The global fight for critical minerals is costly and damaging

Re:The global fight for critical minerals is costly and dama... by actionfromafar on Wednesday July 19, 2023 @09:13AM (#36785740)

Electric cars are helping, but maybe not as much one can be lead to believe. The biggest danger about them is possibly that people may believe they are a big step forward. They are an important but rather small step forward.

Electric cars will reduce demand for gasoline. Some people say this won't affect how much oil is pumped out of the ground, because we still need the other fractions.

That's not exactly the case though - gasoline is effectively now subsidizing the heavier fractions. When that changes, heavier fractions will also be more expensive.

How that will affect demand for crude, I'm not equipped to tell.

The most interesting things about electric cars may be if they transform how our grid works, from baseload to (much more) spot-market.

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Re:The global fight for critical minerals is costly and dama... by jjoonathan on Wednesday July 19, 2023 @09:21AM (#36785848)

I thought the fractions were relatively straightforward to convert to balance demand? I don't really have good intuition for the economics of it though.

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Re:The global fight for critical minerals is costly and dama... by actionfromafar on Wednesday July 19, 2023 @09:54AM (#36786376)

Technology wise, sure. But I can imagine it could take a lot of effort to convert all refineries. And I think it’s much easier to crack heavier fractions than to combine lighter hydrocarbons to heavier?

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Re:The global fight for critical minerals is costly and dama... by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday July 19, 2023 @10:34AM (#36787067)

If I understand correctly, we want more gasoline than the natural fraction in petroleum. So refineries "crack" longer molecules to create shorter ones, increasing the amount of gasoline.

I'm not sure if that's the gasoline subsidizing the heavier fractions. It might be the other way around. There would be more heavier fractions available if we didn't crack them, and therefore they'd be cheaper.

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Re:The global fight for critical minerals is costly and dama... by actionfromafar on Wednesday July 19, 2023 @04:50PM (#36793129)

That still requires changes to the refineries, but even so, when the cracking is eventually turned off, the same mechanism remains.

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