America produces enough oil to meet its needs, so why do we import crude?
nasdaq.com
nasdaq.com
This is all you need to know.
If we had an oil export tariff, then we would very quickly become oil independent. Buyers in other countries are in competition with Americans for this oil, so if you really want to keep the price low in America, we should have such a tariff. Why should we give away our natural resources like this?
Additionally: in these emergency times, a reasonable argument could be made for price controls.
This is very relevant because of this new thing that just happened. There was an auction for rights to install an off-shore wind farm. The final price was $4.3 billion. This tells you the value of green energy: it's so valuable that you could convince investors and banks to pony up the money.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/25/us-offshore-wind-auction-in-...
So what are the auction prices for oil extraction?
https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/07/john-hickenlooper-oil-...
Many have gone on record and said even if they wanted to make them here the engineer volume and expertise are nowhere to be found except in China now. The speed with which they can deploy factories for new processes in China is unprecedented. You can’t match that here in the US. It’s not apples mistake, it’s the governments. And the people who vote for them. Which includes you if you’re American (and sitting in a liberal state voting democrat doesn’t count; if you care that much move to a swing state and vote there).
This is circular reasoning. We can't make them here because we don't.
Yes, obviously it would take time to build capacity, but it's silly to argue China is fundamentally capable of something that the US is not. This is purely a question of cost (and, therefore, motivation).
What should probably be countenanced, in my opinion, is "supply chain readiness": make _some_ of the iPhones domestically, so that if it becomes necessary, it is much faster to ramp domestic production. That hurts profits in the short term, but it probably does enhance long term expectation profits (conflict with China is less disastrous).
Unfortunately Wall Street is notorious for its emphasis on the short term -- and that has next to nothing to do with politics.
While it may not originate from politicians, politics and corporate short-sightedness have been so tightly coupled since at least the Reagan admin that distinguishing the two is arguably missing the forest for the trees.
But yes, the root problem is the people controlling the levers of Capital for short-sighted greed, as is often the case.
Short-sighted pursuit of profit is a failure mode inherent in capitalism in general, no cronyism required.
https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/
It is like 1000$ more expensive than the China version of the same phone. Could Apple and their volume get their price down? Probably but it is still going to be significantly more expensive.
If the US was desperate, we could maybe switch to this phone in an emergency?
Though, most of these parts were first made in the USA so there's no doubt we couldn't do it if we wanted.
Take the example of processor, it is ARM, a British design company's spec followed by Apple, a US company to design their chip, which is made by TSMC, a Taiwanese company with equipments from ASML, a dutch company.
Can you elaborate? From my vantage point, the impetus of this was globalization and there are many hands in that pot.
Consumers like cheap goods. Manufacturers like cheap labor. Governments enact policies that effect both.
The result is an outsourcing of manufacturing over the last four decades. It's odd to me that you give a company a pass but seem to blame constituents and governments, exclusively.
Any company that takes on much higher costs than its competitors without getting some benefit in return will not be able to stay in business for long.
Now what benefits might you get by manufacturing in the US? Certainly, it could be good for marketing. And consumers, particularly those at the high end, might be willing to pay more for a product manufactured here. Apple has, in fact, tried to do this. Remember when they made a big deal about moving manufacturing of the Mac Pro to Texas in 2019 [1]? Unfortunately, this hasn't worked out as well as they'd hoped due to the expertise and supply chain issues that others have mentioned [2].
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/09/apples-new-mac-pro-to...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-02-09/this-is-h...
>Any company that takes on much higher costs than its competitors without getting some benefit in return will not be able to stay in business for long.
This gets to my earlier point. Voting at the ballot and voting with your wallet are both ways to evaluate what people value. Both individual consumers and businesses vote with their wallets. Have you never paid more for something because it better aligns with your value system? Or do you strictly make purchases solely on the input of price? I see many people on HN who refuse to buy Amazon Basic items precisely for this reason, even though they are often the cheapest option.
As I previously said, American consumers largely value cheap shit. Companies largely value profits. Both of these, taken to an extreme, can come at the expense of other things like economic stability or strategic independence. The difference is, I hold all three (individuals, companies, and governments) accountable for those choices. It just seems weird to me that so many people are willing to hold a subset of them to task while giving the other subset a free pass.
>Any company that takes on much higher costs than its competitors without getting some benefit in return will not be able to stay in business for long.
Let me reframe this. If I instead said, "Any politician who doesn't take millions of dollars from lobbyists will not be able to stay in office for long", would that make accepting of that money somehow justified in your mind? For most people the answer is no. The difference is we've been hoodwinked into thinking morally ambiguous or outright immoral behavior is somehow ok in one sphere while acknowledging a moral burden elsewhere.
I'm not arguing that we can simply start making things in America on the drop of a dime. Anyone who has been involved in manufacturing knows that there is a lot of manufacturing expertise that has left and can only be done (at the current time, at least) overseas. What I'm poking at is that this is the logical progression of offshoring manufacturing over the last half-century. That strategy is due in part to corporate influence on laws, as well as the government who put those laws in place, as well as the constituents who put those civil servants in place. I'm old enough to remember Ross Perot's quip about the "giant sucking sound" from jobs (and expertise) being sucked out of the country and to witness firsthand the decline of the rust-belt. To act like corporations are blameless in the undermining of local manufacturing is naïve IMO.
it's not weird - it's human nature. Holding the "government" to account absolves themselves of the individual responsibility and sacrifice. it becomes "someone else's problem" to solve - after all, why would I sacrifice my own self benefit?
Tip of the hat for a rare correct use of the word "factoid".
Even with massive multibilion investments in fabs all over the place it's going to take years to bring up fab capacity - in the ideal case. And that's just for one component.
Apple doesn't even do manufacturing anyway - they outsource every step of the way. What US alternatives are there to Samsung displays or Foxconn assembly ?
Apple is too high up the chain to bring about this kind of change, best you could probably do is US assembly if you imposed India like tariffs. Not sure how the US consumers would feel about their iPhone jumping in price by 30%.
Even the outsourcing of capacity to PRC, didn't happen in a single year. It happened slowly motivated by margins, not due to some technical breakthroughs that were happening in PRC.
> Apple doesn't even do manufacturing anyway - they outsource every step of the way.
That's again a conscious choice because of margins. Apple used to manufacture stuff themselves in US.
No one is saying Apple has to make display tech as well. Buying stuff from allies like SK, Japan and Taiwan shouldn't be an issue.
> Not sure how the US consumers would feel about their iPhone jumping in price by 30%.
Last I checked Apple had over 40% margins on their iPhone. If Apple shared the same concerns as their parent country, they wouldn't work to maximize their profits, even if it comes from labour working in inhumane conditions.
The systematic destruction of US industrial capacity has been in chase of profits.
Modern Asian manufacturing scales up faster than USA has ever done outside of WWII. Large numbers of infrastructure and people.
Apple sells iPhones in Mexico at 30% over the US price and you still see iPhones everywhere, even considering the purchasing power of the average Mexican is about 1/10 of an American.
The most recent ones are even more expensive.
In the US apple is regularly above 50%, not to mention that the US market app store revenue per user should be higher as well. There's a reason Apple has segmented their products where they previously only sold flagship devices.
Everything you need to build an iPhone is in one city. This is quite a bit like Detroit of the 50s - where the manufacturer and the entire supply chain for it is geographically compact.
Today, it is hard to find a geographically compact industrial chain within the US.
http://free.sourcemap.com/maps/57d154a89ca3b16d44e95e5e
Compare that to, say, the supply chain for the Ford F150 - https://open.sourcemap.com/maps/582b47c785e240e442569015
https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/06/09/159456/the-all-a...
> There's a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is.
https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-...
Of course, he would say nice things about China like this so I take it with a grain of salt myself.
There is always a sense in which price controls work. It's just never the actual publicly ostensible sense.
Prices are too high! -consumers
Ok, we'll set a price ceiling -government
Yayayayay! -consumers
Hey wait a minute! Supply has vanished! -consumers
<crickets> -government> Price controls have never worked, and never will work, because they cannot work.
You after this comment:
> There is always a sense in which price controls work.
That's all I was trying to get at. We agree they work. If you know what effects they're going to have, and they match your intentions, then they work. If you know the general populace will have a shortage of N95 masks but hospital workers will be getting every mask produced in the country at a reasonable price, then it works. If your state has a cold snap and your citizens don't see $100k bills for a few hours of power (even though many folks will experience blackouts), then it works.
FWIW black and white statements like "price controls never work" ring of a certain "rah-rah unfettered capitalism is always the answer" mentality that lacks nuance. Just because you've taken some macroeconomic classes doesn't mean that how things work is all that simple.
> stated purpose is generally to reduce prices seen by consumers, or to subsidize producers of some particular good/service
I thought I gave examples that fell outside of this?
* Wartime/Emergency: stated purpose is to shift supply toward military/medical uses. Shortages and black markets are acceptable negative side effects.
* Energy: protect citizens from gouging in time of crisis. Lack of price controls did not prevent blackouts to Texans in the US last year. It did cause many folks to be saddled with insane bills.
You can also implement rationing to further mitigate imbalances. So price may be low, but you can only buy 1 per day, or something like that.
Generally it goes the other way around. First government imposes price controls, which cause scarcity. Then they impose rationing.
> Lack of price controls did not prevent blackouts to Texans in the US last year. It did cause many folks to be saddled with insane bills.
Price controls are not the only way you get to end up with limited supply, that's true, and that situation was temporary, also true, and there was no rationing (some areas did not lose power because they were "privileged") while all others did lose power. The people who were "saddled with insane bills" were those who had a specialty spot-price utility.
> Wartime/Emergency: stated purpose is to shift supply toward military/medical uses. Shortages and black markets are acceptable negative side effects.
