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Comment by what-the-grump | Hacker News Reader

>extract oil more efficiently in the sense that they just produce more externalities faster

You need fossil fuels to get off of fossil fuels, you need regulation, the entire planet working on this, etc. Making the process LESS efficient is not going to help at any point. Let's start blowing up the equipment used to dig coal out of the ground so we can go back to doing it by hand like in the early 1900s, and let's start unscrewing the bolts in the machines at the factories, let's all quit at CAT and never build another digger...

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> you need regulation

Bingo, except government and industry are so closely related now they resemble a circular human centipede, so we can’t rely on that.

When some oil was “$0”, what stopped me from buying it for free, and using grant money to “bury it” (safely store or really dispose of it) and simply never burning it? Every idea in environmental management needs to be explored, because the issue is that serious.

Because oil is fungible, this has the exact same effect as limiting supply: price will increase. There are plenty of other ways to increase oil price (taxes being the simplest) that don't require creating new waste disposal sites. Burying the oil also has the nasty side effect of increasing demand, so there's a chance that, for example, OPEC will just extract more oil to meet the added demand. And extracting oil isn't "free" from an emissions perspective.

If oil costs zero its utility is zero because no one wants it. You've solved the problem!

they're referring to that time spot prices went negative during the early pandemic when nobody was driving, demand was way down, and storage suddenly became a problem.

We need to rub at least two brain cells together to conceive of anything resembling a viable plan.

"Buying" some small amount of barrels during a rare market anomaly, then burying them in the ground is supposed to accomplish what exactly?

Great, you buried 50,000 barrels of crude - congratulations. Now what are you going to do about the 20,000,000 barrels[1] the US will consume tomorrow? Look, oh no, your buried oil leaked into the water table!

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pipelin....

And probably spent more energy transporting and burying that oil than you would have simply burning it or using it... Its insanity how people do not understand the basic principle that any work requires energy. Its why plastic recycling does so poorly, it often more efficient to make new plastic or burn it, than to reprocess it.

It's way more complicated than "the price of oil hit $0".

An option was due, and the holder of the option needed to accept delivery. Because most people who trade in options don't actually want the underlying asset, it was just some trader with no interest in actually owning "oil". It's like if you had barrels of crude oil in your basement; you'd probably let someone pick it up for free too.

But likewise, if you had barrels of crude oil in your basement, then yes you could just let it sit there and never burn it. The trouble is that most people with the ability to accept delivery of industrial quantities of crude oil also want to use it. Also the price rarely dips that low, because the people extracting it do so in order to make money.

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