US oil refining capacity is 19 million barrels per day. 25% of this goes into the manufacture of asphalt and other products, but 75% ends up being burned. So 14.5 M barrels per day of refining capacity is the problem.
That is the part we have to eliminate.
IPCC Paths Forward
The IPCC gives several scenarios for reducing CO2 emissions, each with different probabilities of avoiding bad outcomes. We want to aim for as early as we can, so lets do the math for reaching zero by 2050.
That is real zero, not net zero. “Net zero” is a phantom target invented by climate deniers and can-kicking politicians.
If it is refined, it will be burned.
Assuming a start date of 2022 that gives us 28 years. We have to stop burning the products of 14.5 million barrels of crude oil by then. How much is that? One barrel of oil can be converted into 20 gallons of gasoline plus 11 gallons of diesel fuel, plus some other stuff. So we are talking about 290 million gallons of gasoline production every day that has to be eliminated.
The US has about 130 operating oil refineries, varying in capacity from the tiny Foreland Refining Corporation in Ely, Nevada, at 2,000 barrels per day, to the massive Saudi Aramco facility in Port Arthur, Texas, at 607,000 barrels per day. Some of them produce only asphalt, some produce a combination of products, so we will just deal with the aggregate numbers in a new measurement unit I just invented called the Torrance Equivalent.
I wrote about the Torrance, California, refinery in a previous diary. It has a capacity of 155,000 barrels per day. So 14.5M barrels is 93.5 Torrance Equivalents (TE). We need to close that down over 28 years. That works out to 3.74 TE per year.
In other words, we need to shut down one refinery equal to the one in Torrance, CA, every 3 months starting now, and for the next 28 years.
Do I have your attention yet?
Obviously, we do not have time for gradual transitions, or ramping up alternatives first.
How can we possibly make refinery operators shut down their facilities at the rate the science tells us we need to achieve? Does anyone think “market forces” will do this? How about a Carbon tax? How about reducing demand by making it easier to buy an EV? I don't think so either.
Suggestions welcome.
Now do the same exercise assuming a zero-date of 2040. It’s one every 10 weeks.
And not once, not one single time, have I heard any politician, journalist, or business leader even mention these numbers.
— Greta Thunberg before the French National Assembly, Paris, July, 2019
Next time, Natural Gas.
[All data in this article not otherwise attributed comes from the US Energy Information Administration.]
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