I acknowledge the wartime thing, but that is quite exceptional. We've had lots of price controls during peace time here and all over the world, and they have never worked for their ostensible reasons. When was the last time we had wartime price controls in the U.S.? Not since WWII.
So if price controls + rationing were implemented at the same time, you think it could work to avoid scarcity? If not then why even bring up the order in which things are implemented?
When you say "price controls don't work" you lack imagination for the space of possible policy problems and solutions. Sometimes price controls will be a useful part of a policy solution and likely more often than some randos on the internet can think of off the top of their heads. In general I would not bet on the idea that "mechanism X is shit because it's not the free market." Our societies have implemented many engineered economic mechanisms, some of which are easy scapegoats because they fail, but many of which are overlooked because they work quietly in the background.
You're conflating two distinct sets of people:
- Most consumers pay a fixed price for electricity set by their utility. Many of these people experience blackouts when there was insufficient supply at that price.
- Some consumers opted into paying a variable price for electricity. As supply decreased, the price they paid massively increased. But in exchange for the high bills, these customers did not experience blackouts, or at least experienced them later than others.
Some in the second group, in retrospect, would have preferred the blackout to the increased price, or perhaps didn't understand the implications of their decision when they originally signed up for a variable and uncapped price. But overall, this situation perfectly illustrates the tradeoffs of controlled vs. uncontrolled prices in the face of supply shortage.
> But in exchange for the high bills, these customers did not experience blackouts, or at least experienced them later than others.
Yeah, so regardless of timing or how much blackout they experienced relative to everyone else, they did experience blackouts. And still paid a lot of money too. Lack of price controls didn't help them in the short term, and in the long term hurt them a lot.
free market doesn't guarantee anything. You're assuming that the free market without price control is supposed to guarantee the access to electricity, even at exorbitant prices.
Those who paid a high bill who did eventually got cut off - they got a bad deal because they weren't savy enough to do risk management, and didn't have enough information on such rare events.
The Texas blackout had a supply ceiling, but no price ceiling (and low elasticity in choice from the consumers, because people didn't want to freeze). It's a far cry from a free market during that week.
How about every standard economics class you can find at a reasonable school? This is covered in high school and university economics courses. Oh, it's not usually stated as "price controls don't work", but it's covered.
It's quite simple: forcing the price of some good while allowing supply and demand to adjust accordingly necessarily causes them to adjust accordingly. Set prices too low and supply shrivels, leading to shortages. Set prices too high and demand falls off and searches for substitutes.
The ostensible goal of price controls is always just that: to set the price of some good so as to alleviate the burden on some class of people (either the producers or the consumers, depending on whether the price is set too high or too low).
The actual goal of price controls, if it's anything other than propaganda value ("look! we care about you! we're doing something you want!"), does get met. So in that sense price controls may work, of course, if the target of the propaganda is too dumb to understand they've been had or if they have no way to reject proposed price controls. But that's not the sense people want -- every consumer wants lower prices, and every producer wants bigger profits (which often, but not always, means higher prices).
All that said, you can make price controls work. Like, if you enslave some people (generally that would be producers, when you want to set an artificially low price on some good or service). Or maybe if automation reaches such levels that marginal costs are zero for most goods in most goods baskets -- I'm not sure if this has been studied.
That said, your big rant isn't a citation, and saying "LOL IT'S IN YOUR HIGH SCHOOL CLASS YOU GOOFBALL" doesn't really count. I'm looking for one prominent economist that has stated the price controls can never work.
I’m not an economist, and I tend to see economics “laws” more akin to social science than physics. Ie, economists describe plausible mechanisms and principles, but they are not very useful to make predictions.
Manufacturers can set recommended retail prices but their are limitations to how these can be enforced.
depending on how it is set - most manufacturers set a recommended price, rather than contractually obligate the retailer to sell at a particular price. It's an attempt at price-fixing (without it being price-fixing), but other manufacturers of the same goods could choose to lower their price for competition. It's not the same as price-control.
You've been replying to questions about specific situations with generalities! That's not compelling.
Hell, oil was at $100+ a barrel for years within the past decade, without the same level of gasoline prices seen today in the US: that suggests there's more to the current situation then just econ-101 "high input prices mean output price has to be high too".
For obvious reasons (and very good ones), this is something people won't accept unless the shock is really serious, like a war. Anyway, there isn't sufficient productive capacity either, so the shock importance is a moot point.
a.k.a. slavery
> For obvious reasons (and very good ones), this is something people won't accept unless the shock is really serious, like a war.
No kidding.
But again, it depends on what the goal of the price control is. In a war the goal is not to make life easier for the consumer -- the goal in that case is to get the consumer to stop consuming what the war machine needs for itself.
On the case of war, conscription. It's disturbingly similar, but it's different. In peace times it's usually on the lines of "keep producing or your business will be closed", what is not that similar as the working people are not the ones facing the ultimatum (if it's ever done to a small company, then yes, it's like slavery).
> In a war the goal is not to make life easier for the consumer -- the goal in that case is to get the consumer to stop consuming what the war machine needs for itself.
Economies are large complicated beasts that move all kinds of products. When governments intervene, they do it in more than one way and with more than one goal.
Price fixing also goes with rationing so that the population stays fed.
> On the case of war, conscription.
That works for getting labor for the military. It doesn't work for getting producers of things to produce more for less -- unless you put a gun to their heads, they won't do it, not even during war time.
Hum... Does that assumption ever hold?
Willingness to pay is a proxy for your early earnings and ROI. It correlates very weekly to anything else.
Never
and the greatest ability to pay. "Need" has a moral component, which the market does not price in.
But still i would argue that price control do more harm than good.
Eg. in a desert with a supply of 9 water bottles and 10 potential buyers. All buyers have the same need (buy a bottle of water or die of thirst). In an efficient market, the price of a water bottle would go to the amount of savings of the poorest person + 1 cent. The poorest person will die of thirst.
Price floors can work very well at reducing consumption.
If you put a price ceiling of $1 on paintings, owners will hold and not sell.
If you want to kill the market for paintings, this would be very effective at doing so.
You can imagine similar impacts of price floors or ceilings for real goods like land and housing.
And of course there are duals to price controls such as production subsidies that can smooth things out. And policies that can otherwise influence things. Money is fungible, after all! And thanks to taxation as a general concept, the universe of people paying for all of this is not necessarily the universe of people buying it, so it's not necessarily "the consumers pay in one way or the other".
Person who has taken an undergraduate econ course only: "Price controls are terrible!"
Mathematical economists: "Price controls are bad by definition, under highly restrictive assumptions about human welfare."
Economists who study the actual history of price controls: "It varies and depends."
Regarding the last view, Isabella Weber has done some interesting work: https://twitter.com/IsabellaMWeber
The reality of this article points out the contradictions inherent in capitalist economies.
If there was a tariff how would that impact the rest of the economy. If anything it would only solidify the position of the already big enterprises who are the only ones able to withstand such a hike.
[1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/US_oil_p...
- People reduce their consumption of that good.
- People find substitutes.
- People with stockpiles of the good sell it. If price controls were in effect, they would hoard it instead.
- On a longer time scale, people start producing more of the good. They pay workers overtime to work more shifts, buy/build more equipment, and so on.
Economist Michael Munger wrote an article titled They Clapped: Can Price-Gouging Laws Prohibit Scarcity? which explains the problems with price controls, even in times of disaster.[1]
1. https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2007/Mungergouging....
Are corner stores really illegal in the US? I could not find anything on the topic from a quick search
it's not like those metals are _only_ found in Russia. The upfront capital expense of opening new mines somewhere else is high, so doesn't make economic sense when Russia has already made this investment in the USSR era, and can pump it out cheap(er) now.
But if the need arises, other sources of such metals can be acquired in the medium to long term. Same can be said for the rare earths from China.
The older style with business on ground level and residential above that isn't as profitable for developers and so isn't made as much. Cities, in bowing to demands of developers likewise zone for single family residential and it is thus illegal to build a commercial spot (other than the strip mall along one of the busier roads - that you need to drive to).
Usually such conclusions are a good time to Google and better educate yourself on the problem domain and solution space.
I would love if we could use this crisis to get investment in renewables and EVs/batteries.
I could see Congress passing an emergency subsidy before the election if gas stays above $4 especially if it rises above $5. I would hope we can spend an equal amount or more for longer term 'green' investment, regardless of what happens.
IMHO we do need those high prices to discourage driving. It is after all probably closer to the true cost with externalities of global warming. Could spur more investment in renewables too if done right.
BUT would need to help lower earners during transition or will just get pummeled in the election and Republicans will do the opposite of what's needed on climate.
I personally think most equitable solution would probably be raise corporate rate back up a bit + on very high earners/get rid of some wealthy deductions.
Then do something akin to the child tax credit mailed out each month for maybe <50k households. An energy credit. Scale up slightly if have a bunch of kids.
Maybe 20$/gallon would be what it takes for a quick transition?
And yes it's not even that high relatively! I would love to see an analysis taking into account cost of global warming just that we are already feeling.
I read an article earlier today analyzing cost per mile driven in real dollars.
We're actually a good amount lower than 2007 recession. And way lower than 80s.
But people don't see that. They see $5 and $80 to fill up a giant pickup truck.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-price-of-gasoline-isnt...
Ah there we go, you’re trying for “progress” despite the economy limping along right now. Kick them while they’re down ey?
> IMHO we do need those high prices to discourage driving. It is after all probably closer to the true cost with externalities of global warming. Could spur more investment in renewables too if done right.
And you believe the right time to do this is when we have record inflation?
Also gas is hitting $6+ a gallon where I’m at.
This wouldn’t have made economic sense to an economist because the goals here weren’t entirely economic. Yet it built a giant economy.
