Yes, and: the question revolves around total financial and material capital needed to transition away from fossil fuels.

Synthetic fuels are potentially valuable because they allow existing capital assets (internal combustion engines and the industry that produces them, fuel distribution infrastructure) to continue to be used.

I am glad to see research into them continue- it's difficult to predict what will scale well economically in five or ten or thirty years.

The cost to transition away from fossil fuels isn’t really talked about much.

For example, our electric grid can’t handle everyone using electric cars. Everything from electricity production to distribution needs to be upgraded. There is a massive cost to that.

> For example, our electric grid can’t handle everyone using electric cars. Everything from electricity production to distribution needs to be upgraded. There is a massive cost to that.

Cite for that? That's simply not true. In fact of all major infrastructure media in modern society, electrical transmission is by far the cheapest to upgrade. Even discounting industrial electricity and adding on DC charging of the EV, my household usage has gone up 35%.

You really don't think society can absorb a 35% growth in one infrastructure sector? That's just silly. Obviously there are "costs", but there's no justification for "can't handle" or "massive". At all.

And the majority of people will charge when power is cheapest, meaning peak power won’t increase nearly as much.

plus there are other significant changes that can change in that time. HVDC power transmission lines lose something like 3% of their power over 600 miles, where AC ones lose closer to 7%. And use much less precious metals, since they require 2 lines instead of 3.

Is that 3% for the cable only or the entire system including conversion to AC at both ends?

All the crypto mining dying off should free up a lot of grid resources for EVs.

I've heard the "grid can't handle all EVs" statement, but have not seen anything backing up the claim.

I believe the grid can in fact handle EVs becoming prevalent. We might need more power generation, which could be new plants, and/or residential solar.

Baring some kind of crazy legislation requiring ICE vehicles to be crushed or permanently parked, we are decades away from a scenario where pure EVs are the dominant vehicle type on the road. There are just too many serviceable ICE vehicles in play to expect them to really go away in the next quarter century or so. That allows plenty of time for anything the current power generation and distribution infrastructure lacks to be adequately addressed.

The global energy usage from crypto was in the ballpark of 120-240 TWh/year, but a couple figures repeated the specific 150 TWh/year figure, so I'll use that.

The US's annual gasoline consumption is 135 bn gallons (2021 figure). At around 20 mpg (random estimate because I have to pick something), that works out to 2.7 trillion miles. At 30 kWh/100mi (figure from google), that works out 800 TWh if every gas vehicle in the US was suddenly switched for an electric one, or about 20% of the US's annual electricty generation of 4222.5 TWh (2018 figure). Also, that's about 5x the global crypto energy usage, vs just America's cars. [Obvious disclaimers: some of those estimates are arbitrary and not perfect, but they're in the right ballpark, and we obviously wouldn't switch to electric cars overnight]

Crypto was bad because it didn't actually accomplish anything with that power usage, but it was a pretty small footnote on the grand scheme of things.

The main thing your comment highlights for me is how much of a push we need for more sustainable methods of transportation in general.

There's always going to be people who will need to drive, but there's a hell of a lot of people who could be perfectly adequately served by strong public transportation.

>>but there's a hell of a lot of people who could be perfectly adequately served by strong public transportation.

Never going to happen for 80-90% of the US. It is neither economically feasible, culturally feasible, or practically feasible for most people in the US.

Work places are too spread out, homes are not located near workplaces, and there is no desire from anyone (my self included) to increase density.

I want less density not more, "walkable" cities only work if people actually want to live in a walkable city. Many many many dont

If it is only 20% more generation, that seems pretty feasible. The widespread usage of air conditioners caused a greater increase in electricity usage than that.

As more and more people switch to Electric Heat (heat pumps i.e AC run backwards) off of NatGas more and more energy companies are pleading with people to turn down their heat in the winter and up in the summer as the grid can not handle it

For the first time I can remember, my power company was sending out Texts here in the midwest during that last Arctic blast telling people to use less electricity because the grid was over taxed.

Our National Energy grid is very very fragile.

