money through the biggest private outfit, oil is the beating heart of global fascism.

”Agriculture” can reconcile its frenemy dalliance with the global fascist network, but only if it is framed correctly.

[sdholloway56]

The only sizable chunk of oil that is available and possibly within any degree of US control is in the Permian and a few smaller plays where there is plenty of leased (mostly private) land and rigs and crews, but they're taking their own sweet time- still about 20% below 2019 drill levels. Those are ultra short term plays- a frack well produces fast and dries up fast so it is all BS about how they won't drill because of disincentives. They won't drill because they're holding us hostage.

BTW, on account of the nature of the very short production life of frack wells, there's already a huge hole from drilling that didn't happen the last two years and there's nothing to be done about that.

The northern leg of Keystone XL wouldn't be bringing any additional oilsands or Bakken kerogen for a couple more years yet, nor would any offshore or other plays.

Our pushers are trying to keep us on the spike and they're spending huge amounts of propaganda money to prove that we're all whiny little snowflakes who will crumble with $5 gasoline.

Maybe we are.

[erikjohnson61y]

Right now coal fired generation still produces about 19% of US electric supply, at 774 million megawatt-hours/yr. Solar and wind are at about 12%. (Hydro is at about 10% and is unlikely to grow). It took 10 years to double renewable's share of the electricity market from 2008 to 2018. During that time wind+solar were growing at about 22MMWHr/year, and in a linear fashion, not an accelerating fashion. Coal is WAY down, but mostly because it's been replaced by Natural Gas in the US, which is now about 40% of generating capacity. But to replace the rest of the coal-fired generation with renewables, at the current build-out rate of 22MMWHr/year would take (774/22) = 35 years.

That's just to replace existing coal use to generate electricity. Now we also want to replace liquid hydrocarbon transportation fuels with renewables. The US uses about 20 million barrels per day of oil, roughly half of which is transportation fuels. One barrel of oil contains about 1.77 MWHr of energy equivalent. 10 million bbl/day x 365 days x 1.77MWHr/bbl = 6.5 million MMWHr/year of new renewable capacity to replace it. Divide by 24 and 365 and you get 738GW of new needed capacity (at 100% efficiency, no less). Currently the wind and solar industries brag about low double-digit GW additions to capacity... Even if we could go from 22 to 10,000 MMWH/year of new renewable capacity per year, it would take 650 years to completely replace fossil fuel consumption in the US. We recently built a 220MW wind farm near us, that covers about 30 square miles. We would need about 15,000 like this across the country to replace hydrocarbon fuels, or 300 of them in every single state (but 9 of the 50 states aren't even big enough to host 300 even if you used every square inch). Or you could do it with only 1500 new 1000MW nuclear plants (if you can find the fuel for them all). The numbers are simply staggering. 

Math - the Kryptonite of every liberal.

[sdholloway56]

To the contrary, a land area about the size of KS covered in PV cells would provide 100% of the world’s current energy needs.

As far as land area, AUS has a vast resource for both wind and solar and could easily export vast amounts as NH3 for both fertilizer and transportation fuel. A lot of different sources and technologies will be applied.

At any rate, we’re talking 20 years there so let’s not conflate that with the immediate term.

The fastest way to break the fascist global oil oligopoly is to use less oil. The current global oil spike is from an output reduction of about 3%. That is a very achievable target for reducing oil demand, every single year.

Anyway, short of getting Jared’s buddies in SA and UAE to pump more the quickest route is to ramp drilling back up in the Permian.

I favor using the DPA to force them to make huge money, even if they lose longer term blackmail leverage.