>- People find substitutes.
>- People with stockpiles of the good sell it. If price controls were in effect, they would hoard it instead.
This is only true when reduced consumption is possible, when substitutes are available, and when sufficient stockpiles exist to be sold.
If my only driving consists of the 20 miles I drive to work every day, I don't have the option to reduce my consumption if I want to pay my bills and keep from becoming homeless. If there is no mass transit and no opportunity to carpool, there is no substitute. Stockpiles of oil are generally insignificant when compared to overall consumption (which is why releasing oil from the strategic energy reserve is more of a pr move than something which has a substantive or lasting impact on prices).
The fact is that most of the US has been designed for people with cars. Outside of a very few cities mass transit is extremely limited or non-existent.
Dentists have an excellent track record when it comes to predicting tooth decay and treating decayed teeth. Economists have a terrible track record when it comes to predicting economic activity and prescribing sustainable solutions to economic problems that arise.
For example, when the USA allowed fracking production to hockey stick (started under Bush #2 and took off under Obama), the international price dropped significantly. That hurt countries such as Venezuela and Russia.
Oil is like a drug. Once you're hooked you're no longer free.
And that is true for the U.S. today. We could meet our domestic fossil fuel energy needs, but we find economic advantage in trading energy anyway. But when we want to use energy as a tool of policy, we have the option.
This happens in personal finance too. I can pay off my mortgage: I have enough capital to do so. So I don’t fear the bank. But with mortgage interest rates so low, I’ve found comparative advantage by keeping my mortgage and investing my capital elsewhere.
Tax payer money -> defense companies -> 'political contributions'
This is why it's probably fine to not win wars because the war is not being fought to be won.
I’m sorry, but what do you mean by “we”? You and I benefit nothing from the current status quo. A small group of people get rich off resources below our collective feet and we all pay more for practically everything.
If you find fault with it, you have you voice (albeit a very quiet one) via your right to a vote.
My mom lives in upstate New York, in a low income area. People there are very negatively impacted by the increase gas prices right now.
If that were really true, the US would not be able to export oil, which it does.
There may still be a tax break for some imported oil. Saudi oil was taxed by Saudi Arabia, and this was tax-deductible for US buyers, even though ARAMCO is owned by the Saudi government and that "tax" is the government taxing itself. Not sure if this still applies.
Some export is geography. Alaska has good access to Japan. There isn't enough pipeline capacity through the Sierras. Stuff like that.
Not sure about the refinery argument. Here's a study made during the last oil glut, so the technology is the same but the economics are different.[1] (Start at page 7.) Refineries can crack heavy crude down to lighter fractions, but they don't have to. Turns out that's not the problem. The problem is getting out too many light fractions - propane, methane, butane - for which markets are limited. Some distillation columns can't handle too much of the light fractions. It's possible to add a reformer stage to combine light hydrocarbons down to at least the gasoline level, but most refineries don't have those. All those problems are solveable on a scale of five years.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/petroleum/morelto/pdf/l...
This is why a lot of fracking stopped in 2020 when gas prices plummeted. It just wasn’t profitable anymore.
This was advantageous for a while, but with fracking, there's an abundance of light sweet crude in the US... that the refineries aren't equipped to process. So, we export that oil.
Changing to light sweet crude is a significant investment to the point where switching over isn't economically viable.
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/381444600/marketplace (the March 7th episode at 4:15 and on)
If heavy sour were suddenly unavailable, they'd use light sweet in a heartbeat.
>>>This is all you need to know.
And the Jones Act which makes it cost-prohibitive to ship between US ports. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/jones_act
For example, the different types of oil and the way US refineries are setup. That's useful context to know more about the situation.
The tweet-sized post is useful as a counter to the oil company talking points. They like banning Russian imports (eliminating a competitor), but want to link it to expanded drilling and the reinstatement of Keystone XL. Both of these also take time. Yet they say that they can immediately increase production, so I'm not sure the rush for their other requests.
We typically export refined oil products (think gasoline from WA to BC) that have lots of value add (refined gasoline rather than just oil). A lot of it goes to our allies (Japan), or even China. Cleaner American crude might go to other countries who mix it in with dirtier local crude to create something that is refineable. The trade has a net benefit if you don't treat oil as some homogenous resource. This isn't even to mention geography conveniences: we export to Canada, Canada exports to us because the USA is a big country (and lots of Canadian shale goes to Texas to be refined).
IF we had an oil export tariff, the industry would get messed up quickly. It would survive, we would just have to shoulder higher costs for less efficient usage of resources.
Constitution of the United States Article I, Section 9, Clause 5:
"No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State."
An isolationist America that resorts to price-controls or money-printing in order to keep its oil producers afloat risks run-away inflation. Not only due to the issue of EROEI, but also due to threats to its primacy in the global order.
Of course many of think its unfair that the world pays for the US warmongering and general debauchery, but I imagine there are enough people in the State-dept. and the Fed to understand this even if they pretend this whole thing is a "conspiracy theory" to be punished with blasphemy.
We had an oil export ban until 2015. Lifting it is at least part of the reason oil production has increased as much as it has over the past 6 years. If you look at production graphs, oil production was already on a sharp upswing between 2010 and 2015. But it kept going between 2015 and today, even though domestic oil consumption declined over that period.
If you consider grades of oil and geographic locations (i.e. for what and whom various production areas are best suited), it might even be possible that the only reason we could be hypothetically import independent without substantially increased prices based on today's undifferentiated extraction volume is because of the export market. Without the grade and geography arbitrage provided by trade, current production might not be viable without substantially increased prices. (Though, if global prices become extreme and remain so, then at least we could limit the price increases. OTOH, it's probably just easier--and certainly quicker--to make nice with Venezuela rather than restructure our extraction and refining infrastructure.)
One reason that domestic shipping cost is so high is that 1920 Jones Act[0] prohibits shipping between US ports with non-US ships. This drastically reduces competition and increases prices. Hawaii are particularly hit by this, with estimate $1800 per year per family in extra cost [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_Act_(sailor_rights) [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/jonesing-to-give-up-russian-oil...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920#Na...
We experienced this with supply shocks with COVID as well.
It’s interesting to balance “have the ability to meet our needs logistically” with “don’t create price cartels that cause inefficiency in the market.”
Seems we’d have a vested national security interest in both securing commerce and enabling price competitiveness.
A US flagged ship means following US regulations, too. Can't pay slave wages, can't have an awful safety record, etc. Increases the cost of shipping.
This is also why there are several oil "prices" that you will see quoted, the most common two being WTI and Brent.
Are there physical properties that make these different oils look different? Would I be able to tell them apart if they were in jars, in front of me?
https://kimray.com/training/types-crude-oil-heavy-vs-light-s...
So yes, you could modify refineries (at significant expense) to process different grades of crude, but in order to target different outputs we still need to import the different grades of oil because the refineries end up mixing/matching to get the levels they need. The US produces a lot of light oil, but less of the medium/heavy grades you'll find in Canada or the Middle East.
If you have a refinery that's built for heavy sour oil, how much lighter and sweeter can it handle without any modifications at all? And how much time and money does it take to broaden its range further?
What are the heavier grades used for, I'd imagine stuff like bunker fuel and asphalt? If the prices of those end products went up, wouldn't the market adapt to a certain degree, say using more concrete and less asphalt, etc?
I wish there was an easy answer to your refinery question. They're all different, but there are three basic types of refineries:
The simplest is a topping plant, which is basically just a distillation unit. The output you get is basically whatever the natural yield of the oil is. These refineries can typically only process light crudes.
The next level refinery is a cracking refinery. These take the gas oil output from the distillation and breaks it down further using high temperature, pressure, and catalysts. This allows for the breakdown of slightly heavier crudes.
The final level is a coking refinery. This takes all the residual fuel and "cracks" it into a lighter product. This increases the yield of higher value gasoline, which allows a refinery to take in cheaper heavier crudes.
Building a new refinery is a 5+ year process that costs about $7-10 billion. I'm not sure what upgrading an existing one costs, but it's somewhere in that ballpark. Keep in mind that a large influence on the type of refinery is their geographic location. They're built to accept the type of oil that flows in the pipelines.
So one in Europe will have a higher fraction of diesel (used in most trucks, some cars, and some trains) compared to the USA (trucks and almost all cars use petrol).
(Compare: https://www.statista.com/statistics/189410/us-gasoline-and-d... - https://www.racfoundation.org/data/volume-petrol-diesel-cons... -- the ratio is very roughly reversed.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/business/energy-environme...
The fastest, easiest way to solve the issue is to blend our light crude with heavy crude to have something usable in our refineries.
The cheapest, fastest and safest way to move oil is through a pipeline. The most geopolitically stable supplier of heavy and super heavy crude oil is just north of our border. Canada. The pipeline that was meant to bring their crude, the keystone pipeline was cancelled after its permits were revoked.
The con of Canadian oil is that some of it is produced by Steam Assisted Gravity Drain, a process were steam has to be injected into the reservoir to heat up and reduce the heavy oil’s viscosity, allowing it to drain into a horizontal well, drilled closely below the steam injecting well. This is an energy intensive process, and if the energy to produce the steam is derived from fossil fuels, it’s carbon footprint is large.
Another potential suppliers of heavy crude is Venezuela, but it’s dictatorship has mismanaged the industry to the point that they are importing crude and distillates.
There are no solutions, only trade offs.
The Keystone XL pipeline was meant to take Canadian oil to the Gulf of Mexico to refineries intending to export it. Very little of the refinery infrastructure at the terminal end of the pipeline was equipped to redistribute it domestically. Something like 70% of the oil transported by Keystone XL would have been for export.