That is such a misrepresentation. It has nearly nothing to do with heat pumps, it because there is a large amount of electrical resistive heating used in Texas.

Converting natural gas furnaces to heat pumps and replacing resistive heating with heat pumps, would not increase the total electricity usage at all. Last I looked 40% of heating in Texas was done through resistive heating, heat pumps would be 3-4x more efficient. There is current power devoted to resistance heating to run heat pumps for every home.

I was not aware that Texas is in the midwest... I am not sure what Texas has to do with anything here.

That said, no one isreplacing NatGas with Electric Resistive Heating, that would be crazy, NatGas is still cheaper in most cases for people north of say KY but there are alot of HeatPumps going in

I am unclear why you think replacing a NatGas heater with a HeatPump "would not increase the total electricity usage at all" that is just false, and I am not even sure why you would claim other wise, NatGas is not an Electric Fuel Source so when you change from a non-electric fuel source to an electric fuel source you will use more electricity. Now changing from Resistive Electric to heatPump would actually drop your electrical usage in some cases (above 0degrees anyway)

Around here it is not uncommon to have a HeatPump with a Gas "emergency" heater for when it gets too cold for the heatpump, as Electric Resistive is TERRIBLE and expensive. The problem is when that combo is sold normally it is wiht 80% furnances or they just leave the old furnace in place and just upgrade the AC/Heatpumpt

Not OP, but changing from natural gas heat sources to heat pump does increase your house electricity demand, but then that natural gas is no longer consumed. Natural gas is commonly used as the 'peaker' energy source today... so it's likely that you're just going to be burning natural gas at a plant somewhere else to power your heat pump in the peaky cold snap situation. Natural gas power plants are going to be more efficient than your furnace, unless you have one of the very modern furnaces, and the amount of gas needed to be burned and turned into electricity is going to be a ratio (3:1, 4:1...) lower than the natural gas needed to be burned to heat your house.

Overall that seems like a reduction in total emissions, since you're using less natural gas overall to heat the same amount. Yes, it increases power demand, but is also lessens demand on natural gas by a greater amount.

This could be a overall net negative if the power mix is heavily polluting (coal... etc), but largely we're moving away from that over time and it will only get better.

>Overall that seems like a reduction in total emissions, since you're using less natural gas overall to heat the same amount.

This just isn't the problem at all; it's obviously a problem, but not the constraint here. Fossil fuels let you store energy in a distributed fashion (e.g. cutting and stacking firewood for the winter), which is way better for handling peaks.

If too many people get burnt by oversubscribed grids in the winter, I would expect that the middle- and upper-class response will be propane auxiliary heating systems.

Natural gas doesn't really allow a consumer to store energy. Nobody has a tank to store natural gas next to their house. Yes, you can do that with propane... but it also now requires you to have a heating system compatible with propane (it's just a nozzle change for most NG units... but still, that's way beyond the capability of most homeowners to do).

The only thing that using natural gas to burn for a furnace (vs. using it for a heat pump) gets you, is that you need more natural gas generation plants and the infrastructure to handle the additional power on the system. On the other side of the coin, you have all the natural gas infrastructure to each house premise to maintain... which can leak, have issues, etc etc etc.

Texas has its own electrical grid separate from the rest of the US.

Why is every commenting about texas? No where in my comment did I mention texas, the closest was "texts" i.e SMS messages, not texas.

I do not live in texas.

it makes for a funny read. people are very passionate about your Texas errr Texts

I read Texts as Texas.

Anyways in areas where it regularly goes below 0F, the transition will not be smooth (but probably still necessary). Heat pumps that operate efficiently down -20F are just coming out and will be even more expensive than normal heat pumps. Also most residential energy usage in really cold areas are from burning natural gas, so electricity generation is quite low compared to warmer parts of the country.

Interesting to note that there is ~30kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline, so the reason EV would only take 20% of US electricity consumption is that they are 5x more efficient (than the 20mpg gas figure used).

Indeed seems manageable.