Because the market is bigger and demand is greater
Because Quebec is powered by hydro and doesn't need oil and doesn't want the pipeline going east because they sell power.
The eastern provinces get oil from offshore locally or from Saudi/middle east so the cost doesn't make sense.
The oil is going south anyways on trucks. The pipeline took so many trucks off the road.
Quebec uses tons of oil every day, whenever they fill up their cars. Most of it comes from Saudi Arabia, brought into the Irving Refinery in New Brunswick. Irving would use Canadian oil if they could get it.
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
"Line 9 has been delivering crude oil from Sarnia, Ontario to Montreal since its reversal became operational in December 2015. The line has a capacity of 300 Mb/d and transports a combination of oil from western Canada and the U.S. Midwest.
In 2018, deliveries of imported and eastern Canadian crude oil on the Portland-Montreal Pipeline fell to an average 2.5 Mb/d, less than 1% of its capacity." (italics mine)
That being said, GPP is partially correct: Quebec is the highest electricity producer and consumer in Canada, but it's almost entirely hydroelectric and their electricity is cheap. "Quebec’s emissions per capita are the lowest in Canada at 9.4 tonnes CO2e – 52% below the Canadian average of 19.6 tonnes per capita."
With the highest electric vehicle uptake in the country, and the lowest greenhouse gas emissions, seems Quebec has the right to be smug (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnFAAdOBB1c)
Anyways, please don't spread political disinformation. Quebec is not a significant consumer of Saudi oil, despite what Jason Kenney has to say about it.
Only because they don't count any emissions that come from Hydro. We have no idea what they actually producing because they don't test any of the dam reservoirs for methane emissions.
>Quebec is not a significant consumer of Saudi oil, despite what Jason Kenney has to say about it.
Not my province, so I don't consume anything he says. Considering the biggest refinery in Quebec (Valero refinery in Levis, 265M barrels/day) refines sweet crude, I sincerely doubt it's getting the majority of it's oil from Alberta.
I mean, I understand that may be a good policy for an Alberta, but there's no reason why anyone else should think it's a good policy for them.
Tar sands oil is an endless, pointless jobs program. It's barely afloat when oil prices are high, and a rock around the neck of the Canadian economy, and GHG commitments when they aren't. I'm not interested in drastically cutting back on my energy usage, to balance the books with one of the dirtiest fuel producers in the world.
Pipelines do nothing for me, but encourage this economically-destructive industry to expand. For every dollar of wealth it generates, it destroys a dollar and a dime.
I've lived in Edmonton during oil-boom times, and during not-oil-boom times.. and the corrosive effect of the boom and bust cycle on the Albertan economy, it's not pretty.
And a high per-barrel price in Alberta does nothing good for manufacturing in the rest of the country, dragging our dollar up and making our exports less attractive and the costs of production higher. When the dollar is high also makes my labour as a software engineer more expensive, without much benefit to me.
Ah well, enough ranting, off to go pick up sushi in my electric car and I'm not even joking.
That point alone makes me confident you aren't that familiar with the industry.
This source states an average of $40 today across all oil sands producers.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Breakeven-Price-For-Ne...
Typically when oil prices drop (they were <$40 in early 2020), the oil sands companies put production on standby. It's like most oil exploration - it's either feast or famine depending on global prices.
The chemical industry pollution in Sarnia is pretty bad from what I hear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_ch...
Sarnia is refining an already upgraded bitumen though, so it's only getting half of the garbage. Also Line 9 goes from Sarnia to Montreal, Enbridge Mainline goes from Alberta to Sarnia.
Line 9 runs practically right behind my house, and since it was reversed some years ago it feeds facilities in Ontario (and Quebec) with Alberta oil. Line 5 runs under the great lakes, all the way from western Canada to refineries in Sarnia (and is currently under threat from Mich. governor, but that's a separate topic)
90ish percent of Ontario's oil consumption is domestic oil depending on time of year and so on. The remainder is mostly from the US. Small % from middle east.
Oil from Alberta makes it all the way to refineries near Montreal. Last I looked 70% of Quebec's oil is domestic origin.
Politicians in Alberta have become masters of ignoring this key fact in their rabble rousing.
Could capacity be increased? Maybe. Is it strictly necessary? I don't know. Should we be reducing consumption anyways? Yes.
See map here, on Enbridge's website, zoom in to Ontario:
https://www.enbridge.com/reports/2021-liquids-pipelines-cust...
Now, the Atlantic provinces, that's another story. But a much smaller market.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/apr/16/kirsten-gi...
https://www.lsu.edu/hss/english/files/university_writing_fil... (Page 5)
If I understand these summaries correctly:
1. Countries in Latin America are developing and therefore using more oil so they have less to share with us.
2. We are consuming slightly more oil.
3. Oil obtained from hostile and unreliable regions should be replaced.
The effects would be that oil consumed from the pipeline would be cheaper, it would be more reliable, and while not being totally for domestic use would make a significant dent in our oil consumption in the right categories.
Edit:
Opposition to the Keystone XL likely would have been more effective if it focused on (potential) environmental impacts as well as the spill that occurred in 2017. I think that's what the Biden administration focused on when it cancelled the permits.
They're not the only refineries that handle heavy crude but they are the ones with the easiest access to the export markets of Central and South America.
I don't think it's splitting hairs, that's the main point of the conclusion. What she said:
The Keystone XL pipeline "doesn’t even have any oil for America."
"The competent department of environmental protection administration under the State Council shall conduct unified supervision and management of the environmental protection work throughout the country."
When the EPA plays the delay, deny and harass game they amass brownie points with politicians.
Likewise it's probably safe to assume that the Chinese agency is much more set up (and well practiced at) making sure things actually get done on defensible timelines.
Oil markets are pretty tight to begin with- they're finely tuned to react to even marginal shifts in supply/demand. Have massive changes like the lockdowns or turn off a major supplier, you see equally massive swings in price, backwardation/contango levels, etc.
All it took to get rid of sanctions on a nation that has never harmed or threatened anyone was for one of their competitors in the petroleum market to invade another nation...
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-officials-meet-with-regime-...
Competent Venezuelan oil professionals have been fleeing the country and can be found in Colombia, Brazil, and other oil producing countries farther away.
The Venezuelan regime is far, far from being harmless and nonthreatening, their human violations are numerous and nobody is suffering the consequences of their actions more than Venezuelans themselves. I've seen the plight of their people on the immigrants who fled to my own country.
Even their own PDVSA stars don't drink the Kool-aid... It was sad to share a table with disillusioned young, bright, venezuelan engineers at the SPE Latin America Heavy and Extra Heavy Oil Conference, so ask me how I know...
[0] https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Timeline-of-Half-a-Decad...
There is no freedom of press in Venezuela.
Their take on law 113-278 is blatantly false.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-113publ278/pdf/PLAW...
Venezuelan sanctions targeting PDVSA sanctions start in EO 13808.
https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/126/13808.pdf
The immigrants I see in my country are fleeing a dictatorship.
Think about your individual energy consumption. I assume you have to drive and heat your house, and how much you drive, and weather you heat up your house, does not, in the short run, vary much weather gas is 2 dollars or 3. Many many people behave the same way, thus we deem demand to be inelastic.
Something similar happens on the supply side. Oil projects are incredibly capital intensive, sometimes taking years to come online. Thus oil companies, in the short term, can only extract so much oil from the ground, regardless of the price.
A supply or demand shock, that is, displacement of either curve to the right or left, leads to a much larger change of the clearing price.
Capital intensive projects like Refineries, Storage and Shipment are inelastic, but actual drilling is relatively elastic. To the point where they leave wells sitting, pre-drilled ready to turn on in the event that they become profitable at some point. I'm assuming there is also excess capacity available in the inelastic parts of the system given that a lot of these infrastructure was built during times when the US was a larger extractor of oil.
Wells vary much depending on the reservoir. For the most part, easy oil has already been tapped. There are still some places with low geological risk, in the Middle East, Venezuela, and such. A driller friend of mine in the Middle East was drilling a well a month, so there is that. This is why, every time there is a disruption, one hears discussion about OPEC’s spare capacity.
But even then, before the drilling actually happens, there needs to be a well design, and studies done on how better to drain a reservoir to maximize recovery. All that also takes time.
And all that assumes that these companies operate on fields that are already discovered. Fields have a production curve, the area under the curve is the recovered oil. They all, at the end, decline.
Doing a full field development can take decades after discovery, and discovery can take years too. From prospection, to seismic, to the drilling of wildcat and delimiting wells. Moreover, investment in exploration has declined, and more and more new discoveries are in remote places, needing great investments in infrastructure.
A potential stopgap could be the adoption of fracking in places like Europe, but it is banned over there. It baffles me. The simple exercise of calculating the enthalpy of combustion of methane vs carbon (coal) makes it incredibly obvious that natural gas is a much better fuel from a carbon emitting perspective, and this is without accounting for the efficiencies of combined cycle vs steam cycle.
What likely is the issue is the cost - refineries will make less money refining light crude oil as part of them will be underutilized.
One thing that article did not mention is that perhaps refineries have setup to refine heavy crude because of Canada's tar sands and XL pipeline.
You act as if that was the only pipeline from Canada. There are several others. Here's a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enbridge_Pipeline_System
The US' energy needs don't rise and fall on the approval of one single pipeline project.
For example, the US produces no rare earths, mostly because the process of extracting those is enfironmentally-unfriendly and we've closed all our mines that produced them, preferring to outsource production to places that don't care about the environmental impact, like China.
From what I remember from the USGS talk many years ago, a lot of the critical minerals required for our modern technology comes from unstable regimes. The US could produce mine many of those locally, but of course it'd take many years to ramp up production (not even mentioning the local environmental impact)
[1] https://www.usgs.gov/programs/mineral-resources-program/scie...
Or, put simply: how much US oil comes from fracking? Not a small number - the aforementioned 65%. Source for this data: the U.S. government.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=847&t=6
Remember, these aren't small amounts of water either. I live in California, where we have drought conditions. How much water do you think a typical well uses? "Up to 9.6 million gallons of water (!!!!) per well." For just one well!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/analysis-fracking...
That whole sentence is worth quoting in full:
Oil and natural gas fracking, on average, uses more than 28 times the water it did 15 years ago, gulping up to 9.6 million gallons of water per well and putting farming and drinking sources at risk in arid states, especially during drought.
So, here's the thing. The "cost" of that water in the market is just the cost in dollars. But to Americans, and future generations? It's much higher. You can throw a stone at a US map and hit a state that's experiencing drought conditions right now (and that well water is permanently off limits for drinking).
If we can slash the real cost - the externality cost - by just buying it from elsewhere, we should. And we do. And that's the right choice, despite what NASDAQ thinks.
• Spills during the handling of hydraulic fracturing fluids and chemicals or produced water that result in large volumes or high concentrations of chemicals reaching groundwater resources;
• Injection of hydraulic fracturing fluids into wells with inadequate mechanical integrity, allowing gases or liquids to move to groundwater resources;
• Injection of hydraulic fracturing fluids directly into groundwater resources;
• Discharge of inadequately treated hydraulic fracturing wastewater to surface water; and
• Disposal or storage of hydraulic fracturing wastewater in unlined pits, resulting in contamination ofgroundwater resource
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-12/documents/hf...
Contrast this to the evidence for coal contaminating water supplies with mercury. Fracking, despite its reputation and scary name, is safe. Like, flying airplanes safe.
Hammond, P. A., Wen, T., Brantley, S. L., & Engelder, T. (2020). Gas well integrity and methane migration: evaluation of published evidence during shale-gas development in the USA. Hydrogeology Journal, 28(4), 1481-1502.
There are better criticisms of fracking like the higher rates of disease around well sites, and improper dumping of waste.
Fracking leaks methanol, salts and other compounds into ground water. Operations often contaminate water from leaky pits with diesel and other compounds.
Coal is probably the nastiest fuel by any measure. But that isn’t to say that fracking operations are not problematic, and since industry has fought tooth and nail to prevent meaningful, peer reviewed study of the issue, it’s absurd to compare to a well understood, well measured thing like air safety.
No, the evidence from peer reviewed studies show that this does not occur often. You are presenting this as though fracking leads to ground water contamination. That is simply not the case. Agriculture and urban activities are much bigger sources of contamination.
This recent review says: “ A perceived risk, that fracking chemicals may migrate from the 0.5- to 3-km depth of injection to upper shallow aquifers used for water supply, is not considered to be significant (90, 91). The lack of baseline data on aquifer conditions is cited as a major limitation to the detection and attribution of the impacts (90–92). Wide variations in methane concentrations in groundwater are noted in areas with intensive gas production as well as in areas with limited activity.” https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-envir...
But very open to additional evidence.
===
A spot check shows item 15 in the list, published 2014, is based on work from 2011-12 and the abstract concludes with:
> This study provides a baseline of water-quality conditions in the Monongahela River Basin in West Virginia during the early phases of development of the Marcellus Shale gas field. Although not all inclusive, the results of this study provide a set of reliable water-quality data against which future data sets can be compared and the effects of shale-gas development may be determined.
That is to say, this is a baseline measurement from the start of exploration, not a demonstration that fracking goes not contaminate groundwater.
===
The MIT report listed as item 26 on the list does say the process is mostly safe, which I respect, but also page 39 lists counts of incidents over a four or five year period, including 20 incidents of "groundwater contamination by natural gas or drilling fluid". So it's not like problems do not happen.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-envir...
PFAS stay in the environment and are harmful to humans.
I don't agree with that. I support pollution import duties to remove some of the economic advantage of dumping pollution over there.
The US exhausted fields in Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio 100+ years ago and has depleted the big western fields as well - production in the US requires fracking.
My office during this period was next to an inland port and rail facility. Every day, hundreds of Canadian National Railway cars with explosive tar sands oil lumbered by to be loaded on ships bound for refineries.
High commodity prices drive expensive oil production. That includes fracked gas and oil and other "exotic" sources. An extended war in Ukraine will certainly trigger a domestic oil boom.
This reads like the NIMBY stance of oil production. “Make whatever mess you want, keep it where it is! Can’t have that happening in my state/country!”
So you’d rather export pollution instead of being energy independent and trying to fix fracking laws?
non-fracking methods are used outside the U.S.
fracking is worse for the environment than non-fracking methods.
i hold my personal opinions on each point but i think this is what OP was trying to convey
Is fracking really worse overall? One can screw up non-fracking oil methods too, e.g. Nigerian oil delta, BP oil spill, etc.
> If we can slash the real cost - the externality cost - by just buying it from elsewhere, we should.
I wonder what you think "externality" means?
Hopefully this would diminish consumption, reduce carbon footprint and wouldn't require purchasing extra crude. May cause a revolt though, if advertised to the main street improperly.
Besides you either have loads of money and do not give a hoot or you just live close to work.
When the king takes a portion of my labor 'because he can', then I am a slave. The rich generally understand how to escape the income tax slavery. Let's free the poor.
The rich understand these phrases: "capital gains", "everyone who files". Those with minimal wage income may not even need to file.
Capital gains are taxed using a different rate schedule, but they are still taxed as income (they are literally included in AGI).
And sales tax and use tax.
Capital gains are assessed when recognized, not like a yearly schedule so rich can defer this and choose when to recognize it. Will certainly take many fun 'business' trips that year to offset.
Remove payroll taxes (which support collection of income tax) and employee take-home pay increases. Employers can stop hassles of the withholding accounting. Employees can stop hassles of yearly income tax filing to IRS.
There would be a temporary increase of unemployed payroll tax bookkeepers and storefront tax prep people. Hopefully they will find something more productive to do.
Remove some of the loopholes for trusts that let people avoid inheritance taxes. Add another tax bracket or two for capital gains. Get rid of the carried interest loophole.
Straight consumption tax (excluding uncooked food) and it becomes very simple to implement. And nobody would file a personal income tax again. Employers would not do payroll tax withholding so wage slaves would get an immediate increase of take-home pay.
Not sure of a good answer here
Do you have a source for this? Denser European cities seem to have much higher happiness than people living in single family residential suburbs.
older article but still applies (I think) https://www.chicagoreporter.com/chicago-is-the-fastest-shrin...
I'm sure Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Saudi, etc. really care about the environment and their reports about environment sustainability* are totally true.
The average oil producer is a dictatorship, and I suspect the impact of lack of transparency is more important than the drilling method - they have every motivation to cut corners, while American oil is openly regulated. So from the global perspective I doubt American production is more polluting.
* If they even have any.
This globalist-centric way of thinking is why we’re currently paying $5/gallon, the highest amount ever. Such a “hidden” tax on the working class is why we should shun imports and be self sufficient both with oil as well as manufacturing - or at least as much as humanly possible.
also the US has a variety of conditions for prospection, CA being one of the worst places for new prospection projects - so this also needs to be taken into account
PS: at 3$/gallon I suspect the majority of consumers were already not taking gas consumption lightly, so while it's true that energy savings are a crucial part of the picture, they were already very heavily incentivised for a while in the US and certainly here in Europe as well
The US is a leader in oil refinement technology, such that there are oil rich Latin American countries (Venezuela and Mexico) that rely on exporting crude and importing refined products from the US to meet THEIR energy needs.
This isn't about the US going full 'no import oil', it's about finding the entire west non-Russian sources of crude.
Furthermore, the US has pricing advantages as oil is traded in USD.
Also Peak Oil doesn't seem like it's going to happen anymore. It looks like we'll phase it out long before we actually run out.
Demand will decrease at an ever quickening pace and investment in oil extraction will pretty much die. Most of the cheap to extract oil has already been exploited, so that could lead to oil becoming pretty expensive, pretty quickly. Despite crashing demand.
Running out isn't the issue - the issue is that we've got an economy geared to consume a specific fossil fuel and constantly growing with a dependency on that fossil fuel - if we suddenly outstrip supply we could be left in a lurch where we have a reduced capability to run the machines that'd let us build machines that are less reliant on oil.
1. The common understanding peak - but even if things just remained level supply-side and demand grows it'd be the same outcome
It looks like demand will peak first instead, which is quite different.
That gives us less than 6 years before we completely run through reserves. But it feels like this can't be true because it would have a huge impact on domestic producers, domestic oil prices (especially given the US' relationship with most oil producing nations), and much more. But this article didn't even bother mentioning this fact.
So.... what am I missing?
Of course at some point there must be a limit, but thus far when there's been sufficient incentive to look, more reserves have been found (including via new technology such as fracking).
What? The politicians that matter _are_ incumbents.
Not a great article.
Canada, Alberta specifically, produces precisely this kind of oil. In his speech announcing the ban, Biden listed several alternatives to Russian oil that the U.S. would rely on, including Saudi Arabia, but pointedly left Canada out. This is after one of his first acts as President was to scrap a (heavily politicized) pipeline that would have transported heavy Alberta oil to U.S. refinery centres.
It's worth asking what is going on here. Why does the U.S. seem to prefer relying on oil from regimes that are as morally questionable as Russia while snubbing a long-time stable supplier that is right next door?
Politically, Biden is committed to green energy and, of course, is not going to want to reverse his decision on a pipeline that Trump backed. However, reality is a thing. The U.S. needs heavy oil and isn't getting it as efficiently or environmentally friendly as it could because, as in Canada, infrastructure approval processes have become heavily politicized. Oil will indeed flow from Alberta to U.S. refineries, but mainly via tanker cars. This increases transportation costs and, hence, fuel costs. It also makes spills and accidents, such as occurred in Lac-Mégantic, more likely.