I did not verify his figures, but his methodology was BEV efficiency, not the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline. Electric drivetrains and cars are designed ground-up for efficiency to a degree that ICE cars are not, as well as the fact that something like 80-90% of energy in a gallon of gasoline is wasted (60-70% due to Carnot efficiency alone).

Crypto was 1/5th of the ENTIRE US CONSUMER TRANSPORTATION (BEV efficiency converted)????

That is an astonishing amount of electricity for something of so little value.

But anyway, to the larger point, I agree the grid impact is overblown, especially since we should be coupling consumer BEVs with home / business / warehouse / commercial solar.

The grid seems fine from my non-expert view, its sized for peak loads on the highest capacity days. EV charging can be done at night once AC use drops off. In my 5 years in California there was maybe 1-2 days midsummer when there wasn't enough power and still was entirely due to inadequate generation and high usage in neighboring states as well which limited imports.

In Germany the government asked people not to use electric heaters this winter because the grid could break down.

An ev drains way more power then a 2kw space heater.

An average EV averages far less power than an average 2kW space heater over time.

A 2kW space heater used just 12 hours a day uses the same power per day as a 4kWh/mile EV driven 35,000 miles per year. Many space heaters see more than 12h/day of use but 35k miles per year is extremely rare.

EV’s are like microwaves, they use a lot of power when on but the grid cares about average load across millions of them not what’s happening in any one home.

> “as a 4kWh/mile EV”

“The battery size for a Tesla Model 3 ranges from 50 kWh to 82 kWh” that would give the largest a range of 20 miles.

Ev-database.org says they use 151Wh/km which is about 240Wh/mile.

Just a typo a reasonably efficient EV is 240Wh/mile or ~4 miles per kWh.

This is a ridiculous comparison. Google tells me an electric vehicle uses around 14kWh per day if you drive ~14k miles per year, and is much more efficient than an internal combustion engine.

Your hypothetical 2kw space heater uses 24kWh a day and is drastically less efficient than a heat pump.

Peak loads let the grid collapse. Not constant loads over N hours. If everyone starts charging their EVs at roughly the same time (like when getting home from work) it won't matter that the EV uses less power over 24hours than a space heater.

EV zealots are just blind to the issues their silver bullet creates. Just like the "walk-able cities" folks.

This is why we have different pricing for different hours. Only those that actually need the capacity will use the expensive power from 16-20.

Others will use dirt-cheap night time electricity.

And with Vehicle to Grid smart people can sell the extra energy in their car battery during peak hours and use the credits from that to charge their car overnight.

None of this is some kind of magical tech that's hard to use. Gridio (https://www.gridio.io) already exists and works directly with multiple EV brands.

It looks like Germans drive an average of 19 miles per day. Charging an EV to cover that would only need 7kwh at 100% efficiency. So a space heater could use more or less overnight depending on its duty cycle.

Well, yes. If tomorrow everyone replaces their ICE cars with EVs, then the grid won’t be able to handle that. Completely different situation, though.

We should not replace ICE cars with EVs, but something smaller. Steam engines were large because that was how they got efficiency up. ICE cars could afford to be smaller and more efficient. If they had just replaced steam locmotives with diesel ones that would have been stupid...instead they built a whole new infrastructure around smaller cars that was much better than the rail network and redesigned our entire cities. Existing cars are the optimal configuration for a given engine cost and gas price.

Electric motors are even more efficient, but using them in the form factor of a car is also stupid. With robotics we can now make tiny self-driving vehicles that can do chores for us. Why should I drive a 2-ton car to the store to pick up a gallon of milk, when the store can send a small robot to deliver it to me? Similarly a large empty bus can be replaced with smaller ATV sized EVs that drive me from my house to the main artery and merge to form one train. That reduces the size of the EV engine and battery pack by 10x. Some of the problems to be solved are not merely technological but organizational and cultural.

Why should the store send a small robot to deliver it you?

You can ride a bicycle to the store to pick it up. Just think of the cardiovascular benefits.

And you know what? Think of the energy cost of the robot's manufacture, and the energy the delivery takes.

Because rain, snow, heat, lack of fitness, security, amongst other reasons.