It may be time to look at ways to free long-term infrastructure planning and approval processes from the short-term needs of politicians looking for a quick boost in the polls before an election.
A good resource on how this works is The Crash Course [2] from Peak Prosperity, where it discusses this in relationship with the financial and environmental factors.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
For example, the east coast has refineries, but they are geared for oil from the middle east. Why?
One reason is the Jones Act, which prohibits shipping between US ports except by US crewed/flagged vessels. There basically aren't any of those.
So, we ship liquified natural gas from Texas to Europe and Asia, but are not allowed to ship to the east coast or other US ports.
The other reason is that pipeline capacity to the east coast is severely constrained. Many planned pipelines have been cancelled. It takes decades with all the NIMBY laws to build one, but only one president to throw all that work out with a decree.
Pipeline capacity is further constrained due to regulations for boutique fuels. The gas you can use can vary from state to state. If you start a run of said fuel on the pipeline, you can't serve the whole intended market for when the pipeline was designed.
And then there is the whole ethanol thing. It has to get shipped at great expense from the midwest to the coasts where regulations say it must be used.
I wouldn't expect an economist or an American Jingoist cheerleader to ever crack a geophysics book, but someone should look at the production decline curves of these wells and then take a wild-ass guess how much longer the shale miracle will last.
We import oil because "energy independence" (at least from an oil & gas perspective, renewables and coal may be another matter) is a fleeting, rose-colored dream, from which we will soon awake.
A good contrarian argument for energy independence is it'll impose a higher floor cost on oil prices, making renewable projects more viable. It would also make expensive one-time upgrades that enhance energy efficiency look better on paper when compared against opportunity costs.
It gives us leverage - if we choose to, we can stop refining heavy sour and stop exporting light sweet, leaving other countries with shortages of refined products, while we still have plenty.
When the gas shortages happened in the 70s, a law was pass limiting the prices of US sourced oil sold domestically. It was put in place to lower the "oil shock".
I do not know the status of that law, but I assume it still exists.
So, US source oil can be sold at a higher price if exported and that forces the US to import to make up the difference.
I think there was a loophole that allowed this to happen, probably it was not thought at the time it would be viable to export US oil or US would never have the oil to export.
What are these lies?
We can save the planet:
When computed as the planetary-scale problem this is, it is very easy to see that the energy and resources we would need to affect change are in a range between impossible and massive. The scale of this fallacy is such that, even if we could do something, it is far more likely to kill all life on earth than to save anything.
Fix Climate Change:
Same as above. At a planetary scale it is nothing less than laughable to think we can do a thing about any of it. It takes natural processes an unimaginable amount of energy and resources over 50K to 100K years to drop atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm. We actually have people believing in this religion that says we can affect climate change and save the planet in a 50 year time scale. In other words, 1000 to 2000 times faster than the natural rate of change. Nobody EVER asks them to "show the math". If they did, they could not. This is ignorant nonsense.
Stop using oil (petroleum):
Impossible. Impossible at a massive scale. The ignorant among us (which is to say, as it pertains to this problem, most people) think gasoline when they think of oil. Well, that's not what we use oil for exclusively. Petroleum is one of the most highly processed materials on this planet. We derive everything from lubricants and plastics to fuel from it. Secondarily, we derive almost everything you can touch and use in your daily lives. Almost everything at a hospital or the company you work for. Manufacturing of everything, from food to medical equipment, computers and clothes would grind to a halt without petroleum. I think I can say that we could not support 7 billion people on this planet without oil and its byproducts. In other words, once again, this is ignorant nonsense.
Migrate to electric cars:
In the US alone we have somewhere around 300 million vehicles. If anyone with the requisite knowledge took the time to do the math, you would quickly come to the stark realization that a migration to electrics is --from our current context-- impossible. About five or six years ago I wrote a relatively simple simulation model to try to understand this problem.
My model told me that we would need to ADD somewhere between 900 GW and 1400 GW of power generation capacity in order to go fully electric. For context, we currently generate about 1200 GW. In other words, we would have to double our capacity.
For further context, a single nuclear power plan produces about 1 GW. This means we need to build somewhere in the order of a thousand nuclear power plants, or, on average, twenty per US state. We can't build ONE in 25 years and we are actually talking about doing something that would require a thousand of them as if it were possible.
I never had confirmation of my model until Elon Musk was asked this very question not too long ago. For those who think what I just said is nonsense, I'll let him confirm my findings and statement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcI6FaaDp8g&t=3510s
As Elon says, it's worse than having to double our power output. Our infrastructure cannot handle this. It isn't built to carry and handle twice the power draw. Which means we have to rebuild almost all of it. Imagine having to replace almost every cable and transformer distributing power in the US as a starting point (it is far more complicated than that).
So, once again, this is ignorant and stupid.
There's more, but I'll stop here.
I just heard the US President go on TV and pretty much get behind all of the above, again. The Prime Minister of Canada did a similar thing during a press conference with the leaders of UK and Netherlands (side note: How diluted is he that he decides to talk about this nonsense when Ukraine is going on? I don't understand.
Yes, I know, these words are put in front of them in a number of cases to read off a teleprompter. However, we keep living in this "Emperor has no clothes" scenario where everyone is repeating and getting behind a collective set of lies both emotionally and financially. Lies that are easily proven to be so with some of the most basic of mathematical analysis. And, here we are, driving society mad with imaginary nonsense indistinguishable from religion.
None of this is to say that cleaning-up our act isn't a good idea. However, the way we are going about it is to lie about both the reasons and plausibility of it.
Electric cars are a good idea, but we need a 50 year plan to radically enhance our power generation and delivery infrastructure. A plan that would require a doubling of our generation capacity. It's like building an entire duplicate of all of the power infrastructure in the US. Not a small endeavor.
While that happens oil will be crucially important. And oil has to be CHEAP or that infrastructure will be impossible to build. Oil has to be cheap because it is needed not just for the massive transportation requirements of all of the materials, components and systems that will go into doubling our energy production infrastructure, but for all of the byproducts that will be essential for the manufacturing and transportation industries (lubricants, plastics, etc.).
And so, we have the US President (and other world leaders) reading what someone else put in front of them, likely from a purely ideological perspective, while completely ignoring the fact that what they are saying, what they want to do, is absolutely impossible form that ideological framework.
The first thing a country like the US has to do in order to be able to reach for some of these ideas is exactly contrary to this ideology. We have to drill, extract and transport oil from everywhere in this land. Oil has to be $20 a barrel, not $130. Without cheap oil you cannot have a future full of electric cars. Which means not a chance in hell of "saving the planet" or affecting climate change.
And, yes, we need HUNDREDS of nuclear power plants. Solar and wind can't do it alone. If you want to challenge that, be my guest. Do the math on the insanely massive number of batteries and solar panels we have to produce in order to match the output of a 1 GW nuclear power plant (24/7/365 for 50 to 100 years). Calculate all the materials, resources and CO2 that would be consumed and produced in the manufacturing and installation of such a system. And then multiply that by a thousand, because we need about 1200 GW.
Get real.
We need to start to speak the truth so we can put forth realistic plans for a cleaner future.
What I am saying isn't a matter of personal opinion at all. I make this very clear. This is about mathematics, physics and elementary calculations. Yet, nobody bothers to devote anything but a trivial amount of time to check what they are sure they know and question it.
Just today I saw a press conference with the Vice President Harris and Pete Buttigieg. She went on an on about this idea of imagining that all of our heavy transportation systems became electric. Pink unicorns and bubble gum for everyone. Except, the entire thing is a pile of --sorry-- pure horse shit. Nobody wants to question this delusional drive into the disaster these people are going to create.
Despite what this might sound like, I DO, want electric transportation. I want 100% of our ground and air transportation systems to go electric...eventually. The thing is, for that to happen we need to extract ourselves from the mass delusion/religion this has become and put down a solid plan to make it happen. It will take somewhere in the range of 25 to 50 years. That is, if we execute to perfection.
The first thing we need is cheap oil. Which means producing as much of it as possible here.
The next thing we need is a solid --as if our lives depended on it-- commitment to build as much nuclear generation capacity as possible. That means a minimum of 500 nuclear plants, likely of 1 GW class. And they can't take 25 years to be built.
And, yes, solar, wind, renewables and batteries. Responsibly. With attention to total cost of ownership as well as total environmental cost. These things are not magical. They are not clean. These are dirty technologies, in different ways, but dirty just the same. You have to look at manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance and lifetime (replacement) costs and consequences.
We can do this, but we have to stop lying and believing these lies first.
That is what I am clamoring for.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
FWIW, I'm not one of those people who think we'll save the planet if only everyone drove EVs. Changing over to EVs is only a fraction of GHG emissions and other pollution issues. There's tons of other stuff we can be working on as well instead of spending all our focus trying to get everyone to buy EVs and pat eachother on the backs. I do think we should work on making more sustainable cities and reduce the need for cars for those who don't want them. I just don't know why doubling our generation capacity over 20 years is seemingly impossible when we were doing it pretty much all the time except for the last 20 years when demand leveled off.
Since I can't know if readers understand the difference (you might, others may not), here's a simple example:
You have to lift 1000 kg of metal to the top of a massive 1000 meter tall skyscraper being built. It's a thousand 1 kg pieces. Let's say it takes 10 minutes to walk up to the top.
You can do this at least two ways:
One person moves each 1 kg piece up to the top, one at a time. That will require 1000 times 600 seconds, or 600,000 seconds. That's roughly seven days.
The other way is to do it all at once. We get a thousand people, each one of them grabs a 1 kg piece and, ten minutes later the entire load is at the top of the building.