Cycling is my most common mode of transportation these days. I love it. But I also know it's not going to be practical primary means of transport for a huge slice of the population. And the "danger from cars" ranks pretty low in my list of reasons.

A bike cannot compete in terms of energy efficiency with a slow robot that delivers multiple packages to people along a route.

Human food is the most expensive fuel on the planet when you factor in agriculture.

A Tesla Model 3 charges at the rate of 3~ per hour using about 1.2 kw. Over 12 hours that's about 36 miles each night.

My EV is currently charging at 2.4kW power. Or was, I'm pretty sure the battery was already at limit a few hours ago.

The next time I need to plug it in is maybe on Saturday.

You need to use your electric heater 24/7 to not freeze.

Two important things to note…

1) where power is generated and used for crypto isn’t the same as needed for electric cars. Locations matter when you’re dealing with the creation of and distribution of electricity

2) moving electricity to all of the locations where it will be used is another problem. That deals with transmission lines, transformers, the last mile, and all of that stuff. That we don’t hear about it doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. It is Andy the lack of awareness and planning concerns me.

Oh, you mean some non-zero investment is required? What change doesn't require investment?

In all likelihood, gasoline transportation costs an order of magnitude more than electricity. And that's not just infrastructure that is already paid for. There is a much larger maintenance cost, an ongoing labor cost, and a much shorter useful life for anything related to fossil fuels.

>In all likelihood, gasoline transportation costs an order of magnitude more than electricity.

This statement just doesn't pass even the most lax economic sanity check.

Why don't all the use cases where people don't care about anything other than the bottom dollar and don't run up against the weaknesses of modern batteries already run electric vehicles. I'm thinking like low daily mileage fleet of small vehicles in a warm climate somewhere with high fuel costs. Like why doesn't an EV Fiat Promaster exist and why doesn't every tradesman in Sicily run one? If the numbers penciled out then surely we'd have it, at least in some niche somewhere. We are starting to see mass EV adoption but it's right on the margin and the details on any specific use case make it cheaper or maybe not.

Because vehicles are expensive and people don't replace them all that often? Affordable, capable EVs are relatively new and being competitive with gasoline vehicles doesn't necessarily mean they're so competitive that it makes sense to prematurely replace a working gas powered vehicle.

Longer term though, EVs replacing gasoline vehicles for those kind of use-cases is exactly what we're going to see. In the US, the postal service intends to start deploying tens of thousands of EVs over the next few years as they replace older gasoline powered delivery vehicles. The economics do apparently work out and pass the sanity check, just not overnight.

Well, you seem to not have read my answer...

But anyway, your answer is because transportation costs are irrelevant for both gasoline and electricity. So, even tough they are much cheaper for electricity, none makes any difference, and nobody picks a power source based on them.

But some people makes a huge effort to focus on this non-issue and turn it into a showstopper on their discourse. People resorting to this is good evidence that there aren't any large showstoppers for cars electrification.

The EV transition is really slow and easy for the grid to adapt to.

Assuming 100% of new cars where EV’s you’re talking 25 years before adoption approaches 98%. Plus on average each EV is only using ~50,000kWh / year or 400 watts average load.

Sounds like an opportunity to me. Think of the jobs.

"For example, our electric grid can’t handle everyone using electric cars"

I bet you the electrical grid couldn't handle everyone having an air conditioner in Texas in the 1920s but slowly people installed window and later central ACs and the grid grew.

The situation where everyone suddenly had an electric car is implausible

The grid today can't handle all the industrial power use and residential power use increases that will happen over the next 20 years either. So what? Everybody switching overnight is not and was never on the table. This is a silly non-issue pushed by the fossil fuel industry.

The grid can handle everyone using electric cars. Yes some upgrades are needed, but they are needed anyway. See for example https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-electric-vehi...

Electric car batteries are even seen as part of the solution to move to renewables.

What the grid can't handle is if everybody all at once needed a full 300 mile charge in 8 hours, while they are showering, running ac, and factories are producing. This is partly resolved by sun heating, cold sleep patterns, factory shifts, smart charging, and that 95% of consumers do not make 300 mile daily commutes.

Substation and individual point of charge capacity may not be there for areas without ac, or high density apartments - but that's where distributed charging stations come into play (aka charging stations) (very low volume of gasoline is distributed to home parking, currently). In the worst cases this is readily reduced with storage (liquid or power wall) at distribution centers.

Same when we went from horse carriages to gasoline powered cars. There was no infrastructure in place to buy hydrocarbons for otto-engines, other than in pharmacies.

Industries are built when demand is rising, infrastructure always has to change to cover the needs of the population.

EVs will be important sinks for electrical energy in the future, to balance out demand.

The Fischer-Trospch process has a stupendously high capital cost because, even though cheap catalysts work, chemical reactions that build up larger molecules (that can proceed explosively under some conditions) compete with chemical reactions that break molecules down and have to be balanced on a knife edge to get hydrocarbons of the right length.

For any normal industrial process people would be really delighted that they could use iron as a catalyst but the economics of FT are so bad they've scoured the periodic table for something better and not had much improvement.

Why cant you just distill them after producing them, instead of worrying about getting exactly the right length?

Main issue is they want to be length 1 methane or length 1000+ polyethylene

Synthetic fuels are potentially valuable because they allow existing capital assets (internal combustion engines and the industry that produces them, fuel distribution infrastructure) to continue to be used.

Won't engines have to be modified and reprogrammed?

According to this article: maybe not, since they used an unmodified engine.

For alcohol, DME and other single entity fuels you may need to change the engine, but synthetic hydrocarbons really are a drop in replacement.

Most engines that run on gasoline will run unmodified on LNG and many other combustibles besides, alcohol would work but the way in which it and ethanol attack various materials found in the fuel systems of vehicles means that your problem is likely not going to be the engine but further upstream towards the tank (seals, membranes).

Well, it's kind of obvious that the supplies of oil aren't infinite, isn't it? Is there even a theory that the oil is infinite? The peak oil is about timing and and cost, maybe it didn't happen according to the predictions but it will definitely happen. Besides the environmental concerns it also seems wasteful to burn away the stuff that is used for so many more things.

The synthetic stuff is interesting because it may actually be practically infinite thanks to the fusion reactor in the skies. That is because storing the energy from wind and solar in form of chemical energy solves the storage problem of the renewables. If extracting energy from that storage without polluting the environment becomes viable it can be huge.

The proven oil reserves have steadily increased for the last decade, even as consumption has increased. This means that we are discovering oil faster than we are burning it. The Earth obviously can't have infinite oil, but we don't know how long until we run out, and it's likely well over fifty years from now.

> This means that we are discovering oil faster than we are burning it.

Nope. All this means is that oil is getting more expensive.

I don't understand. Can you explain?

Reserves are defined by economic viability. When the thing gets more expensive, they grow.

Yes, we have known, untapped, oil reserves.

The problem with those is that Someone needs to front the billions to get them pumping - and with the current state of the world it's not guaranteed that they'll get their money back.

It's better for business to raise the price of existing oil production. C-staff gets their bonuses and stocks go up.

newly discovered reserves are more expensive to recover, otherwise oil price would fall.

> Is there even a theory that the oil is infinite?

Not quite infinite, but renewable: https://edu.rsc.org/news/treasure-from-the-earths-mantle/202...

There is such a theory, Thomas Gold thought that hydrocarbons came from underneath and then was processed by the metabolism of bacteria living far beneath the surface. He later wrote a book about the theory called "The Deep Hot Biosphere". He turned out to have been right about deep life at least.

Here is a retrospective: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5502609/

There's probably as much combustible matetial as there's oxygen to burn it. If we burn too much, it will be difficult to breathe.

oil supplies are so vast that they are practically infinite : we must stop using it because of the emissions. peak oil has always been junk science and clickbait news.

synthetic hydrocarbons as energy storage is interesting, but all about the economics.

Current synthetic fuels cost around 10€/litre, which comes to around $37/gallon.

Not really viable for day to day use yet.