Anyone can understand that these problems require vastly different scenarios.
Energy is about the total amount of work done. In this case it is the same for both scenarios.
Power, on the other hand, is a measure of how quickly this work was done. In this hypothetical, the fast delivery scenario required a thousand times more power than the slower version.
Electric cars require power. Energy is delivered over time. The problem with our grid and power generation is that it simply cannot handle this beyond a very small deployment. People driving electric cars today are enjoying the fact that they do not pose a significant threat to the existing infrastructure and generation capacity. As the numbers increase we will start having problems.
The idea of having a million or ten million cars simultaneously fast-charging today is likely an unthinkable reality.
Put a different way (just pulling hypothetical numbers out of my behind, these are not real numbers):
If we could charge electric cars over, say, 30 days, we might not need even one bit of additional power generation capacity or changes to the infrastructure. Sure, nobody would be able to drive more than once a month, but, hey, we don't need to build nuclear power plants.
However, that is not a practical reality. Tens of millions of cars will need to quick charge in 20, 40, 60 minutes. And another set of millions of cars will want to be charged over, say, 8 hours, overnight. This requires the ability to deliver power --large amounts of it-- in a way we are not prepared to do. This is both true in terms of power generation capacity as well as infrastructure, from the cables all the way to the power plants.
What the page you linked shows is an increase in energy consumption. It says nothing about power. Also, the increase you point out is only 60%, not a doubling from 1980 to 2020. Still, this is somewhat meaningless. I can consume 60% more energy if I keep the lights on 12.8 hours per day, instead of 8. I would not demand 60% more power out of the grid, I would just use the available power for a longer period of time. That's why speaking in terms of energy isn't relevant to the electric car problem. The problem is power, not energy. People need their cars charged now, right now. That requires power we cannot deliver.
I will acknowledge I did only eyeball the chart and saw it was about 2k going to about 4k, the values are 2,290/3801 so about 60% as you say and not doubling. My bad.
Still though, your argument of leaving the lights on longer and power capacity points to how EVs are still possible even with this kind of usage vs power argument. Charging my EV at home doesn't increase my home's peak power much at all. It's another 50A circuit on at my house, but it's not like it's running all the time. It's mostly running when most the other appliances in my house aren't running. So there's already plenty of capacity to serve my house 50A, my neighbor's house 50A, on and on, even with the current hardware because it was already built with the idea a lot of people are going to get home from work and start cooking dinner with an electric range and electric oven together use considerably more power than charging my electric car. For those who can charge at home, it really shouldn't change the math on power at all.
I do agree power demands would increase a good bit with DC fast chargers, those would be the biggest change in our grid infrastructure. Some of the arguments of having a good bit of local battery storage to smooth out those peak power loads sounds incredibly expensive to me. However I don't think those would necessarily make up the bulk of actual charging usage. The majority of Americans live in single family homes, implying they have some kind of garage where they can charge their car and would thus have the same power argument made above. Decent L2 chargers at offices can provide adequate charging to those commuters without charging capacity at home. Obviously this wouldn't have the same time of use shift as above, but L2 charging wouldn't impose nearly as much power demands as DCFC. While DCFC is somewhat important for mass adoption of EVs, I think you might be overestimating the actual usage of DCFC. The majority of Americans would rarely need them. I haven't used one once in the many thousands of miles I've put on my EV so far. A huge chunk of the power charging so far was 12A@120V, would you really argue every home having a load like that running overnight is going to melt all the transformers?
And FWIW I'm still a proponent for using diesel/petrol where it makes sense. Please don't take me as an EV fanatic thinking that Elon's self driving pure EV semi's are going to completely change the trucking industry anytime soon.
Of course not. This was just an example to attempt to drive the point that there's a very real difference between energy and power. You can deliver more kilowatt-hours (energy) without changing kilowatt (power) generation capacity. The bottom line is that energy metrics or charts are impossible to use in this discussion.
> your argument of leaving the lights on longer and power capacity points to how EVs are still possible
In small numbers, sure. At scale, 300 million vehicles. No. Nobody is going to wait 16 hours to charge their cars. The infrastructure has to be able to deliver double the power we can deliver today.
I read through your reasoning about the 50 A circuit at one or many homes. The problem with this reasoning or story is that, while it is easy to say these things, until you sit down with Excel and quantify it all with a reasonable model of reality, it is just words. Once you do that you will very quickly realize a full migration to electrics is absolutely impossible with the current power generation and distribution infrastructure.
As I said before, I wanted to understand this in some detail. I kept hearing these claims about going electric, yet nobody showed any calculations. As an engineer, I had to put numbers to the claims.
The model I created about five years ago simulated a fleet consisting of 300 million vehicles of various types. This being US-centric, I divided the fleet into six time zones based on current population distribution figures. And, within those time zones, I created variables to manipulate utilization scenarios. For example, a percentage of the population would only drive 20 miles a day and would be happy slow charging over eight hours. Another portion of the population required fast charging a few times per week (pretty much as one might get gasoline today). Some would be hybrid: plug in at home every night and top-off with fast chargers during the week as needed. Yet another part of the model looked at some percentage of those vehicles being mid and long distance trucks, which simply cannot afford to sit idle for eight or more hours while charging. Etc.
The point is, the model wasn't a simplistic statement of the kind that is often offered in these discussions, things like "We have more than enough solar to do this" while nobody bothers to put some numbers to it.
Having said all of that. The best confirmation of my numbers I can offer is Elon Musk himself explaining in that video that we need to double our power generation capacity and redo our entire infrastructure. Until Elon was asked this question I was, to be dramatic, entirely on my own making these kinds of claims. People want to religiously believe that these things are possible. They are not. So, don't believe what I say, but, please, do believe what Elon Musk said --which happens to confirm my findings from many years ago.
Assuming both Elon and I are not completely full of shit, well, reality is that the fully-electric transportation dream will require leaving this cult-like delusion behind to put into place a realistically attainable plan. This plan requires --absolutely requires-- cheap oil. Oil is what we have to use to build the very infrastructure required to support electric transportation. Without cheap oil we cannot get there. That is VERY important to understand. Without an admission and an understanding that petroleum is critical in making the all-electric dream a reality, there is no way to make it happen.
And so, the plan must include a well-defined and intensely funded period, about 50 years long, where we drive local petroleum costs as far down as possible in order to be able to engage in a massive construction project to revamp power generation capacity. This plan should also include a vey serious commitment and a solid plan to build hundreds of nuclear power plants. We cannot do it without nuclear. And, yes, solar and wind must be a part of this.
The precise proportions and sequencing of the above will be a matter of detailed analysis and, yes, math. None of this is particularly difficult --outside of the politics and ideological delusions we must leave behind. It's just a matter of starting to bring the truth to the forefront and having the adults in the room lay out a clear, attainable plan for a transition to all-electric transportation within the next 50 years.
To drive the point home: If you feel you still need to argue against my claim that we need to double power generation and infrastructure, you need to argue against Elon Musk. You are free to discount me as some nutcase on HN. Elon, on the other hand, well, he is confirming what I am saying. Not sure how anyone can argue against that one.
I'm definitely not one to argue the full migration to electrics. As mentioned elsewhere I think diesel/petrol/similar kind of fuel vehicles will be around in at least some capacity for quite some time. Its incredibly energy dense and the ability to just pump up gallons of it from pits in the ground is quite handy.
> Some would be hybrid: plug in at home every night and top-off with fast chargers during the week as needed.
I really can't imagine this would make up any large fraction of the EV fleet. If someone can charge from home, the extreme majority of their charging will be overnight or potentially during a weekend if they need to do some catch up. The vast majority of commute cars which can charge at home will not need this hybrid approach save for the extremely rare long road trip when comparing the total number of miles.
> percentage of the population would only drive 20 miles a day and would be happy slow charging over eight hours
That 20mi commute would generally use ~6kWh. Over 8 hours, that's 750W of power. During a time where power at people's homes is often at its lowest point. Delivering that power would barely be a blip. If our grid collapses because a few million people plug in a tiny 750W space heater overnight we've got some serious problems.
> If you feel you still need to argue against my claim that we need to double power generation and infrastructure, you need to argue against Elon Musk
I would, especially when it comes to long-haul trucks. Arguing against Elon is then easy in this regard, where's the long-haul driverless trucks which were going to revolutionize the entire trucking industry in 2017? EVs in this kind of capacity don't make sense without massive changes not only to the grid but also to our battery technology. Just making the batteries a little fatter isn't going to change the math on these kinds kinds of trucks. So you should pretty much just completely eliminate these kinds of vehicles from your model, its a moonshot to even think these kinds of things are really going to switch to EV-only anytime soon for many reasons.
I don't doubt we'll need to make a lot of changes to our grid. I agree it will take a lot of energy to make those changes and it will use a lot of petroleum based products to make those changes. There's oil in practically everything we touch, so I agree its short sighted to praise the idea of expensive oil. I also agree this won't be something that happens overnight, it'll be something that will take an effort over decades.
I agree moving to EVs is overly praised and there's quite a cult mindset of if we just put an EV in every garage we'll have solved some big problem. As you mentioned its often a question of power, and well at least down here in Texas overnight we often get to the point where there's not even enough load to match the generation available for free. On many grids there's already a good bit of slack in the power distribution in off-peak times, probably enough to support every average commuter car in every single family household. Note that term, average commuter car. Not the people which somehow are still sane after a 100+mi daily commute, they're extreme outliers and yeah it will probably take a lot of work to get to the point where all of those people are reasonably served with EVs.