I live in the Netherlands and we're almost there! ;)

No not really but, when it peaked I saw 2.40 eur/litre (9.71$/gallon, now down to 1.80 eur/litre) in places... Of course, much of that is taxes, but hey, this stuff would receive a lot of subsidies.

Fwiw, I once spoke to someone on a ICE conference (a parallel conference to my breast cancer conference) who explained that ICE's can be made 100% clean (just output CO2 and H2O) and 100% circular (take all that emitted CO2 out of the air again), it's just an economic consideration, technologically we are there (I guess that is true for many if not most environment related technologies).

Imagine if the fuel could be sold as carbon negative. i.e They will (somehow) plant more trees or take the same amount of CO2 from air for every CO2 fuel you burn on top of the CO2 they collect back to make the synthetic fuel.

If some % of the fuel burned turns into some chemically stable carbon waste and 100% of the carbon in the fuel came from stuff that was grown recently then it would be carbon negative.

Yes, but that price is not determined by cost. It's determined by taxes.

Qatar claims their Methanol-to-Gasoline based factory is profitable at a world price of $40 a barrel based on natural gas as a feed stock.

What people are hoping for today is to get CO₂ from the atmosphere and hydrogen from H₂O with electricity from solar, wind or nuclear. (Though w/ nuclear you might use thermochemical hydrogen if you can get the temperature up)

The best use case for that I've seen is that the US Navy would like to synthesize jet fuel on aircraft carriers so they don't have to slow down to take on fuel from a tanker -- delivering fuel to an aircraft carrier has to cost more than it costs at your local gas station.

Also I think there is more interest in synthetic fuel for airplanes than cars. That Mazda could almost as easily have been run on ethanol, methanol or maybe even butanol. Even methane isn't that hard. Diesel engines can be run on Dimethyl Ether. Single-entity fuels are more efficient to make than synthetic fuels based on long-chain hydrocarbons.

Aviation, on the other hand, is a place where innovation goes to die, where airlines struggle to replace obsolete electronics, where the #1 and #2 aircraft in the world were designed in 1967 and 1982, etc. (... it wouldn't even be legal to sell a car based on a 1982 design!)

Not to mention leaded fuel still being a thing in aviation

Not anymore. You need to update your talking points.

The FAA got off their butts and approved the unloaded substitute in 2022 and it's starting to roll out.

Airports want it ASAP because the (IIRC) ~20% higher cost is a cheap price to pay to not have to listen to people complain.

Avgas 100LL is going to be around for a good long period of time. Not a single local airport around me locally has rolled out the new fuel yet so I’m not sure I believe your point about airports wanting it ASAP

You haven’t refuted anything. It’s still a thing.

“On February 23, 2022, the FAA joined aviation and petroleum industry stakeholders to announce a comprehensive public-private partnership to transition to lead-free aviation fuels for piston-engine aircraft by the end of 2030.”

https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas

Not on aircraft carriers. They only handle jet fuel.

Yeah leaded fuel is only for piston engines. I can't actually imagine leaded fuel working in jet engines, even if they can usually take a wide range of fuels.

That's crazy cheap. I think oil sands here in canada can have a minimum break even point of up to 80$/barrel, and it still seems to be profitable most of the time. So you are right that there is quite a bit of room for more costly alternatives.

Using methanol to make synthetic gasoline is just bonkers.

You can just use the methanol to run cars. CNG/CBG cars have existed for well over a decade.

Not viable yet.

But with greater adoption and more focus the prices are bound to fall.

And the prices of alternatives will be rising, both electricity and hydrocarbon fuels.

Also EVs seem to not be the answer to everything. If you live in a colder climate, out of grid or you need to drive long distances, it is not clear when on whether EVs will become practical for you.

That depends.

What is the cost of the environmental damage from traditionals?

What is the real cost of the military used to guarantee the delivery of traditionals?

That is the opportunity cost of that same military expense?

Oil refineries, they have a cost.

What happens to the cost of synthetics as production volume increases?

Etc.

We need to consider the full cost landscape, not simply gallon v gallon.

Yeah, because current fuel prices - especially in countries like the USA are fake.