I think there's a bit of a disconnect between us here. You're arguing about the full migration to EVs, while I mostly agree a full migration to EVs isn't really practical anytime soon. While a large part of the average commuter car and short haul vans can probably make the switch to EVs today, it seems there are plenty of use cases where EVs are still impractical vehicles. This is before even figuring in your grid arguments. So once you then eliminate those vehicles where EVs are currently a somewhat impractical case at the moment, the math of how reasonable grid upgrades get becomes a much more practical number.
Also, FWIW I do agree there will need to be some amount of an upgrade to the grid, and it will probably be a large one. Shifting all that energy which used to be handled by fluids running through pipes into cables overhead will inherently mean some amount of capacity upgrades. However, I think for average commuter cars, this really won't be that much of an impact. There are definitely cases where there will need to be a large change (DCFC corridors) but I doubt the average suburb would need some radical change. Its just adding load to a time of day that routinely experienced its lull.
Again, if you want to understand this well, I urge you to stop and create your own simulation model. This can be done in Excel.
The point is that it is very easy to make statements such as your when one does not make an attempt to actually model reality and see what this might mean. When you do (if you do) I assure you there will be an "Oh. That's what he was talking about." moment.
I very much understand that a full migration to EV's isn't likely to be possible for perhaps as long as fifty years, if not more. Yet, that's not the point here. What we are being asked to do to this nation and the world is motivated by the delusion of clean energy and pink unicorns. They are selling this delusion as if it were reality. It is not.
Let's assume that only a third of the 300 million vehicles convert to electric power in, say, 25 years. That means we need to increase our generation capacity by about 400 GW. For context, that means 400 nuclear power plants, each operating at 1 GW. I use nuclear power plants because this is a good measure of the scale of things as well as the impossibility of achieving such a goal in just 25 years. We can't build one in 25 years, much less 400 of them.
Even worse, the power distribution system, the "grid", would have to be rebuilt to at least double, if not triple, its power transport capacity. This due to a few realities, one of them being that you have to build it for present (once the upgraded version goes online) peak demand as well as future requirements.
To be clear, I am not proposing that going electric is a bad idea or that we should not do it. In a very much for the transition. What I am saying is that the delusion we are selling does not describe a path to a reality where even one third of vehicles can be electrified. In order to get there we have to abandon ideology and focus on math and science. Then we can plan a path that will get us there. Whatever "there" means, whether that is 25% electrics or 75%. We can't get there without a stop to all this ideological nonsense.
The perfect example of this is the insanity of our current oil production policies. Here in the US, the current government is doing all it can to kill our oil production and processing infrastructure. They hate it. Ideologically. They just hate it. Irrationally. Because they have all bought into the delusion.
What's reality? Well, if we want, say, 25% of our vehicles to go electric in 25 years, we have a massive job ahead of us. We have to build a massive amount of additional power generation capacity. We have to execute a decidedly non-trivial upgrade of our entire power delivery infrastructure. We have to build somewhere between 50K and 100K charging stations throughout the nation. We have to manufacture batteries, solar panels, cables and all the materials and components that go into such systems. We also have to build nuclear power plants faster than ever in history. And more. I can't possibly list all the dependencies in the tree that leads to being ready for 25% of our vehicles becoming electrics. Not to mention actually manufacturing the vehicles.
What do we need in order to accomplish the above? Cheap oil. What I mean by "cheap" is $20 oil, rather than $130 per barrel. Why? Because EVERYTHING we will have to make, move, install, manufacture requires oil. Everything. You can't build a power plant without a massive amount of fuel. The cables that move the electricity? You can't make them without oil. You can't install them without oil. Manufacturing parts, and structural materials (beams, etc.) out of steel and aluminum? You can't do it without oil. Plastics, electronic components, microprocessors, displays, computers, motors, car bodies, etc. Everything is based on industrial processes that depend on oil. Humanity cannot exist in its current form without oil.
And so, the paradox here is that, if we want a future where ground transportation is significantly less dependent on petroleum, we have to make petroleum as cheap as possible for somewhere around twenty five years, if not more. Only after making that kind of a monumental effort will we be able to start detaching from oil. We can't get there from here because, at $100+ per barrel these projects become insanely expensive and likely unattainable.
We need a real plan of action based on real math and science. And then we do everything we must do to make it happen. We have to leave this delusion behind us in order to move forward. If we don't, electric vehicles will be doomed to being an oddity for decades upon decades.
Can you point me to the actual math and not just a YouTube video of a guy habitually wrong about technology and talk of a spreadsheet model of probably inaccurate usages which really claims such needs? Because in practice I've got an EV in my garage tonight which doesn't increase our overall power demands at all. In fact, it's only finally using the negative generation costs that we've had in my area for years. That's right, right now as my EV charges the wholesale cost of energy in my area is negative USD. There's not enough load to meet the generation demand! My retail provider is making money buying power at negative cost on me charging my car at the moment. Adding more cars charging right now would only bring balance to that mismatch of generation to demand, not overload demand at all.
The model you've mentioned above has a lot of questionable assumptions baked into it. It didn't take a new transformer for my home to support an EV, nor my neighbor, nor the person next door to them. So when thinking of vehicles, and especially not miles or per pound of payload delivered, it's really not that crazy.
Please feel free to share your magical spreadsheet model which explains everything. I'd love to see it. It sounds like it makes a lot of assumptions which may or may not be realistic. But until you share that I'm going by my actual use cases I've actually seen in person with EVs, where it didn't increase my peak power at all, and between myself and my neighbors was absorbed by the grids capacity without any issue at all.
So let's take your example of building out a model based on usage I've actually experienced. How much peak load has my EV actually added to my home's usage? 0 additional kW peak? Cool, so we extrapolate that to all the other single family houses, so we can easily add over 15 million EVs to our fleet before we even need to upgrade a single line. Given we've only managed to produce a few hundred thousand EVs in several years it'll probably take many decades before we even each that 15 million figure, so we're probably fine to slowly roll out upgrades to our grid if we're really only targeting upgrading commuter vehicles at the moment.
And that is precisely how to put a violent end to an otherwise cordial conversation.
Hinkley C is the first public nuclear power plant in the UK in decades. At current rate it will be 27 years between announcement and completion, at a cost of $30Bn USD equivalent, double the earlier cost and a decade later than planned. Brazil is building a 1GW solar farm [1]for a total cost of $750M USD equivalent. Algeria is aiming to build 15GW of solar in the next 15 years[2]; that's a country with a GDP of $150 Billion USD compared to USA's $21 Trillion.
+400GW of Solar in 50 years at Brazil's prices would be $20Bn/year. Solar has been dropping in price significantly in the past two decades and may do so in coming decades. Compared to +400GW of nuclear power at these prices, which would be $240Bn/year. Hinkley C has doubled in cost in a decade, and it's not certain it would be significantly cheaper if done again several times.
That's still not easily /doable/ for all the other reasons you've discussed about materials needed and power used in supply chains and manufacturing and limits of places to put it, etc., but it's a more plausible to commit a-COVID-response-per-year than an-entire-Apollo-Moon-landing-program-per-year for the next dozen presidential terms. The Elon Musk interview you linked, you say "We need to double power generation, it can't be done! It's impossible! Elon says so!" but Elon says "we need to double power production and distribution, which isn't going to work, that's why we make solar roof tiles, we need more local power generation, blah blah". He didn't seem to agree with you that it was impossible.
USA uses 21 million barrels of oil every day, Google tells me there is about 1.6MWh equivalent in a barrel of oil, or 33million MWh per day equivalent; over 24 hours makes about 1.3TW, approx the same as USA power generation. To replace all the oil use (in pure power terms not counting plastics, etc) with electricity would require doubling the power output of the country, yet a lot of the oil isn't used for transport, maybe half is used for transport. So replacing transport should be a chunk less than doubling power output. And it's not the case that transport needs to stay the same efficiency for the 50 years, e.g. how many of the 300M cars you talk about get less than 60mpg? Less than 40mpg? How many of them stop their engines at traffic stops? Elon commented that wing mirrors on Teslas cost up to 5% drag but can't replace them with cameras for regulatory reasons which could be changed. What if road speed limits were reduced to mandate more efficiency? What if delivery shopping was subsidised? What if work-from-home was given a tax break? What if double-car-ownership was taxed more? 50 years is enough to drive a lot of other changes in society if there was collective will.
I'm not handwavingly saying "it can be done easily", maybe it still can't; but I am saying that you are thrilling over the-sky-is-falling. It's not the case that the only possible variable is power production; power use can be incentivised to change.
The UK national grid is currently producing[3] 30GW, half of that from wind. There's 33M cars in the UK, if they all charged at the other commenter's suggested 750W, and needed charging every 5 days each, that would add 5GW of demand. The UK built 2.4GW of wind power in a single year in 2019. You're modelling 5x the population with 10x the cars and getting to 100x the power demand.
> "What do we need in order to accomplish the above? Cheap oil. What I mean by "cheap" is $20 oil, rather than $130 per barrel. Why? Because EVERYTHING we will have to make, move, install, manufacture requires oil. Everything. You can't build a power plant without a massive amount of fuel. The cables that move the electricity? You can't make them without oil. You can't install them without oil. Manufacturing parts, and structural materials (beams, etc.) out of steel and aluminum? You can't do it without oil. Plastics, electronic components, microprocessors, displays, computers, motors, car bodies, etc. Everything is based on industrial processes that depend on oil. Humanity cannot exist in its current form without oil."
I often think the only way out is through. We cant revert to pre-industrial life without billions dying and quality of life plummetting. Still, oil is finite even if you discount the CO2 burning. Making it 1/6th the cost would lead to increasing use; would you, and how would you, stop it being used for motor racing and plastic junk making, in 5x the quantity?
[1] https://renewablesnow.com/news/brazils-ibitu-energia-starts-...
[2] https://www.pv-tech.org/algeria-launches-tender-process-for-...