I think it's more about finding an offramp for motorsports and classic cars (and some rural machinery) that are against electrification for a variety of reasons (both legitimate and illegitimate).

I don't think there is anyone at all that thinks turning agricultural waste into carbon neutral synthetic fuel for ICE has anything to do with "oil not running out" (which it absolutely is, demand is at all time highs, while production is at 30 year lows and no new major oilfield has opened in the lifespan of most people reading this, just saying).

Just to add to this: You seem to be referring to the global picture. If we look at the US in isolation it is a different story. 30 yr low was ~4M barrels of crude oil from fields. We were at ~12M Barrels in 2022.

It is true that no major field has been opened recently which I blame on the (legitimate) push against fossil fuels and the rising cost of capital for projects that won’t pay off until at least year 5-8 of an investment. Furthermore, the shale revolution made smaller fields competitive and distributed production. Major oil fields opening are not a good indicator anymore for the industry’s state of business. For example, the Bakken formation was already open but only saw its peak extraction relatively recently.

Speaking about the US: Crude oil will be around for a long time together with LNG. Whether that is good or not is an interesting question. Either way, the conversation IMHO starts to become very different for the US compared to other significant economies, and global metrics are becoming less useful.

(Just one example: German chemical plants are moving to the US where LNG is cheap and abundant. They are rebuilding entire, enormous industrial processing plants. The US attracts fossil fuel based industries without even opening new major oil fields. Just by what is already there. )

>Just to add to this: You seem to be referring to the global picture. If we look at the US in isolation it is a different story. 30 yr low was ~4M barrels of crude oil from fields. We were at ~12M Barrels in 2022.

The oil market is a fully globalized commodity and there is no "American picture", there is just the global oil market. This is why OPEC can manipulate elections by changing the rate at which they produce oil, and it is why Biden was able to "leverage" global prices to make the taxpayer billions by selling high and buying low.

The American reserves of oil are insignificant with regards to the next generation of transportation, and wringing out the last drops of oil from shale rock at prices approaching $70/breakeven (and rising fast) is not the savior of ICE.

Plus OPEC will happily drop prices and destroy American oil industry every so often because their breakeven is still dramatically lower.

>Speaking about the US: Crude oil will be around for a long time together with LNG. Whether that is good or not is an interesting question. Either way, the conversation IMHO starts to become very different for the US compared to other significant economies, and global metrics are becoming less useful.

"Being around" and "being affordable enough for your F150 and XL SUV" are very different things.

Oil absolutely will not remain affordable for Americans in 15mpg vehicles, and the next decade will see the death of cheap American oil. We cannot print enough debt to subsidize it forever.

When you consider the BILLIONS of humans who want way way more oil in China, India, and Africa (et al), you start to see how declining global production + quadrupling global demand = the end of cheap oil.

> The oil market is a fully globalized commodity and there is no "American picture"

I agree that this is the current state. However, this can quickly change at the whim of the US president and doesn't even need congressional approval. In fact, we have seen increasing request from within the US to decouple from the global market and hence have a "domestic" and a global oil price. I don't know how this would play out if it ever happens. But all the legal groundwork is there and the US president can impose an oil export ban at any time if he wishes to do so.

Examples of requests to do so (without success so far):

* https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/141...

* https://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycomme...

The saddest part is, that the US has great solar and wind potential but the least incentive for a mass transition given the opportunity to decouple from the global commodity market at any time (elections anyone?)

Even better if there was an economical solution for farms to turn their own ag wastes into fuel on site or even in local coops. Farmers would jump on that in a minute if they could solve their waste and fuel problems with one solution.

My chainsaw runs on Aspen, which is a synthetic replacement for gasoline. It doesn't cause a headache when I'm exposed to the exhaust fumes for long times. It's quite expensive though, about 4€/l (15€/gallon).

Aspen2 is not green. its Aspen 4, which is part of the gasoline distilation process, but the oil they mix in for the 2 stroke engines is a syntetic bio oil.

https://www.aspenfuels.us/knowledge/what-is-alkylate-fuel/wh...

Good to know, thanks!